The true battle is not left against right. It's between the unholy alliance of far-left and far-right against sane liberalism. I hope the Democrats and Ezra Kleins of the world learn this before it's too late.
I don't have much hope for an America that endlessly flips between two flavors of insanity.
MAGA may be Alt-Right; but they also currently both houses of Congress, SCOTUS, POTUS, and more than half of state governments. Fortunately, with the exception of regular FOX News viewers, most of the country seems fed up with their policies, and is ready to hand them a sound defeat this November. Whether it's a Hungarian-scale wipeout remains to be seen.
Piker may be slightly popular, but he doesn't seem--to my taste anyway--in any way mainstream Left. I'd never even heard of him, and I watch mostly Liberal YouTube clips for hours daily. I do like Ezra's podcasts, though. My guess is that right now, Mr. Klein is kicking himself after Piker made that horrifying Hamas remark.
Wikipedia sez Piker gained his popularity by attacking Trumpian/GOP stupidities. Like pretty much every other podcaster that's Left of Center. Maybe that's his bread-and-butter, and the pro-Communism and other nonsense is something new? Like he's trying to be pack leader in the let's bash Israel-gone-crazy category?
I don’t really understand the Piker debate. Even Mamdani denounced his 9/11 remarks as “objectionable and reprehensible” when it was brought up on the debate stage. Is there anyone refusing to condemn those statements?
Pikerites are statistically insignificant in the electorate, but they are dramatically overrepresented among the “mentally unwell perpetual student racking up debt with no plausible path to repayment who will show up and scream at Ezra Klein when he tries to do a book signing”, and Democrats’ romantic attachment to that demographic is very strong, probably stronger even than the Republicans’ attachment to landowning agricultural interests (also small population, but extraordinarily well distributed in electoral college terms and also kinda useful for growing foodstuffs).
It’s just bizarre that Mamdani is willing to condemn Piker’s remarks without caveats and in stronger terms than Ezra Klein. Ezra is trying way too hard here
Mamdani hasn’t yet been screamed at in person by a horde of far-left nutjobs; we shall see then whether he has the spine to just ignore them.
I just think that for a smart but soft lib like Ezra, being yelled at by those people is so deeply unpleasant, so existentially demoralizing, that they then do a bunch of intellectual gymnastics to twist themselves into the position that will get the yelling to stop.
Hasan Piker is a middling nepo nibling of Cenk Uygur. He holds laughably, reactionary leftist views that are doomed to make Democrats lose even worse. He should be shipped to an obscure corner of the internet and left to rant in obscurity once his stream loses its sheen.
It was hilarious how hard the Pod Save America doorknobs tried to launder Hasan in that interview, throwing him softball after softball, and he still managed to sound deranged. It just made me wonder why they were even bothering. Are they so desperate to have a popular left-wing influencer that they can’t see how boosting the anti-Western communist/islamist guy who hates the Democratic Party is not going to be helpful for the Democratic Party?
All this just confirms what was a growing suspicion on my part: Ezra Klein is an idiot. Yes, he is onto some good things, such as amplification of YIMBY beyond housing. But his recommendations for Democratic strategy range from poor to disastrous.
"It has used the Iran war as an opportunity to launch an invasion of Lebanon" is an interesting way to phrase "responded to a massive missile and drone attack launched by Hezbollah". Ezra talks about a rupture in reality on Israel, but he seems to be the one out of touch with reality on this particular point. I'd also note that the reason that Gaza is still occupied and all of those people are stuck in the remainder is because Hamas has thus far refused to disarm. According to the UN-backed ceasefire agreement, Israel will withdraw in tandem with Hamas's disarmament, but Hamas has refused to surrender their light arms.
You do realize that between the 2024 ceasefire and the "massive missile and drone attach launched by Hezbollah" there were approximately 10,000 strikes on Lebanon by the IDF?
It wasn't Lebanon who fired those missiles and drones. Quite the opposite, Lebanon banned Hezbollah from conducting military activities and demanded it disarm in response. Nor was Lebanon succeeding in holding to the terms agreement either, although that's primarily because Hezbollah is more powerful than the Lebanese state. Beyond all of that, the ceasefire was for a war that Hezbollah itself started. However, I will say that if Ezra had framed it as "using Hezbollah's assault as an opportunity", then I probably wouldn't have said anything. My complaint is in tying the invasion to the Iran war rather than the Hezbollah response to the war.
Defending Bibi is really what you want to do now? Eight billion people are now hurting financially because of this stupid war Bibi and Donald started for no other reason than to "...mow the grass." And you think there will *not* be a price to pay by both Israel and the Diaspora?
The AIPAC set seems completely oblivious to this new Bibi-Trump war as MASSIVE overreach. That will hurt not only Israel, but the entire Diaspora. Support J-Street; the only adult in the room.
8 billion people are hurting because Iran's government decided that they would rather shut down the global economy than lose power. That was a choice. And yes, I will criticize what I see as inaccuracies. Note that I said nothing about any of the other statements Ezra made vis-a-vis Israel.
When I was a kid in the 90s and everyone was talking about the "shock-jocks" like Mancow and Opie and Anthony, I thought well surely we'll grow out of this at some point.
Now it seems like every influencer or online pundit is basically running some version of that same playbook. *Sigh*.
And aside from all that, there's the simple tribal logic. As a White Christian who doesn't hate himself, I’m not voting for Communism and Jihad. The party who wants my vote should avoid association with these things. And BTW, my tribe is the majority here.
As an older (66yr) independent who gets all information by reading I didn’t even know who this was. I’ve tested myself (I did a related experiment for a 10th grade science project) and I can read with comprehension the transcript of a podcast with moderate information content 6x faster than listening to it. For a low information content podcast it approaches 20x. I understand the appeal of real people and voices as we move into more AI generated content, but it’s a huge step backwards for human knowledge. I suspect that’s a contributing factor to the “shock jock” appeal to some people: if you are boring the pre-frontal cortex stimulating the amygdala generates attention. A relevant data point on knowledge transfer is provided by the Feynman lectures, which had relatively little measurable impact on the students who witnessed them, but the transcripts form a core part of any physical scientists learning. (That said, Weinberg’s writing skill makes his books much higher density in knowledge transfer than the Feynman lectures). In person is great for entertainment value, seeing King Lear is better than reading it, but for information/knowledge transfer reading is measurably superior.
This is quite frankly a colossal waste of column inches. We know that Hasan Piker is a fool and no better than the average Fox news opinionators on the right. I wonder if Noah just couldn't come up with something better such as why Gina Raimondo is the stealth Dem candidate for 2028!!👍
The worst part is that Hasan hates the Democratic Party. He rails against them harder than Republicans. He sees most to the Democratic Party as the “pressure release valve” that prevents class consciousness from rising and allows the evils of capitalism to survive. So it’s no wonder why he both sides them so much. He only intends to use the Democratic Party as a vehicle to fulfill his Marxist-Leninist vision. He has admitted to playing the Bernie Progressive to lure people on the left into his camp and radicalize them with his true believes once they begin consuming his content on his platform and interact with his community. He is a parasite in every sense of the word who would at best make the party less popular and create an America as dark as the post-liberals on the right.
I like Ezra Klein but this was an irresponsible take by him. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn’t know much about Piker before writing this, but in that case he shouldn’t have written that opinion piece at all. The Democratic Party is being gaslit into thinking Piker represents a far stronger faction of the left than actually exists and it’s important that we resist it.
I don't think he should be reached out to by Democrats and certainly don't think he should be embraced by them. The main reason, though, is because he has almost no audience. Hardly anyone has any idea who he is. He doesn't command a large following or even a small one. For all the talk about him being a liberal Joe Rogan, he's got a microscopic fraction of his reach. The entire concept of a liberal Joe Rogan is dubious anyway. Anyone saying that is telling you they have no understanding of how he became what he is. The key to his success is being largely non-political, not being an ideologue.
The obvious compromise position on Israel is to no longer support aid to it. Selling weapons to it is fine as long as they're paid for. That looks like where things are headed. On the merits, giving Israel aid is hard to defend and Netanyahu has burned every bridge there is.
The Democrats hate us just as much as the Republicans do, Noah. It’s the only thing they have in common and they’re desperate for a commonality. It’s only a matter of time before all the Jew haters (including the self hating ones) get prime time.
You're not helping. Bibi fuc@#d up with persuading Donald to attack Iran; it's that simple. Trump might try to dodge by claiming he had no idea Iran would interdict the Strait. But Bibi is no fool. He knew very well what would happen. Now eight billion people who can no longer afford to cook dinner are cursing his name. And it's the Diaspora that will have to clean up the mess. Support J-Street.
I'm not a socialist but I usually think criticisms about socialists being comfortable or participating in the capitalist economy to be pointless and in bad faith.
I'll make an exception for Hasan Piker though. He's a guy who gets rich from donations from impressionable kids he evangelizes socialism to. At the very least he could cut down on the conspicuous consumption, like thousand dollar shirts and private jets to Coachella.
I absolutely detest Hasan Piker's views for all the reasons that you, Noah, and Jeremiah Johnson have mentioned. I've been watching Hasan's rise over the past few years and have grown increasingly alarmed as he appears alongside various politicians such as when he was with Bernie and AOC, then Mamdani, and now Abdul El-Sayed. Lately, a bunch of popular progressive influencers have been rushing in to defend Piker's abhorrent views. One such notable progressive influencer defending Piker is Secular Talk's Kyle Kulinski. I'd really like to see liberals and Democrats draw hard lines and publicly denounce Hasan's views. Elissa Slotkin is one such Democrat, but I wish more would come forward.
The true battle is not left against right. It's between the unholy alliance of far-left and far-right against sane liberalism. I hope the Democrats and Ezra Kleins of the world learn this before it's too late.
I don't have much hope for an America that endlessly flips between two flavors of insanity.
MAGA may be Alt-Right; but they also currently both houses of Congress, SCOTUS, POTUS, and more than half of state governments. Fortunately, with the exception of regular FOX News viewers, most of the country seems fed up with their policies, and is ready to hand them a sound defeat this November. Whether it's a Hungarian-scale wipeout remains to be seen.
Piker may be slightly popular, but he doesn't seem--to my taste anyway--in any way mainstream Left. I'd never even heard of him, and I watch mostly Liberal YouTube clips for hours daily. I do like Ezra's podcasts, though. My guess is that right now, Mr. Klein is kicking himself after Piker made that horrifying Hamas remark.
Wikipedia sez Piker gained his popularity by attacking Trumpian/GOP stupidities. Like pretty much every other podcaster that's Left of Center. Maybe that's his bread-and-butter, and the pro-Communism and other nonsense is something new? Like he's trying to be pack leader in the let's bash Israel-gone-crazy category?
I don’t really understand the Piker debate. Even Mamdani denounced his 9/11 remarks as “objectionable and reprehensible” when it was brought up on the debate stage. Is there anyone refusing to condemn those statements?
Pikerites are statistically insignificant in the electorate, but they are dramatically overrepresented among the “mentally unwell perpetual student racking up debt with no plausible path to repayment who will show up and scream at Ezra Klein when he tries to do a book signing”, and Democrats’ romantic attachment to that demographic is very strong, probably stronger even than the Republicans’ attachment to landowning agricultural interests (also small population, but extraordinarily well distributed in electoral college terms and also kinda useful for growing foodstuffs).
It’s just bizarre that Mamdani is willing to condemn Piker’s remarks without caveats and in stronger terms than Ezra Klein. Ezra is trying way too hard here
Mamdani hasn’t yet been screamed at in person by a horde of far-left nutjobs; we shall see then whether he has the spine to just ignore them.
I just think that for a smart but soft lib like Ezra, being yelled at by those people is so deeply unpleasant, so existentially demoralizing, that they then do a bunch of intellectual gymnastics to twist themselves into the position that will get the yelling to stop.
lol https://x.com/daveweigel/status/2009969739557154892?s=46
You might be mistaken, the idiots have even protested Mamdani lol https://x.com/daveweigel/status/2009969739557154892?s=46
Hasan Piker is a middling nepo nibling of Cenk Uygur. He holds laughably, reactionary leftist views that are doomed to make Democrats lose even worse. He should be shipped to an obscure corner of the internet and left to rant in obscurity once his stream loses its sheen.
It was hilarious how hard the Pod Save America doorknobs tried to launder Hasan in that interview, throwing him softball after softball, and he still managed to sound deranged. It just made me wonder why they were even bothering. Are they so desperate to have a popular left-wing influencer that they can’t see how boosting the anti-Western communist/islamist guy who hates the Democratic Party is not going to be helpful for the Democratic Party?
All this just confirms what was a growing suspicion on my part: Ezra Klein is an idiot. Yes, he is onto some good things, such as amplification of YIMBY beyond housing. But his recommendations for Democratic strategy range from poor to disastrous.
"It has used the Iran war as an opportunity to launch an invasion of Lebanon" is an interesting way to phrase "responded to a massive missile and drone attack launched by Hezbollah". Ezra talks about a rupture in reality on Israel, but he seems to be the one out of touch with reality on this particular point. I'd also note that the reason that Gaza is still occupied and all of those people are stuck in the remainder is because Hamas has thus far refused to disarm. According to the UN-backed ceasefire agreement, Israel will withdraw in tandem with Hamas's disarmament, but Hamas has refused to surrender their light arms.
You do realize that between the 2024 ceasefire and the "massive missile and drone attach launched by Hezbollah" there were approximately 10,000 strikes on Lebanon by the IDF?
It wasn't Lebanon who fired those missiles and drones. Quite the opposite, Lebanon banned Hezbollah from conducting military activities and demanded it disarm in response. Nor was Lebanon succeeding in holding to the terms agreement either, although that's primarily because Hezbollah is more powerful than the Lebanese state. Beyond all of that, the ceasefire was for a war that Hezbollah itself started. However, I will say that if Ezra had framed it as "using Hezbollah's assault as an opportunity", then I probably wouldn't have said anything. My complaint is in tying the invasion to the Iran war rather than the Hezbollah response to the war.
Defending Bibi is really what you want to do now? Eight billion people are now hurting financially because of this stupid war Bibi and Donald started for no other reason than to "...mow the grass." And you think there will *not* be a price to pay by both Israel and the Diaspora?
The AIPAC set seems completely oblivious to this new Bibi-Trump war as MASSIVE overreach. That will hurt not only Israel, but the entire Diaspora. Support J-Street; the only adult in the room.
8 billion people are hurting because Iran's government decided that they would rather shut down the global economy than lose power. That was a choice. And yes, I will criticize what I see as inaccuracies. Note that I said nothing about any of the other statements Ezra made vis-a-vis Israel.
If we stop fighting, and then I punch you 10,000 times before you punch back, who started the current fight?
Also Piker is simply an asshole.
When I was a kid in the 90s and everyone was talking about the "shock-jocks" like Mancow and Opie and Anthony, I thought well surely we'll grow out of this at some point.
Now it seems like every influencer or online pundit is basically running some version of that same playbook. *Sigh*.
And aside from all that, there's the simple tribal logic. As a White Christian who doesn't hate himself, I’m not voting for Communism and Jihad. The party who wants my vote should avoid association with these things. And BTW, my tribe is the majority here.
As an older (66yr) independent who gets all information by reading I didn’t even know who this was. I’ve tested myself (I did a related experiment for a 10th grade science project) and I can read with comprehension the transcript of a podcast with moderate information content 6x faster than listening to it. For a low information content podcast it approaches 20x. I understand the appeal of real people and voices as we move into more AI generated content, but it’s a huge step backwards for human knowledge. I suspect that’s a contributing factor to the “shock jock” appeal to some people: if you are boring the pre-frontal cortex stimulating the amygdala generates attention. A relevant data point on knowledge transfer is provided by the Feynman lectures, which had relatively little measurable impact on the students who witnessed them, but the transcripts form a core part of any physical scientists learning. (That said, Weinberg’s writing skill makes his books much higher density in knowledge transfer than the Feynman lectures). In person is great for entertainment value, seeing King Lear is better than reading it, but for information/knowledge transfer reading is measurably superior.
This is quite frankly a colossal waste of column inches. We know that Hasan Piker is a fool and no better than the average Fox news opinionators on the right. I wonder if Noah just couldn't come up with something better such as why Gina Raimondo is the stealth Dem candidate for 2028!!👍
The issue is not that Piker is a fool, since he himself makes that obvious, it’s that Klein is a fool for trying to normalize Piker’s stupid opinions.
The worst part is that Hasan hates the Democratic Party. He rails against them harder than Republicans. He sees most to the Democratic Party as the “pressure release valve” that prevents class consciousness from rising and allows the evils of capitalism to survive. So it’s no wonder why he both sides them so much. He only intends to use the Democratic Party as a vehicle to fulfill his Marxist-Leninist vision. He has admitted to playing the Bernie Progressive to lure people on the left into his camp and radicalize them with his true believes once they begin consuming his content on his platform and interact with his community. He is a parasite in every sense of the word who would at best make the party less popular and create an America as dark as the post-liberals on the right.
I like Ezra Klein but this was an irresponsible take by him. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn’t know much about Piker before writing this, but in that case he shouldn’t have written that opinion piece at all. The Democratic Party is being gaslit into thinking Piker represents a far stronger faction of the left than actually exists and it’s important that we resist it.
I don't think he should be reached out to by Democrats and certainly don't think he should be embraced by them. The main reason, though, is because he has almost no audience. Hardly anyone has any idea who he is. He doesn't command a large following or even a small one. For all the talk about him being a liberal Joe Rogan, he's got a microscopic fraction of his reach. The entire concept of a liberal Joe Rogan is dubious anyway. Anyone saying that is telling you they have no understanding of how he became what he is. The key to his success is being largely non-political, not being an ideologue.
The obvious compromise position on Israel is to no longer support aid to it. Selling weapons to it is fine as long as they're paid for. That looks like where things are headed. On the merits, giving Israel aid is hard to defend and Netanyahu has burned every bridge there is.
The Democrats hate us just as much as the Republicans do, Noah. It’s the only thing they have in common and they’re desperate for a commonality. It’s only a matter of time before all the Jew haters (including the self hating ones) get prime time.
You're not helping. Bibi fuc@#d up with persuading Donald to attack Iran; it's that simple. Trump might try to dodge by claiming he had no idea Iran would interdict the Strait. But Bibi is no fool. He knew very well what would happen. Now eight billion people who can no longer afford to cook dinner are cursing his name. And it's the Diaspora that will have to clean up the mess. Support J-Street.
I'm not a socialist but I usually think criticisms about socialists being comfortable or participating in the capitalist economy to be pointless and in bad faith.
I'll make an exception for Hasan Piker though. He's a guy who gets rich from donations from impressionable kids he evangelizes socialism to. At the very least he could cut down on the conspicuous consumption, like thousand dollar shirts and private jets to Coachella.
> private jets to Coachella
Is that actually true?!?... ...
I absolutely detest Hasan Piker's views for all the reasons that you, Noah, and Jeremiah Johnson have mentioned. I've been watching Hasan's rise over the past few years and have grown increasingly alarmed as he appears alongside various politicians such as when he was with Bernie and AOC, then Mamdani, and now Abdul El-Sayed. Lately, a bunch of popular progressive influencers have been rushing in to defend Piker's abhorrent views. One such notable progressive influencer defending Piker is Secular Talk's Kyle Kulinski. I'd really like to see liberals and Democrats draw hard lines and publicly denounce Hasan's views. Elissa Slotkin is one such Democrat, but I wish more would come forward.