The Brief | The New York Times Would Like You to Know Some Crimes Are "Cool" As Protest
Plus: a Special Forces soldier's $409K Polymarket bet, record denaturalization filings, and a 10-year-old boy flown home from Cuba on a DOJ jet.
Happy Friday, friends!
Is everybody ready for the weekend? (attempted earwig implantation)
What do you have planned? There’s this cute little pastry shop that just opened in town, and I’ve been dying to try it. Legit pastries. Croissants. Tarts. Not to dog on donuts or cookies, but there’s something special about the airy layers of a warm butter croissant.
Makes me wonder what your favorite baked treat is?
Anyway, let’s get down to business.
In today’s Brief:
The NYT Opinion podcast spent Wednesday explaining which crimes are acceptable now. Murder made the list.
A Special Forces soldier involved in Maduro’s capture bet $33K on Polymarket the week before the raid, walked with $409K, now facing 60 years.
The DOJ just filed more denaturalization cases in one year than Biden’s DOJ filed in four.
The FBI flew a DOJ jet to Havana to retrieve a 10-year-old boy whose parent allegedly took him for gender-transition surgery.
Plus marijuana rescheduling, a Regeneron price deal, the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire extended, and missing scientists on Congress’s radar.
Microlooting, “Cool Crimes,” and the Rotating List
On Wednesday, the NYT Opinion desk ran an episode titled The Rich Don't Play By The Rules, So Why Should I? Guests: self-described communist Hasan Piker and New Yorker anti-capitalism writer Jia Tolentino. — Can we acknowledge the irony of Condé Nast paying someone to write about anti-capitalism? What are we doing?! — Host: NYT culture editor Nadja Spiegelman. Topic: "microlooting," which is apparently what we're calling petty theft. Progressives love making things up to validate their subjective morality.
Fifteen minutes in, Tolentino casually admitted she’d stolen lemons from her Brooklyn Whole Foods “on several occasions.” Miss Nancy needs lemons. Organic ones are $1.29 each. Tolentino, who posts her fab NYC life on IG, walks back in and pockets them. Piker: she “should go to prison.” Wink.
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They built a philosophy around it. Fine to steal from Whole Foods. Not from a small business. Fine to pirate movies, bypass paywalls, rob a bank. Fine, to steal from the Louvre. Piker said he’d “pirate a car” if he could figure out how. Whatever that means.
Piker’s logic: corporations budget for theft, so theft is a subscription fee you pay yourself. It's payback for the self-checkout, which put the cashier out of a job. Seattle is this at scale. Half the downtown Target shelves are behind plexiglass or gone.
Then Spiegelman asked the real question. 41% of Gen Z told pollsters the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was morally justified. How do we sit with that?
Piker’s answer: “Friedrich Engels wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson, as the United Healthcare C.E.O., was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder.” (For the unaware: Engels was Marx’s homie, co-author of the Communist Manifesto.) Hasan kept going. Structural violence. For-profit paywall. Because of that, he argues, people understood why Thompson had to die.
Same move as the lemons, applied to a man’s life. The act doesn’t matter. The target does. Whoever’s bad enough this week is fair game. Assassinated in the process? Understandable. According to Hasan.
A rotating list. Today, insurance executives. Yesterday, landlords. Last week, the Louvre. Pick the character, the method follows.
anya @anyaxmar you’d think this i-just-want-healthcare socialist would want a high trust a la nordic society but he just dreams of being soviet union party elite...
Your life and property here aren’t contingent on anyone else’s approval. Strip that out, you don’t have a society. You have a seating chart.
The part that’ll keep me up: this isn’t a Twitch stream. The NYT gave him the mic. Bernie and AOC appear with him. Ro Khanna said he’d sit down. This is the adult table.
Republicans need to run Piker clips on a loop through November.
The $33,000 Bet on a Classified Raid
January 3, U.S. Special Forces captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. A week before, Fort Bragg Master Sergeant Gannon “Ken” Van Dyke, directly involved in the planning, placed $33,000 in Polymarket bets on Maduro’s removal. He won roughly $409,000 and tried the foreign crypto shuffle on his way out. Apparently Fort Bragg doesn’t teach Money Laundering 101. The DOJ charged him with Commodity Exchange Act violations, wire fraud, and insider trading. Max: 60 years.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Two Florida Republicans want Van Dyke to walk. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna wants a full pardon. Rep. Jimmy Patronis was plainer: “If the DOJ isn’t prepared to go after every member of Congress profiting off insider trading, this feels like selective enforcement, not justice.”
They aren’t off base. Members of Congress do this every quarter, sometimes betting against American interests. Their fig leaf: the intel was “technically public” by a day when they trade. The argument is that Van Dyke should give the money back, get a reprimand, and go home. The man served his country. More than you can say for most of Congress. Go after Pelosi’s next tech position and every member who beats the S&P by ten.
Trump got asked Thursday and reached for Pete Rose: this was “Pete Rose betting on his own team.” Pressed on Iran war patterns, he shrugged: the world has become “somewhat of a casino.” Harvard estimates $143M of Polymarket profits may trace to nonpublic info.
How about no one cheats or steals, and if you do, everyone faces a consequence.
If a Master Sergeant pulled this off, how many others did? Polymarket is a public ledger. Someone at the CFTC is staring at that chart.
The DOJ’s Record Denaturalization Push
The DOJ confirmed Thursday it’s moving denaturalization cases to all 93 U.S. attorney offices. Targets: naturalized citizens who got citizenship through fraud, sham marriages, or concealed criminal histories. Will this include “brother-lover” Ilhan Omar? Asking for a friend.
DOJ deputy Matthew Tragesser: “The Department is pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history.” The year’s 384 cases already exceed Biden’s four years combined. The media will frame it as the administration targeting immigrants. For context: the U.S. brought 305 denaturalization cases total between 1990 and 2018.
Denaturalization used to be rare enough that one case made national news. Now it’s industrial. Cases are moving out of the specialized immigration unit to 93 U.S. attorney offices in parallel.
Blanche is betting, not incorrectly, that a chunk of the naturalization backlog is fraudulent. USCIS approved hundreds of thousands a year for a decade. Built for volume, not scrutiny.
Quiet story for now. Give it a minute.
The Justice Department Jet That Flew to Havana
The FBI flew a DOJ plane to Cuba this week to retrieve a 10-year-old American boy. His biological father is Rose Inessa-Ethington, a 42-year-old male who pretends to be a woman. Rose and partner Blue Inessa-Ethington took him to Havana from Cache County, Utah. Shared custody. They told the boy's mother they were going camping in Calgary.
Per the USAO Utah and the federal complaint, the child is “a biological male who identifies as a female.” Family members told investigators Rose had been manipulating him that way. The FBI cited concerns he was taken “for gender reassignment surgery prior to puberty.” Not legal there. Not legal here. The trip ran past the April 3 custody return. The mother got one phone call March 28 saying they’d “arrived in Canada.”
So, a man who convinced himself he was a woman then convinced his 10-year-old son of the same, and allegedly tried to move him to a communist island to make it permanent.
The aviation internet noticed first. Flight trackers spotted a DOJ jet on a rare Richmond-to-Havana route Monday. Answer: a kidnapping complaint unsealed days earlier in Utah. Both defendants arrested on arrival. The boy is home.
A DOJ jet to Havana to retrieve an American child is unprecedented. The White House made the call anyway. This is the clearest sign, yet this administration will use the full federal apparatus to keep kids out of the medical transition pipeline. A boy is home with his mom because of it. The class that spent a decade defending “gender-affirming care for minors” has nowhere to stand.
Quick Rundown
Marijuana rescheduled. The DOJ moved marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III Thursday, out of the same class as heroin. Only took 50 years and half the country legalizing it anyway. Broader reclassification is expedited.
Regeneron drug price deal. Trump announced a voluntary price cut with Regeneron Thursday. Praluent drops $537 to $225 on TrumpRx, per Newsweek. Future Regeneron drugs hit at Most Favored Nation rates. Covers 86% of branded drugs. Also: a two-year-old named Travis Smith stole the press conference while Trump announced Regeneron’s gene therapy for a rare hearing disorder. Watch the clip.
New York Post@nypostA two-year old stole the show during President Trump's prescription drug announcement. Travis Smith chattered and cooed as the president announced the FDA-approved Regeneron's auto harmony, a gene therapy curing a rare disease that causes deafness.8:16 PM · Apr 23, 2026 · 58.3K Views17 Replies · 98 Reposts · 1.09K LikesIsrael-Lebanon ceasefire extended. Trump added three weeks to the truce. Iran ceasefire also holds, for now.
Missing scientists. Axios has a quietly alarming report on Congress investigating missing U.S. scientists connected to space and nuclear programs. Thin on details. Worth watching.
Let’s Talk About It
If the New York Times ran a podcast where a conservative guest defended political assassination as “justified response” to bad actors, what do you think the week would have looked like? Be honest.
Wrong answers only. What’s the most on-brand thing Hasan Piker could steal next?
Drop your takes in the comments. I’ll see you Monday.
The Brief publishes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Forward to someone who needs to understand what’s actually happening.
I feel like they need to go after Congress if they go after the service guy for his betting! I don't agree with what he did but I also don't agree with Congress's actions and we shouldn't treat our service men harsher than our politicians.
Well as the left says: misdemeanors aren’t crimes! 🙃