Hasan Piker is bad for the Democrats

Republicans embraced extremist ideology and it backfired on them. Democrats shouldn't follow suit.

The other day on X, leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker got into an argument with a commentator known as Swann Marcus. Marcus had scoffed at the notion of Piker trying to connect with blue-collar workers. In retaliation, Piker claimed that Marcus had written a “how to” manual about sex tourism in Asia:

As you can see, Community Notes quickly corrected Piker. The person who wrote the “how to” articles about sex tourism was actually a rightist influencer named Matt Forney. Apparently, some leftists had — intentionally or unintentionally — gotten Marcus mixed up with Forney because Marcus had made a documentary about Burmese missionaries. But Piker refused to delete his accusation against Marcus, even after being informed of his mistake.

Recently, a video resurfaced of Hasan Piker launching a profanity-laced tirade against a Vietnamese refugee named Bach Hac. The refugee complains of suffering under Vietnam’s communist regime. Piker responded by saying “Fuck you old lady. Shut the fuck up you stupid idiotic old lady. Suck my dick, old lady. God damn, Yo, fuck this refugee”. He then tells her to go back and live in “South Vietnam”. Piker later deleted the stream, but has never apologized.

During a recent speech at Yale, Hasan Piker declared that “The fall of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century.” This is an almost direct quote from Vladimir Putin, who said in 2005 that “The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” This would be news, of course, to the countries that fought to escape Soviet communist rule, and whose economies flourished after the USSR’s collapse.

Recently, Ezra Klein wrote a New York Times op-ed urging Democrats to open a dialogue with Hasan Piker instead of trying to freeze him out of the party. The Times gave Klein’s post the headline “Hasan Piker is not the Enemy”. On a podcast, Piker then declared that Hamas is “1000 times better than Israel”. The New York Times promptly changed the headline of Ezra Klein’s post:

This kind of behavior is par for the course for Piker. Jeremiah Johnson had a good roundup back in December:

Democrats have their own extremist problem

Some excerpts:

When questioned about China’s lack of LGBT rights, Hasan said the country is ‘gay as hell’ and defended the CCP banning gay dating apps as a ‘privacy issue’…He went on state television to talk about how great China is, and dismissed criticism of the CCP as ‘rumors’ and ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘lies’ that he wanted to help correct…He’s downplayed the genocide in Xinjiang, calling the concentration camps there ‘re-education’ camps and claiming they’re all closed now.² He’s said that Chinese colonialism in Tibet was a good thing…

He’s defended the idea of socialist re-education programs explicitly. He wishes the USSR had won the Cold War, he’s cool with Hezbollah, he thinks the Houthis are awesome and he’s used his platform to give a voice to literal, actual terrorists. He defended Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, and while he doesn’t outright defend Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine he sure does spend a lot of time blaming the American government for somehow starting the conflict. He said that America deserved 9/11. He repeats neo-Nazi talking points about the Holocaust. He promotes political violence.

It should be pretty clear at this point what kind of guy Hasan is. His ideology is standard leftist “campism” — the idea that America is bad, and that any country or group that opposes America is therefore good. His style is that of a typical “shock jock” radio host — he says extreme and vulgar things in order to get attention and excite his listeners. It’s basically the same shtick that Michael Savage used back in the 2000s, but with the right-wing politics swapped out for Cold War-era anti-Americanism.

And yet Democrats and progressives are starting to treat this radio shock jock as an important voice in their party. Here’s what Ezra Klein had to say in his NYT post:

[P]ick over Piker’s years of streaming, and you can find offensive things he’s said.“…Streamer has said offensive things” isn’t really a news story…The impulse to cut off those with whom we disagree reaches far beyond Piker…It sits at the heart of cancellation as a political tactic. It relies on a belief in the power of gatekeepers that might have been true in an earlier age but no longer reflects the way attention is earned and held. Tucker Carlson was ejected from Fox News and grew stronger on X and YouTube. Nick Fuentes was banned from major social media platforms and gathered strength in the shadows. Trump went from being banned by every major social media platform to retaking the presidency.

According to Ezra’s line of thought here, the Republican Party and mainstream conservative institutions like Fox News would be smart to embrace Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — and therefore the Democrats and mainstream liberals would be smart to embrace Hasan Piker.

Let’s think through the implications of that line of reasoning. If the mainstream should always include extremists in the conversation — if gatekeeping is useless and counterproductive — then all you have to do in order to force extremist ideas into mainstream discourse is to grab some attention. If you get a Twitch stream or a podcast and you start screaming that the Holocaust was fake, or that the USSR was good, etc., and you manage to get a decently big audience by doing this, you should now have a say in how the country is run.

The obvious problem with this idea is that it creates a competitive market for extremism. If being more extreme and profane and outrageous than the next guy is what gets attention, and if attention is what gets you influence in the Democratic Party or the GOP, then there’s a huge incentive for would-be influencers to be as extreme and outrageous as possible. Everyone will just keep one-upping their competitors until all the right-wing commentators are Hitler fans and all the left-wing commentators are Stalin apologists.

One could argue that this is exactly what has happened on the right, with the ascent of Carlson,¹ Fuentes, Candace Owens, and similar rightist extremists. The Heritage Foundation’s embrace of Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes last year was very similar to Ezra Klein’s embrace of Piker; Heritage declared that although they disagreed with the ideas of Carlson and Fuentes, those commentators were so popular that they had to be allowed inside the mainstream debate.

But there’s another, less obvious problem with the idea of mainstreaming popular extremists. In the internet age, the bar for what counts as “popular” has been dramatically lowered. In the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh had between 15 and 27 million weekly listeners for his radio talk show. Nowadays, Tucker’s shows get about 1 million listeners. The internet has fragmented audiences, so that even the most popular commentators get a lot less attention than they used to.

This means we lower the bar for who we think of as “popular”. Hasan Piker’s stream gets about 6.5 million hours of attention per week. That’s about 10% of the viewership of Fox News’ Sean Hannity, and about a third of CNN’s Anderson Cooper. But Hasan is considered far and away the biggest political streamer, because streamers who talk about politics a lot just tend not to be that popular. Podcast audiences are harder to compare, but if we assume that about half of podcast downloads eventually get listened to, then Hasan is probably in the top 10 political commenters in the U.S., but not in the top 5. Joe Rogan — who, as Ezra points out, is not consistently conservative, but who supported Trump in 2024 — has many times Hasan’s audience.

International audiences lower the bar even further; only about half of Hasan’s audience is American. Ezra Klein is ready to embrace Piker as an important voice within the Democratic coalition based on his popular appeal, but a significant fraction of that appeal is to audiences who can’t even vote in American elections.

On top of all that, Piker gets a boost because as a left-wing talk show host, he’s a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Liberals tend to read the news, while conservatives are more likely to watch or listen to it. This is why there are relatively few right-wing writers, so the ones who rise to the top of the heap tend to be of lower quality. This is also why most of the top political podcasters, radio hosts, and TV commentators are right-wing. And this is probably why Hasan Piker can become an important influencer in the Democratic Party even as he declares he wouldn’t vote for Gavin Newsom over JD Vance.

All these structural factors can help explain why a cruel, vicious man like Hasan Piker, who supports totalitarian governments, spreads blatant lies about his critics, advocates political violence, makes excuses for terrorists, and vilifies the Democratic Party, can manage to shock, shout, and bully his way into being respected by mainstream progressives like Ezra Klein.

But there’s another important factor here, which is the content of Piker’s message. Whereas the leftist shock jocks of the previous cycle — self-described “dirtbags” like Chapo Trap House — tended to focus on economic issues, Hasan focuses squarely on foreign policy. And his main foreign policy focus is opposition to Israel.

Anti-Zionism is still taboo within the Democratic Party establishment, because of the Palestine movement’s association with antisemitism. But as Israel has done more and more bad things, grassroots anti-Israel sentiment has spread on both sides of the political aisle. In his post about Piker, Ezra talks a lot about the importance of including anti-Israel voices in the Democratic conversation:

We are living through a rupture in both the meaning and the reality of Israel. A Gallup poll from February found, for the first time, that more Americans sympathized with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. Among Democrats, the gap was overwhelming, with 65 percent who sympathized more with the Palestinians and 17 percent with the Israelis. The difference, as I have argued, is largely generational: Older Americans still view the Israelis more sympathetically, but among Americans ages 18 to 34, 53 percent sided with the Palestinians and 23 percent with the Israelis. This is new. Before 2023, young people and Democrats were more likely to side with the Israelis.

This is not the result of an international psy-op or a profusion of memes. The Israel that young people know is not the Israel that older people remember. It responded to the savagery of Oct. 7 by flattening Gaza in a brutal campaign that killed at least 70,000 Gazans, taking control of more than half of the territory and herding Gazans — more than two million people — into the remainder. Life there remains hellish. Israel has made hopes for a two-state solution fanciful by slicing the West Bank up into Israeli settlements and abetting constant settler violence and keeping a boot on the throat of the Palestinian Authority. It has used the Iran war as an opportunity to launch an invasion of Lebanon, displacing more than a million people and announcing that as many as 600,000 won’t be allowed to return to their homes until Israel decides otherwise. The Knesset just voted to legalize hanging as a punishment for Palestinians who are convicted of killing Israelis in terrorist attacks…

Israel, as it is behaving today, and as it is constructing itself for tomorrow, is incompatible with any normal understanding of liberal values…Anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing.

Ezra is right about Israel’s plummeting popularity in America:

Source: Pew

Source: Pew

And Ezra doesn’t even mention the fact that Netanyahu helped convince Trump to launch the disastrous Iran War, which has resulted in high oil and gas prices. Israel hasn’t just violated human rights and international norms against territorial conquest — it has been a highly problematic ally for the U.S., and is quickly becoming an outright liability.

American public opinion is slowly but inexorably turning; Ezra sees this, and is getting out in front of the shift. To some degree, he’s using Hasan Piker’s popularity, such as it is, as an excuse to advocate for a deeper, substantive policy shift — a turn away from staunch, reflexive U.S. support for Israel.

I view this as a mistake. If mainstream liberals want to drop their support for Israel, they should just do it on the merits. They should not bring in a guy like Hasan Piker to do it for them, because then they have to accept all the baggage that Piker brings with him. Mainstreaming Piker means that Democrats have to take seriously the notion that the Soviet Union were the good guys in the Cold War, that China and Russia are the good guys in the world today, and that America itself is — and has always been — an Evil Empire.

That message is likely to resonate poorly with many voters, especially older ones who remember a time before Trump and before the War on Terror. Pride in America has fallen significantly since Trump came on the scene, but that doesn’t mean the solution is to tell Americans that their country is the Great Satan. I doubt that Democrats and Independents want to destroy the U.S.; I think they want to restore and redeem it. Piker’s message is inimical to that goal.

And mainstreaming Piker and his anti-American ideology will inevitably lead to a deterioration in the quality of the people the Democrats elect and appoint to high office. This has absolutely happened with the Republicans. In 2024, the MAGA movement embraced the idea that America is an Evil Empire, spreading woke values around the world, and that we should realign ourselves with Russia. This led to the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence, the end of most American support for Ukraine, the right-wing turn against Europe, and to the tearing up of most of America’s alliances. It notably did not lead to fewer American wars; it just led to dumber, more evil wars.

Why should Democrats willingly walk down this same path? Do we really want the next Democratic administration to have staffers and appointees who think the Soviets should have won the Cold War? Are we prepared to realign America towards China, as Trump has realigned us toward Russia, and for the backlash this would generate?

Maybe so, but I hope not. Instead of embracing anti-American shock jocks like Hasan Piker, mainstream liberals should simply levy their own criticisms of Israel instead. You don’t have to believe America is evil and communist empires are virtuous in order to say that Israel has become crueler, more totalitarian, and less reliable as an ally. Those arguments are easy to make within the framework of liberalism, instead of by embracing someone who says he wants a “post-liberal America”.

I’ve sat here for years and watched the Republicans embrace their worst extremists. I’ve watched as those extremists turned the right away from mainstream conservatism, and drove them to embrace insane, self-destructive ideas. I don’t want to see the Democrats do the same. Maybe the incentives of the social media age are just too powerful, and every major party is destined to be forced down this road. But I say we should keep trying to resist the extremist impulse for as long as we can.

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1. Note that Carlson used to be a mainstream conservative, and pivoted to rightist extremism when it gained him more views. This strongly suggests that it’s the incentives of the ecosystem, rather than the personal preferences of media personalities themselves, that drives the overall slant of popular commentary.