RICH LOWRY: Hasan Piker’s ‘cool crimes’ chatter exposes the left’s toxic rage.
Is robbing the Louvre a good idea?
Left-wing influencer Hasan Piker and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino did a much-discussed video interview with the New York Times this week on the ethics of theft, and came out four-square in favor of stealing things, including artwork from the Louvre.
They consider larceny an appropriate response to the inherent corruption and injustice of the American capitalist system.
The merits of this position aside, it’s not clear why it justifies stealing paintings or sculptures from a museum owned and operated by the government of France.
When asked about the propriety of hitting up the Louvre, Tolentino heartily endorsed it.
Piker explained, “Yeah, I think it’s cool. We gotta get back to cool crimes like that. Bank robberies. Stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.”
Yes, who wouldn’t love to see someone make off with the Venus de Milo, chop it up into pieces and sell them on the black market?
What Piker and Tolentino are doing, at bottom, is romanticizing violence for its own sake — wrapping nihilism in the rhetoric of social justice.
It is radical chic for 21st century opinion-makers, and one can only rue that Tom Wolfe isn’t still with us to lampoon it.
Piker’s riff about “cool crimes” is even older than Wolfe’s seminal 1970 article. As Piker’s fellow lefty Rick Perlstein said of 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, which kickstarted the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” era of filmmaking that lasted until Jaws and Star Wars righted the industry’s coffers for decades:
My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate [sic] how strange and fresh that was.
And how shopworn and moth-ridden it feels still being trotted out 60 years later.
Related:
In fairness, Piker self-weaponized. The right noticed.
Promoting political assassination, car theft, shoplifting. Hardly benign speech.
I suppose, given the SPLC indictment, we now have to consider the possibility that Piker is a conservative op. But I doubt it. He's just… https://t.co/oEEMfYuBEa
— Northern Barbarian (@xnoesbueno) April 25, 2026