San Francisco’s shoplifting epidemic is shocking to behold. But we shouldn’t imagine that the same couldn’t happen here. In fact, we’re well on our way. According to the British Retail Consortium, theft from stores across 10 UK cities is up by 26%. More, “incidents of violence and abuse against retail employees have almost doubled on pre-pandemic levels.”

On Tuesday, Asda Chairman Stuart Rose told LBC that “theft is a big issue. It has become decriminalised. It has become minimised. It’s actually just not seen as a crime anymore.”

In the absence of an adequate response from the authorities, retailers are beginning to take defensive measures. For instance, home furnishings company Dunelm is now locking up duvets and pillow cases in cabinets; Waitrose is offering free coffees to police officers to increase their visibility; and Tesco plans to equip staff with body cameras. 

The “progressive” response to this phenomenon isn’t quite as deranged as it is in in the US. Nevertheless, British liberals have responded as expected. A piece in the Observer is typical. You’ll never guess, but apparently it’s all the Tories’ fault: “Starving your population and then ‘cracking down’ on it for nicking baby formula or a can of soup can start to make a government look rather unreasonable.”

But as the writer ought to know, the issue here isn’t the desperate young mum hiding a few groceries in the pram. Nor is it the schoolboy pilfering the occasional bag of sweets. Rather, the real problem is blatant, organised and sometimes violent theft of higher value items. Criminals who never previously thought they could get away with it increasingly now do — thus presenting a material threat to retail as we know it. 

But instead of addressing the issue head-on, the writer blames the victim: “Once goods were kept behind counters, but since the birth of large supermarkets they have been laid out near the door, ready for the taking.” How terribly irresponsible of them! On the other hand, perhaps the open display of goods isn’t just a convenience for customers, but instead the hallmark of a high trust society. 

In fact, modern shops are a minor miracle of civilisation: public spaces, stacked high with products from all over the world, that passing strangers may freely inspect and handle, but which aren’t looted by anyone who feels like it.

Surely, that’s something worth defending. But if you’d prefer to abandon retailers to their fate, then don’t moan when they do what it takes to survive. Some will close, of course, and others will move their operations online. Those who stay open will guard themselves and their stock behind plexiglass and electronic tags. And then there’s the hi-tech solution: the fully automated and completely cashless store, in which customers have to be authenticated to even get in. 

Remember that retail facilities like this already exist. One day, when they become the norm, we’ll remember what shops used to be like. Then, we’ll ask why no one stood up for them.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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For years, the conventional wisdom was that as long as Donald Trump was in the Oval Office, conservative media would follow him into the gates of Hell — or, as it turns out, into the skies over Tehran. But as the first missiles touched down in Iran at the weekend under “Operation Epic Fury”, a funny thing happened. While Fox News and company held the line on supporting the war, some of the key figures from the digital vanguard which helped burnish the Trumpian brand are in open revolt, including Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Mike Cernovich.

Leading the charge is the Daily Wire’s resident moralist, Matt Walsh. “I can’t take the gaslighting, guys. I really can’t,” he wrote in a widely-shared post on X. “You and I both know that almost every conservative influencer in the business was opposed to war with Iran until just now. And now you’re trying to use justifications that stretch back decades. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Even the White House noticed. After Walsh followed up with a complaint about how the Trump administration’s messaging on the war was “to put it mildly, confused,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went into a defensive crouch. She responded with a laundry list of justifications, saying that Trump “is correcting decades of cowardice and holding those responsible for the deaths of Americans accountable.” Then, in a separate interview, Trump dismissed Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson as representative of MAGA. “I think that MAGA is Trump — MAGA’s not the other two,” he said.

This is a nightmare scenario for the Trump 2.0 coalition. Already, Reuters/Ipsos finds that only 27% approve of US strikes (43% disapprove, while 29% are unsure). Independents disapprove 44% to 19%, with 35% unsure — unusually soft support from the public for a major military campaign. These weak numbers reveal that the tensions over “Operation Epic Fury” are not just elite disagreements, but instead reflect a broader fracturing of the MAGA base itself.

The rift over Iran suggests that the MAGA movement is less a monolithic personality cult than a volatile ideological coalition which may have found its breaking point. For years, the glue holding the New Right together was a shared hatred of woke libs and the Washington consensus — a nebulous entity usually defined by the establishment Democrats, the Cheneys, the Romneys, and the permanent bureaucracy. By adopting the foreign policy of the very people he rose to power by mocking, Trump has effectively decapitated his own “outsider” status.

Conservatives under the age of 50 who receive their news from digital influencers tend to use the term “neocon” as a slur. They’re the ones who took MAGA’s claim seriously that America First meant no new wars in the Middle East and who are having trouble swallowing the administration’s justification, which sounds like a lazy ChatGPT version of George W. Bush’s arguments for invading Iraq more than two decades ago. If Trump loses the influencers, he risks losing the youth, as it would signal that the MAGA brand has become synonymous with 2003-style interventionism. The movement’s younger members and populist core would likely walk away, no longer willing to trade “America First” for “Israel First” or a “Bush-era forever war, but with better memes”.

This raises the existential question of succession: who inherits the crown once the golden elevator stops running? With the influencer class in open revolt, the true MAGA heir likely won’t be a dynastic choice like Don Jr nor a traditional politician like JD Vance, who now finds himself the trigger man in an administration launching missiles. What’s most likely is that the movement will likely fracture into warring fiefdoms: the neo-nationalists, the Israel hawks, the libertarian restraint crowd, and the grievance-driven culture warriors, each claiming to be the rightful heir to “America First” until the possibility of a Democratic president in 2028 brings the gang back together.

And if senior figures at the White House don’t realize that soon, they’ll find themselves shouting into a Fox News void that no one under 45 is watching.

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Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, based in Pennsylvania.

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