HOW IT STARTED: New York Magazine Publishes Tom Wolfe’s Brilliant “Radical Chic” Article in 1970.
How It’s Going: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York Mag Lionizes Shoplifter and Gives Tips on How to Steal.
Here’s the excerpt from a New York Magazine article headlined, “Paying the Price for Shoplifting From Whole Foods:”
At Whole Foods, you are apparently being monitored by a swarm of security officers, some of whom wander the aisles in plain clothes, and the company’s surveillance tech is improving. When security officers catch you, they will take you to Whole Foods Jail. Sometimes with glee.
The Union Square Whole Foods jail is a windowless storage closet near the entrance, says Astrid, a photographer. She mostly remembers the wallpaper: “Layers and layers of grainy faces,” she tells Nora Deligter. “All the thieves that had come before me.”
A sculptor we’ll call Gina found herself in the Bowery Whole Foods Jail. She was late to an Alex G concert at Bowery Ballroom and had decided to slip into Whole Foods for a quick spicy-tuna-roll walk-and-dine. She had a system: Approach the item with confidence, grab it, then head upstairs to the dining area and surreptitiously place it into her bag. But this time, she headed straight for the exit. “A rookie mistake,” Gina says.
Gina remembers keeping her head bowed and her eyes low as she was escorted back to Whole Foods Jail. The windowless office was almost too bland to recall, she says, except for a rudimentary banner, that read: ALL SHOPLIFTERS ARE BANNED FROM WHOLE FOODS FOR LIFE. A few weeks later, Gina says her parents received a $90 ticket in the mail from the company.
David Strom replies, “Is this the new socialism? Why wait for the revolution when you can just decriminalize stealing, or take your chances of getting caught and running to the media with your sob story?”
Pretty much. Flashback to the annus horribilis of 2020: NPR regrets elevating pro-looting anti-Semite.
Did anyone at NPR read the book, which includes a chapter titled “All Cops Are Bastards”? Did no one at NPR question the wisdom of elevating an activist whose Twitter handle even bears the acronym for “All Cops Are Bastards”? Did it not occur to anyone that, instead of elevating a provocative but worthwhile voice, they were actually amplifying an ignorant bigot with no basic understanding of history or community?
Apparently not, which is why NPR is in the embarrassing position this week of having to issue mea culpas for what was always an extremely avoidable fiasco.
“This piece was fact-checked, but we should have done more,” Code Switch editor Steve Drummond said of the interview, which has been updated to correct [Vicky] Osterweil’s many false assertions.
But even with the corrections, NPR’s McBride explained Thursday, “this failure to challenge this author’s statements is harmful on two levels. Publishing false information leaves the audience misinformed. On top of that, news consumers are watching closely to see who is challenged and who isn’t.”
As I wrote back then, I have no problem with NPR interviewing Osterweil. If somebody writes a book with the provocative title of In Defense of Looting — , and gets it published by the subsidiary of a major publisher, it’s news after all. Alex Haley famously interviewed American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell for Playboy in 1966 — but he asked the appropriately tough questions. In contrast, Natalie Escobar, who interviewed Osterweil for NPR, tweeted (and eventually deleted) the following, which was still cached by Google as of [September 4th, 2020]:
New York magazine, like much of the left, apparently hasn’t moved on from the positions they staked out during the 2020 color revolution.
