At the height of the 2020 riots, a book was published entitled “In Defense of Looting.” At the time I asked a bookshop in New York, which was prominently displaying the work, whether I could walk out with the book without paying. I was told not.

But a friend did download it and publish the work for free online before being served a copyright notice by the pro-looting book’s publisher.

Some of us had hoped that the madness of that summer had gone away. But this week we got a good reminder that for a part of the left the question of whether or not it is right to steal is still being mulled over.

The issue was raised on a New York Times podcast featuring the radical left’s current favorite podcast guest — Hasan Piker. For anyone unfamiliar with him, Piker is a nasty piece of work. He has claimed that this city deserved 9/11, has praised the terrorist group Hamas and happily describes himself as a Marxist.

In the 21st century it can safely be said that anyone who still calls themselves a “Marxist” is what we used to call “a slow learner.”

On the NYT podcast Piker and a writer from the New Yorker were asked to mull on such complex questions as whether it is OK to steal and whether it is OK to murder.

The answer to both of these questions appears to be “Yes.”

On the first question it turns out that there are certain stores which it is more moral to steal from than others. Piker and his fellow guest agreed that Whole Foods is especially OK to steal from. A small business is less OK to steal from. But listeners were never treated to an explanation of which shops might be on the borderline between being a place where you could help yourself to a five-finger-discount and those where you couldn’t.

That is because neither Piker nor the other people in the studio seemed to have a very stable set of ethics.

Not that they don’t think of themselves as highly ethical people. The NYT’s host — Nadja Spiegelman — moaned at one point that “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.”

New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino chimed in that she frequently does things that are ethnically questionable. “Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action.”

As apparently, is taking a commercial flight.

All of which makes something that the trio didn’t seem to find morally troubling all the more startling.

Because naturally where two or three radical leftists are gathered together there begins a conversation about Luigi Mangione.

The moral case against the man accused of killing the United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson is not hard. Mangione stands accused of murdering a 50-year old father of two on a street in the center of New York in cold blood.

The debate over whether that was a good thing to do should not be complicated. Not as complicated as iced coffee, for instance.

But the NYT crew felt otherwise. The host, Spiegelman, said that the killing of Brian Thompson felt to some people that “finally, someone can actually do something about health care.”

Though she did admit that it feels “scary” to be in a society where people can just kill each other.

Piker seemed to have no such quandaries. “Friedrich Engels,” he started, unpromisingly, “wrote about the concept of social murder.” He went on to claim that Brian Thompson “was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. The systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty.” And so on.

Both Piker and Tolentino then went on to express their dismay that the Democrats hadn’t done more in the wake of Mangione’s actions to push “a unified message toward universal health care.”

In these statements and arguments sit the darkest assumptions imaginable.

One is the constant radical left belief that in order to get to their socialist utopia blood must necessarily be shed. Never the Marxist’s own blood, of course. But they are happy to wade through the blood of others, in the belief that violence is a sort of purifying fire on the way to utopia.

Worse is the assumption that while Mangione should be treated with care when it comes to moral condemnation, his victim should be afforded no such privilege. Thompson can be accused of “social violence.” But woe betide anyone who condemns Mangione for practicing actual violence.

This is a classic case of moral inversion. Where crimes become non-crimes and non-crimes are made into crimes.

If Piker does indeed know his Marx and Engels then he should know where all of this leads. In case he doesn’t, it might be worth reminding him and his friends.

The ideology which they praise was responsible in the 20th century alone for more deaths than any ideology in human history. Read the accounts of the Great Famine in Chairman Mao’s China alone and you will see what “systematized Marxism” actually looks like.

We don´t need to use terms like “social murder” to describe what Marxists spent the last century doing. What they did was simply murder. No “social” required.

As so often with radical leftists, we must all hope that they get nowhere near the sort of society they claim to be aiming for. Not least for their own sakes — because the revolution always reliably eats its own. But because they could not possibly enjoy the values they express being used on them.

After all, someone might glibly say that Hasan Piker and his Marxist friends have been responsible for tremendous amounts of “social murder.” So would it be OK for somebody to kill them? I would say obviously not. But someone else might think differently.

As ever, we must hope that these radicals never get the world they claim to be wishing for. Meantime, feel free to take any of their stuff, obviously.