Howard Husock of the right-wing Manhattan Institute began his June 3 CNSNews.com column (originally published at the institute’s City Journal) this way:
Monday night, the looting of New York moved on to the luxury-brand flagships of Manhattan’s Soho and Midtown.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo correctly noted that looters were simply taking this moment to steal, to smash, and grab a Rolex. It may seem self-evident why looters prefer luxury, but it’s still worth pondering.
That basic premise, it turns out, isn’t true. As GQ documented, there isn’t a Rolex store per se in Soho — there is a store that is an authorized Rolex dealer — and would-be looters couldn’t “smash and grab a Rolex” because the store had been closed for weeks because of the coronavirus pandemic and any inventory that hadn’t been removed previously was stored in a safe, not lying around. A New York Post story pushing the narrative that the store had been looted “2.4 million in Rolexes” were taken is simply not true.
Nevertheless, Husock had his hook on which to do a column, however bogus it may be. Thus he used that to condescending lecture about “why looters like Rolexes,” in which he claims that “looters understand the intangibles of brand as status because the people they envy are also seduced by such charms” and that “looters have absorbed the message that such baubles can be confused with actual accomplishment, can substitute for a purposeful life built in small steps, a family nurtured, a child looked after.”
Bernie Sanders got blamed as well, for pointing out that the “ultra-rich” have built their fortunes in no small part on the backs of those poorer than them, and that “this logic, filtered down to the street, forgives looting as sticking it to the man.”