Do you know what the problem with capitalism is? It doesn't want to sell stuff to people. Calling it "a late-capitalism horror story," the Washington Post's Maura Judkis might have just written the stupidest possible piece about Blue America's state-sponsored shoplifting craze.
"America is a sticky-fingered nation built on stolen land," Judkis scolded her readers on Friday to their self-loathing delight, "and its current moral panic is about shoplifting."
Judkis tells the story of Washington's Columbia Heights shoplifter-beloved CVS location, where by last week, there was "almost nothing left to steal... and that gives you an idea of which items have actual value."
"The thieves don’t even bother" with blank CDs or greeting cards, we're told without any surprise. "The good magazines like Vogue and GQ and Sports Illustrated are gone, but there are still a few copies of Traditional Home, some special issues of Life devoted to Willie Nelson, and a Woman’s World that declares: 'Bye bye, jiggly fat!'" The soft drinks are gone, "but three gallon-sized jugs of Arizona green tea are still on the shelves on one recent visit."
The good stuff — including Dawn dish soap, L’Oreal shampoo, MiraLax, Clairol root touch-up hair dye kits, DayQuil, NyQuil, diapers, Cetaphil, Neutrogena face wash — are all either behind Plexiglass, available only at the counter, or under lock and key.
"Other shelves, stretching entire aisles, are totally empty."
If you've been reading the news these last four years, you know that the Third World shopping experience is a familiar sight in cities like Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.
Yet Judkis insists that "the data is murky" whether or not America really has a shoplifting problem. But that misses the point, doesn't it? America doesn't have a shoplifting problem, but poorly policed neighborhoods in America's Democrat-dominated blue cities do.
The problem is so exaggerated that corporate finally had to shut down the Columbia Heights CVS last week.
"Besides, there’s a Robin Hood mentality," Judkis wrote, that allows thieves (and politicians and well-to-do white progressives) to "assume that a massive corporation can absorb the losses of petty thefts. Some shoplifters view it as a form of anti-capitalist social activism."
And they're being encouraged by the current zeitgeist that whites are racist, so are the police, and that petty crimes shouldn't be punished.
Judkis did leave one question unanswered: where are those free-lance reparations specialists going to shoplift now that the local CVS has closed? I'd wager this month's car payment that she'll have a somewhat less understanding take if the O.C. shoplifting gangs ever come to Georgetown or Adams Morgan.
I'm reminded once again of Barack Obama aide Ben Rhodes' blithe assessment of young reporters — the ones who cut their teeth covering politics during the Obama years. "All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington," he told New York Times Magazine in 2016. "The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing."
Maura Judkis might not be 27 anymore, but she certainly knows nothing.
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