The Heartwarming Story Of How New Yorker Writer Jia Tolentino's Parents Ran A Human Slavery Ring

Progressive New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino recently made the news for cheerfully boasting of shoplifting as an act of personal vengeance against big corporations.

Appearing alongside far-left agitator Hasan Piker for a New York Times podcast, Jia admitted to repeated acts of shoplifting against Whole Foods, before encouraging her readership to go out and commit theft: ‘‘Everyone, try it. See what happens.’’

And she did not stop there.

Jia encouraged people to steal from the Louvre, before effortlessly pivoting to endorse Luigi Mangione’s infamous murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

She described the brutal, cold-blooded killing of a father of two as an ‘‘effective act of political consciousness-raising.’’ She expressed frustration that the Democrats failed to fully capitalise on the murder - she called it ‘‘one of the most egregious missed opportunities that we have seen in recent political history.’’

Jia apparently thinks that the main center-left grouping in American politics should come out in support of extrajudicial assassinations and domestic terror.

Elsewhere in the interview she expressed cosmic horror at the use of plastic cups for coffee: ‘‘I find (getting iced coffee in a plastic cup) to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action.’’

The banality of evil.

Execute a father of two by shooting him from behind on a cold Manhattan footpath: missed political opportunity. Drink your iced latte from a plastic cup: EVIL, SELFISH, IMMORAL, WORSE THAN MURDER.

It turns out that Jia’s always had this kind of weird, instrumental approach to morality.

For example, Jia wrote a blog post back in 2020 defending her parents’ decision to operate a human trafficking-slave ring.

Jia referred to the small matter of her parents’ decision to operate a human trafficking-slave ring as ‘‘petty internet gossip.’’

It turns out that more than two hundred Filipino teachers subjected to debt slavery might disagree!

In a since-deleted blog post, Jia described the situation as a ‘‘reputational time bomb,’’ which I guess makes a lot of sense given the slavery.

Jia writes: ‘‘Around the time I was born, my grandmother founded an agency placing nurses from the Philippines in U.S. hospitals that were experiencing a skilled labor shortage.’’

She then spun up a cute story about how her grandmother and parents lovingly helped Filipinos migrate to the United States in search of better opportunities, only to be crushed by the forces of evil American racism and white supremacy: ‘‘This was Texas in the years following the Patriot Act, and basic human and constitutional rights did not seem to be granted to brown non-Americans accused of such serious crimes.’’

Now, the only problem with this story is that her parents ran an actual slavery ring.

I decided to go and read the court documents.

Her parents trafficked hundreds of immigrants into the US, then threatened them with deportation if they spoke out against abusive living conditions and predatory loans that forced them into a kind of indentured servitude or modern day slavery.

Her parents ultimately stole almost $2.8 million USD in fraudulent visa fees before being indicted on 40 counts of money laundering, conspiracy to smuggle immigrants, and visa fraud.

According to court records, the fraud worked like this:

The Tolentino family took school administrators on free trips to luxury beach resorts in the Philippines.

In exhange for the luxury holiday, school administrators would then ‘‘interview’’ Filipino teachers and agree to hire them to their school district.

At first, the school district promised to employ 55 teachers.

With this preliminary order, the Tolentino family charged each of the teachers $10,000 for a non-refundable deposit and extracted a promise to pay up to 50% of their US salaries for their first few years of employment.

Before even making it to the US, most teachers were therefore placed in debt roughly equivalent to two years of median family income in the Philippines.

This debt quickly became crushing because the Tolentino family business Omni Consortium worked with a predatory loan shark company called Blue Pacific to deliver loans at an annual interest rate of 60%.

Blue Pacific - this illustrious beacon of justice - required that each “recruit” have a co-signer in the Phillipines: co-signers were threatened with jail-time if “recruits” were unable to make monthly payments.

Most teachers then promptly failed to make monthly payments, because the Tolentino family failed to secure their promised employment.

Far from being forgiving of their trafficked slaves in such adverse circumstances, the Tolentinos decided to punish non-payment by charging an additional 10% penalty to the loan payment, plus an additional 5% interest.

At least one victim of the Tolentinos ultimately filed for ‘‘T nonimmigrant status’’ - a temporary immigration benefit for victims of human trafficking - in order to escape their servitude.

While ultimately unsuccessful in their overall ''T nonimmigrant status'' appeal, US Citizenship and Immigration Services ultimately determined that the victim had in fact been a victim of human trafficking at the hands of the Tolentinos: ‘‘Upon review, the applicant has established that she has been a victim of a severe form of trafficking in persons, and that her physical presence in the United States is on account of a severe form of human trafficking in persons.’’

So a DHS agency determined that the Tolentino family engaged in a severe form of human trafficking - a severe form of trafficking that basically involved forcing migrants into a kind of modern slavery.

So what became of the Tolentinos?

After a lengthy trial, lawyers hired by the Tolentinos managed to secure a lucky mistrial ruling on a technicality after two jurors admitted to reading some newspaper articles about the case.

Father and grandmother ultimately pleaded to conspiracy to defraud the US government and received 3 months' probation each, not prison.

Her mother Angelica Tolentino meanwhile had her charges dismissed in August 2008 specifically in exchange for agreeing not to contest a forfeiture order.

According to the El Paso Times reporting on the August 2008 sentencing, the Tolentinos ultimately forfeited:

- A $1.75 million house in Houston
- $80,000 from five different bank accounts - A 1996 Mercedes Benz
- A 1999 BMW
- Real estate properties in Houston and McAllen

Jia's mother avoided prosecution by letting the assets go, which suggests the family treated the forfeiture as the real cost of the case rather than the criminal sentence (which was just 3 months' probation each for father Noel and grandmother Florita).

Jia’s fucking awesome childhood mansion (before the evil racist feds stole it from her parents for the crime of possessing non-white bodies in AmeriKKKa)

So this is the moral universe Jia Tolentino actually inhabits.

Her parents ran a federally indicted human trafficking operation that stole $2.8 million from poor Filipino teachers, subjecting them to conditions of modern day slavery, threatening to have them deported if they complained - and she somehow manages to transform this into a story where her own parents are the victims, brutalised and crushed by the forces of American white racial supremacy.

It becomes a story about the Patriot Act, the War on Terror, George W. Bush, brown people being denied their rights.

Even though her parents ran a fucking slave ring.

Awesome. Honestly the mansion she lived in as a kid before the evil AmeriKKKan empire stole it from her parents for the crime of being brown while running a slave ring looked fucking awesome.

They were living a baller Nietzschean lifestyle, reaching out over the world, mastering it, enslaving Filipino teachers. How can we complain? She takes what she wants. She steals from Whole Foods, boasts about it on a podcast, tells her readers to try it themselves.

Zero consequences. She continues to lead an epic, cool as fuck life in a $2.5 million Brooklyn mansion while writing for the New Yorker. You have to respect it, the fact that she lives without limits, without any moral guardrails. Nietzschean. BAP pilled in many ways.

Where it becomes a bit unfair, though, is that she insists on bitching and nagging the rest of us into servitude and submission. Her family are allowed to operate epic baller Andrew Tate trafficker-slave ring operations, but God forbid we take a fucking sip from a plastic coffee cup.

This is ultimately the friend-enemy distinction in its purest form. For our friends, everything - for our enemies, the law. Or as the Chinese Ambassador to Sweden once so beautifully put it: ‘‘Fine wine for our friends, shot guns for our enemies.’’

For Jia, morality exists to absolve the people on her team and to anathematise the people who aren’t.

Left wing criminality and violence are to be absolved, explained away, forgiven as acts of rebellion against harsh and uncaring systems.

Murdering Brian Thompson is okay because he’s the enemy.

Stealing from Whole Foods is okay because Jeff Bezos owns an 8% stake in its parent company, Amazon.

Enslaving Filipino teachers is possibly okay, so long as your daughter writes for the New Yorker.

Morality only exists as a weapon against her enemies: the corporation, the CEO, the white man, etc. Even the most insignificant right-coded act - say, something as small as using a plastic takeaway cup - is to be met with the full force and fury of the collective left.

This is what passes for moral seriousness at The New Yorker in 2026.

Honestly, it’s so fucking funny. Can you imagine if the New Yorker hired a right winger whose parents had run a trafficking operation enslaving hundreds of Filipino teachers? Can you imagine the New York Times then hosting said right winger on a podcast to complain that Republicans missed a political opportunity in failing to cheer on the murder of a left-wing CEO? It’s literally impossible - it would violate the most basic known laws of the universe. It could never be permitted to happen.

So the lesson is this: if you really MUST enslave Filipino teachers while boasting about breaking the law and killing your political enemies, you have to at least pay lip service to progressive pieties in the pages of the New York Times and New Yorker.

Please never forget Patrick Bateman’s own heartfelt musings: ‘‘Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless, and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.’’

So true.

Now if you excuse me, I have to return some video tapes.