Have a beer in the park. Smuggle a pudding cup past the TSA agents. The point, Scott said, was to keep the civic muscles strong.

Without constant reinforcement, these muscles will atrophy, and when real tyranny arrives, the flabby citizen will be powerless to resist. Scott particularly enjoyed telling Germans to get their reps in, because their grandparents had not.Tuesday a New York Times podcast hosted the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino for a discussion of lawbreaking, which they both endorsed not as a habit of mind but as resistance to actual tyranny, today. They agreed that shoplifting from grocery stores such as Whole Foods is laudable, because (as Tolentino says, without evidence) “every major grocery chain” steals from workers and customers.

Streaming services—they specifically name Spotify, which carries the Times podcast—are bad for creators and, they say, worthy of being ripped off. Piker said he would steal cars, “if I could get away with it.” Channeling Abbie Hoffman, Tolentino encourages people to steal from her own employer, The New Yorker, but does not explain which high crimes David Remnick has committed to earn this comeuppance.They are more circumspect about violence against people. Both Piker and Tolentino giggle their way to a “no” when their host, Nadja Spiegelman, asks if they endorse murdering executives of a health-insurance company or burning down companies they dislike. (Piker says his answer is prompted by legal advice, and Spiegelman joins Tolentino in tittering at his saucy qualification.) But Piker and Tolentino both accuse health-insurance companies of “social murder,” and use that concept to (rather sympathetically) explain why Americans might react with actual murder.

The host and her guests have an awfully good time agreeing about everything.[Yair Rosenberg: The problem with Hasan Piker’s Einstein story]Six years ago, the New York Times opinion editor lost his job for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton because he advised invoking the Insurrection Act to quell riots. The op-ed, the Times explained, fell short of the paper’s standards. This same publication today recommends listening to this podcast about the sunny side of chaos, rather than just reading the transcript, “for the full effect.” I would go further and recommend watching the video, whose Scandinavian-minimalist set, along with the participants’ chic outfits (Piker is wearing Ralph Lauren), greatly enhances the comedic effect.

A previous generation of Marxists would dress down, the better to relate to the workers they tried to organize at the factory gates. These podcasters are, I suppose, the hard-left equivalent of those prosperity-gospel preachers, who dress rich so that they can give others a vision of something to aspire to.They could not look or sound more unoppressed if they tried. Spiegelman invokes Jean Valjean, the Misérable who stole a loaf of bread to feed his family, but when offering a modern example of virtuous theft, she asks why she should have to pay for “organic avocados.” Piker says that “we’ve got to get back to cool crimes,” including Louvre heists, “bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.” Crime, to these people, appears to be a series of Thomas Crown affairs, punctuated for some reason by free guacamole.

Tolentino is at least self-critical. She lists the immoral acts that unsettle her conscience: “getting iced coffee in a plastic cup,” going on vacation in “so many planes,” and failing to organize workers.The belief that workers frequently get a raw deal is an old one, and roughly 200 years of leftist R & D has gone into figuring out how to configure governments to make it easier for labor to negotiate with management on fair terms. Also old is the idea that health is a collective responsibility, and that giving a dignified life to the poor is part of the government’s job. (The belief that you are oppressed by Whole Foods, however, is a modern psychosis.) Among the remarkable aspects of this conversation is the ignorance of this long, eventful history—as if the upshot of the past century of leftism is that you can simply take things, and maybe the justice of it all will start to even out, as society gives way to what Piker approvingly calls “full chaos.”It is difficult to take any of this seriously, especially from someone like Piker, who has compared America unfavorably to China and Cuba, two countries where you will be thrown into a dark hole if you do so much as an anarchist jumping jack.

Cuba is miserable, and to travel there without noticing the misery is grotesque all by itself. China is a more interesting case, and much more ironic as a comparison. Piker’s romantic view of crime is, shall we say, not shared by