Below is my column in The Hill on the recent New York Times podcast exploring the justifications for crimes ranging from theft to murder. The podcast with radical Hasan Piker, the New York Times Opinion Culture Editor Nadja Spiegelman, and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino captured the moral relativism that has taken hold of the left in American society. Reading the manifesto of the accused White House Correspondents Association Dinner shooter Cole Tomas Allen shows the ultimate expression of a society where rage has replaced morality and decency.
Here is the column:
“It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.” That lament heard this week from New York Times opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman could well be the Democratic Party’s epitaph.
Spiegelman was interviewing two left-wing influencers about how everything from shoplifting to murder may be excusable today in light of the unfairness they see in society.
The podcast, a product of the nation’s newspaper of record, reveled in the moral relativism that has taken over the American left. It featured the ravings of the antisemitic Marxist streamer Hasan Piker, who calmly explained how the murder of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson was perfectly understandable. His rationalization came from Marxist revolutionary Friedrich Engels, who had called capitalism “social murder.” If capitalists are “social murderers,” then why not kill them? The logic is liberating and lethal for some on the left looking for a license for violence.
Mind you, this same newspaper had once condemned and effectively banned a U.S. senator for writing an op-ed advocating the use of the military to quell violent protests during the summer of George Floyd’s death. The Times even forced out its own opinion editor for having the temerity to publish such an opinion.
But glorifying murder? The suggestion of open hunting season on corporate executives did not appear to shock or repel Spiegelman. After all, we are living in “an unethical society.” She explained that many felt that the murder of Thompson, the father of two, meant that “finally, someone can actually do something about health care.”
Even liberal comedians are practicing a literal version of slapstick. Margaret Cho this week declared that “we need a feral, bloodthirsty, violent Democrat.”
To be fair, Spiegelman did concede that it might seem a bit “scary” for some to start murdering our way to social justice.
She also explained that shoplifting can be justifiable because people are “stealing from Whole Foods — not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification.”
New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino also contributed to the podcast, titled “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” She immediately threw in her own experience with “microlooting” and explained why it is arguably moral: “I have, under very specific circumstances. I will say, I think that stealing from a big-box store [isn’t] significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest.”
She detailed her own past thefts and added, “I didn’t feel bad about it at all, in part because the store was a corporation. And it certainly felt, in a utilitarian sense, I was like, this is not a big deal. Right, guys?”
Not in the confines of the New York Times, where apparently you are entitled to all goods that are fit to pilfer.
The bizarre exchange highlighted the moral chasm that is opening its maw on today’s political left. In my book “Rage and the Republic,” I write about how rage helps people excuse any offense or attack. It dismisses the humanity of others and provides a license to hate completely and without reservation.
It is not really murder or theft if there are no real humans on the other side, is it?
Other columnists have defended such property crimes. Washington Post writer Maura Judkis ran a column mocking shoplifting stories as the “moral panic” of a nation built on “stolen land.” It is reminiscent of those who excused rioting in past summers “as an expression of power” and demanded that the media refer to looters as “protesters.”
Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University Journalism Professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones went so far as to call on journalists not to cover shoplifting crimes.
At its core, it is a denial of transcendent values and rights. It is a decoupling of our society from a grounding in moral or universal truths. It is a trend that extends not only to attacks on individuals but also to attacks on our constitutional system. There is a growing denial of our founding based on Enlightenment principles of natural rights, which come not from government but from God.
Some people seem to have forgotten this. In 2024, a celebrated political journalist memorably asserted that belief in God-given rights is a form of “Christian nationalism” — an odd claim about a concept the nation’s founders literally wrote into our Declaration of Independence.
Last year, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) — a man who represents Thomas Jefferson’s own state — attacked a witness in committee for espousing Jefferson’s immortal assertion that human beings’ natural rights are endowed by their Creator. Kaine disparaged this idea as something worthy of Iran’s mullahs.
The result is the type of moral free-fall and rejection of personal responsibility expressed on the New York Times podcast. Simply because they condemn our entire age as unethical, they feel justified in asserting a moral right to commit any offense, from microlooting to murder. This underpins the increasingly frequent justifications made for attacks against conservatives or law enforcement as a form of “defending democracy.”
Yet the feeling of “anger and moral justification” does not make an act moral. It is the morality of mayhem; a spreading decay within our society. History has shown us how democracies can become mobocracies.
During the French Revolution, journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan observed that “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.” The sad fact is, it is not just the danger of fellow revolutionaries deciding that you are the next reactionary to be guillotined. It is the self-consumption of radicals who untether themselves from any higher order or purpose. It is the knowledge that all mortals carry the Saturn gene; all mortals share the capacity to become monsters.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
Another MAGA theme today–when you can’t defend Trump, the war he started, the damage to our economy, the incompetence of his administration and the fact that Iran is making a fool of Trump–attack people who write something extreme that can be spun as outrageous, and then try to argue that it reflects the overall values of Trump’s opponents. It’s not working, Turley. These people do not speak for “the left” or Democrats.
Meanwhile, even some in MAGA are wondering, as I am, whether the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was staged. Here’s why: 1. Trump has been mocked before at this event before being elected, and has refused to attend before. Thin-skinned Trump is a bad sport at being the butt of jokes, he routinely insults mainstream journalists who ask him questions he doesn’t like, and he does not respect the press or its role. So, why would he attend, other than to be the center of attention and to likely deliver insults to non-MAGA media? That’s not what the WHCD is about–it’s NOT about Trump; but everything HAS to be about Trump in his mind. He has given comedians plenty of material to work with. Trump would not be there to celebrate American freedom of the press–he has called non-MAGA media “the enemy of the people”. And, there are journalism awards and scholarships given out at this event. So why attend, other than another chance to get his fat butt in front of cameras and maybe try to improve his image and get his gilded ballroom? 2. Trump has set a new record for low approval ratings and thinks that appearing brave, or at least as a victim, it might improve his image, and Trump is all about image; he knows he’s losing, badly, in the PR department. AND, he tried to stage a photo in the Oval Office that channeled Obama’s iconic SCIF meeting when Bin Laden was taken out. That effort flopped badly. Trump was not at all alarmed when the shots rang out, but the shooter wasn’t even in the room. 3. Even the alleged shooter, who was a guest at the hotel, said that security was poor. He was able to sprint past the magnetometer. And, if he had invited himself to any of multiple pre-dinner receptions, he could have gotten into the ballroom itself. It appears that the Secret Service has not improved much since Butlerville. 4. Despite being shot at, no bullets from the Secret Service or whoever was doing the shooting, hit the alleged shooter. The alleged shooter hit a law enforcement officer, but in the vest, so he was not harmed. Is this the Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight or is something else going on? 5. Trump and MAGA media IMMEDIATELY began posting that this episode proved the need for the gilded ballroom that has been enjoined by two courts because it is not wanted, not needed, and it would destroy the aesthetics of the White House itself by dwarfing it. Trump can’t stand to lose, and literally no one would put it past him to stage something like this to try to look like a hero or victim and to try to force the ballroom on the American people after proceeding, without any permission, to tear down an entire wing of the White House.
Overall, it stinks.
Other considerations: 6. Why is the video so grainy as to be worthless to identify the alleged shooter and the details of what happened? 7. An eyewitness says that the alleged shooter fell down volcano and was not taken down by law enforcement?
Should be: “fell down voluntarily” according to the eyewitness.
Volcano! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Prior post—should be “fell down voluntarily “.
Further considerations: 8. It’s not clear that the Secret Service agent who took a bullet in the vest was shot by the alleged gunman. There’s some evidence that he may have been hit by friendly fire. 9. Even if Trump were to get his gilded ballroom, the White House Correspondent’s Association, which the sponsoring organization, could not hold their gala at the White House because it would be a conflict of interest. The POTUS is only an invited guest at this event—not the host. With the use of proper security measures, The Washington Hilton would be sufficiently safe.
“would be sufficiently safe.”
Not from your type of Democrat.
The alleged shooter got to the magnetometer area from which he sprinted by simply walking down 10 flights of stairs from his room. The stairwell was unguarded and unlocked— it was totally unsecured—like the perimeter at Butlerville, which allowed the shooter to get onto the roof of a nearby building within range of the dais.
This was a serious screw up by the Secret Service. To have prevented the problem, all they would have needed to do was make sure there was nobody in the stairwell and then lock it down. The exit from the stairwell was right there by the magnetometers, so it’s not like it was unforseeable that someone could just walk down the stairs and be there, bypassing the checkpoints at the entrance to the hotel.
And it appears that the alleged shooter simply slipped and fell down and wasn’t taken down by the Secret Service. They fired at him but missed.
There are reports that the Secret Service was not paying very close attention when this happened because the dinner had started 30 minutes before.
Some of those things you mention are why hotels can’t offer the security the White House grounds offer.
You guys missed the boat! Again.
I was there. I was in the lady’s room where Melania changed her clothes and put on a mask. I saw all this. I was hiding in the john. Someone said, “Now” and she dashed out a side door and ran toward Trump’s seat, shouting at the top of her lungs, “I’ll get you, you filthy, disgusting, two-timing immigrant.
Suddenly shots rang out and she fell down. All pictures of her were taken by woke immigrants and thugs.
More facts: 10. The Trump gilded ballroom would hold, at best, about 1/4 of the number of attendees of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. And, his peace with non-MAGA media didn’t last long. Journalist Norah O’Donnell read to him the “manifesto” of the alleged shooter that referenced a pedophile and rapist, and Trump immediately attacked her. O’Donnell was not attacking Trump as a pedophile or rapist–but thin-skinned Trump called her a “disgrace” anyway. AND, for the record, Trump was adjudicated to be responsible for sexually assaulting E. Jeanne Carroll at a trial in which he was represented by counsel of his choosing, and at which trial he declined to testify.
I think the max number of seats is 999, and 2,000 were at the correspondent dinner. The larger the number, the greater the risk, as large numbers create poor security. It is an improvement over tents, but I don’t think you realize what is actually being built there.
“attention and to likely deliver insults”
I grow weary correcting her.
Do not split infinitives. How many times have I warned you? It should be “to deliver”
Turley Writes:
“The podcast, a product of the nation’s newspaper of record, reveled in the moral relativism that has taken over the American left.”
*****
A year ago, hundreds of tuxedo-clad crypto investors descended on the Trump National Golf Club in Northern Virginia, marching past crowds of protesters to claim an expensive prize — dinner with the president. They were the winners of a contest that offered access to President Trump in exchange for investing in his $TRUMP memecoin.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump did it all over again, welcoming an even larger group of $TRUMP investors to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., for a daylong event marketed as “The Most Exclusive Conference In The World.”
But circumstances had changed.
Once hailed as heroes by crypto traders, Mr. Trump and his family have come under fire over the plunging value of their digital coins, the complex financial maneuvering of one of their crypto companies and an escalating business dispute with a billionaire crypto partner. As shuttles ferried the investors to Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, the price of $TRUMP hovered at $2.83, down about 80 percent from last April.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/technology/trump-memecoin-conference.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
…………………………
Just hours before the Correspondents Dinner, Trump was hosting crypto investors at Mar-a-Lago in an effort to stabilize his own crypto company.
Never before has a president so shamelessly promoted his OWN business interests while serving as president. No wonder the Bernie Bros think shoplifting is acceptable!
But Johnathan Turley would have us believe that the moral vacuum on the left is strictly a liberal phenomenon.
Violent crime and property crimes are social injustices but the Left calls them social justice. The Left acts like fascists while calling freedom-supporting conservatives fascist. The Left acts like Iranian mullahs with its intolerance, while calling conservatives Iranian mullahs.
The Left has now developed an assassination chic culture and rejoices when a political commentator with whom it disagrees is murdered, leaving behind a grieving widow and two young children.
The Left ruins everything it touches. And it is blind to its own depravity. God help us.
The New York Times is so psychotic and rotten as an institution that it is searching for a demolition services company. In order that it might self destruct for the greater good of the nation. We await that day with bated breath.
It should be quite obvious to everybody now that these Crazies that come out of California, a State Governed by Gavin Newsom, Senator Adam Schiff, and Frm. Senator Nancy Pelosi, etc. etc. are the product of State politics (the Atmosphere).
Stop Electing these people and you will stop the Crazies from coming out of the California Woodwork. California Politicians that create these conditions are responsible for the existential threat to the rest of the United States (i.e.: the latest lunatic out of California, Cole Tomas Allen).
re: “Last year, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) — a man who represents Thomas Jefferson’s own state”
That may be an unintentional personal attack on Thomas Jefferson. Having read his correspondence with Adams extensively, I find it highly improbable he would have claimed that honor of “own state” – as demonstrated by his tears when dealing with the unnecessary and violent protests by the Oligarchical students of his founded institution – the University of Virginia.
“In the fevered state of our country, no good can ever result from any attempt to set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in fact or principle. They are determined as to the facts they will believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, therefore, as you would by an angry bull; it is not for a man of sense to dispute the road with such an animal.” — Thomas Jefferson (1762-1826)
Re: watching the final throes of democracy in its last breaths of its 250 years. At least honor was attempted:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt(1858-1919)
I understand the radical left. These views are their religion. They truly believe. So therefore any extreme measures are ” morally acceptable”.
These foljs should be very careful what they wish for and support. They are talking about a door that swings both ways. It will be the end of our republic and be a much worse conflegration than the Civil War.
Not better, Wisconsin Dem’s bar laments ‘we almost got free beer day’ for Trump assassination
https://nypost.com/2026/04/26/us-news/wisconsin-dems-bar-laments-we-almost-got-free-beer-day-for-trump-assassination/
“A NEW AMERICAN RENAISSANCE”
The entire communist American welfare state is unconstitutional, and those who enter must assimilate.
America must be “fundamentally transformed”—recovered, retrieved, repossessed, and reconstructed under the “manifest tenor” of the Constitution and Bill of Rights of the Founders and Framers of 1789.
A new American Renaissance is not a departure from history but a courageous return to the manifest tenor of the founding. It is a commitment to restore the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights as the definitive, unchanging boundaries of government power.
Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto 59 years after the adoption of the Constitution because none of the principles of the Communist Manifesto were in the Constitution. Had the principles of the Communist Manifesto been in the Constitution, Karl Marx would have had no reason to write the Communist Manifesto. The principles of the Communist Manifesto were not in the Constitution then, and the principles of the Communist Manifesto are not in the Constitution now.
“A DISCORDANT INTERMIXTURE MUST HAVE AN INJURIOUS TENDENCY”
“Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of half a million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here.”
– Thomas Jefferson
_______________________
“Prudence requires us to trace the history further and ask what has become of the nations of savages [Indians] who exercised this [generous immigration] policy, and who now occupies the territory which they then inhabited? Perhaps a lesson is here taught which ought not to be despised.”
– Alexander Hamilton
_________________________
“The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.”
– Alexander Hamilton
“A DISCORDANT INTERMIXTURE MUST HAVE AN INJURIOUS TENDENCY”
The American Founders established a Nation, its Law, and its Population.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Naturalization Acts of 1790, 1795, 1798, 1802
United States Congress, “An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” March 26, 1790
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof….
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
“A DISCORDANT INTERMIXTURE MUST HAVE AN INJURIOUS TENDENCY”
A couple of comments.
First to note that Nadja Spiegelman’s, undoubtedly reflecting the thoughts of many, pathetic sense “enlightened self interest” in explaining that shoplifting can be justifiable because people are “stealing from Whole Foods — not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification.”
Secondly, Prof Turley finishes his essay with some very interesting comments: “The sad fact is, it is not just the danger of fellow revolutionaries deciding that you are the next reactionary to be guillotined. It is the self-consumption of radicals who untether themselves from any higher order or purpose. It is the knowledge that all mortals carry the Saturn gene; all mortals share the capacity to become monsters.” This brings to mind a quote from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago, “If only it were all so simple! … But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Here Solzhenitsyn places his finger on the difficulty that Nadja Spiegelman and others of like minds have. She cannot admit that she is a thief, an immoral person, because to admit this so would be to destroy part of herself. Which then brings me to Prof Turley’s assertion identifying “radicals who untether themselves from any higher order or purpose.” If they are untethered from higher purposes, they are, however, solidly tethered to their own highly developed sense of “enlightened self interest”. This enlightened self interest has few or no moral constraints – a very real menace.
A very interesting and thought-provoking essay.
Arnold Nordsieck,
That was a very interesting comment. Thank you for making it.
I would also point out, we have already seen where some leftists have devoured their own when one does not toe the leftist line, or go FAR enough. An example is some extreme leftists have already called out NYC Mayor Mamdani for not being extreme enough.
I’m confused by the phrase “self-consumption.” Looking it up it seems to be almost exclusively used to refer to the generation of electricity. Looking up instead “self consuming” provides a little more insight:
What is a word for self consuming?
self indulgence, self indulgent, overconsumption, consumption, consumes, consumptive, compulsive, self explanatory, self loathing, internalised, internalized, compulsively, consume, selfishness, addictive, selfness, self concept, compulsivity, Autonomous consumption, narcissism, internalises, unsustainable, addiction, …
Or, perhaps simply a tragic comedy expressed by Nadja Spiegelman — comparable to that of Bolinbroke in Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act V, Scene 6 (finale):
Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe,
That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow:
Come, mourn with me for what I do lament,
And put on sullen black incontinent.
I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land,
To wash this blood off from my guilty hand.
March sadly after; grace my mournings here,
In weeping after this untimely bier.
As I’ve previously tried to share a few times with the professor, in the early 1900s John D. Rockefeller instigated a conspiracy to reorient mainstream medicine from prevention and cures to perpetual treatments for profits (“Murder by Injection,” Eustace Mullins, 1988). In 1980 the US FDA approved the expanded use of brain damaging, mind altering added artificially cultured “free” (can cross the blood-brain barrier) MSG as an alleged “flavor enhancer,” knowing full well then it would be harmful to some (FASEB reports on MSG to the FDA) but, apparently (if not deliberately), not “how, how many or how soon?” The obesity and Alzheimer’s disease epidemics presented by 1990 and the diabetes epidemic by 1994 (CDC data). Gun violence (mass/school shootings and suicides, minimally) has increased accordingly. God and/or nature, we live in an action-reaction, cause and effect, stimulus-response universe and, with the US Constitution (not the Declaration of Independence) being the founding document of America, in June of 1778, with no provisions in it for obscene wealth to coexist with abject poverty, the insanely greedy, selfish and treasonous bipartisan ultra rich, who never pay their fair share of taxes, are getting exactly what they keep bargaining for. God and/or nature rules and the Founders got it right in the Preamble (“We the People… etc.”), which I find to be as integral, inseparable and enforceable as any other part of the Constitution.
Your chatGPT response is interesting. The FDA is surely a dumpster fire. I think all support serious reforms of that.
Then you go off the reservation talking about wealth distribution, poor v rich, as if we are in a class/caste system. You can climb or fall in the US. Unfortunately, our current structure makes climbing more difficult (e.g., inner city public education, benefits of staying on welfare because there’s a hard ceiling, and the benefits of single parent homes within the benefits). This creates an impossibly steep climb for too many children in blue cities.
Finally, you appear to connect gun violence to drugs/food additives. I am sure you would then agree that the massive spike the last few years of transgender shooters is directly related. When a mental health issue is treated as something else, we have a recipe for violence.
I’m sure you would agree and it’s what you meant.
No anonymous, I’m not ChatGPT. I was late to the party and a little hastily I simply forgot to sign my name to comments that I didn’t really expect to get posted. And, you appear to have gotten the gist of at least some of it. Charles G. Shaver/CGS
Democrats live in an obverse universe where fact is replaced by an illusionary truth premised of their Deontological ethics and damn the consequences of their actions. Their proud shoulder pounding of righteousness in damnation of others and outright treat of life is evil personified, and assuredly the path that leads to perdition and the flaming abyss of unmitigated ruin of this great nation, The United States of America.
Soooo, then can LEOs call it a “microshooting, of a micotheif?” /sarc
Start by prosecuting all of the individuals in the Epstein files, then prosecute the oligarchs and the corrupt politicians like Trump and his sycophants who continue to commit crimes with impunity and then we can talk about the poor shoplifters.
I wondered how people who didn’t want to agree with Turley but didn’t want to openly approve of shoplifting would respond to the column. Thanks.
I am confused? Since when did Turley start opposing theft and murder? Or is theft and murder only bad if Democrats do it?
The good professor has always opposed theft and murder. The good professor is a man of law and order. He is just pointing out how leftist Democrats have abandoned the concept of law and order by their own words and actions.
Do you have a altar in your house for him? Do you also suck his weenie?
8 Year Old ANON posting again!
Do you have examples of when he supported theft and murder?
Yes Sally, I agree you are very confused. See, even though we have opposing political views we can still find at least one thing to agree upon.
Well said. Thank you
The New York Times, the national newspaper of discord.
NYT – All the news that’s shit to print.
Objective truth may not always be possible but should be the goal.
This whole “narrative control” culture needs to die a painful death.
That includes you, Salem Media