I write a fair amount about Hasan Piker, not because it's rhetorically useful to highlight the most extreme characters in order to smear your more moderate opponents with guilt by association.
Sure, it's a cheap and easy rhetorical trick used all the time in politics, but it is also lazy, unfair, and does little to take on the bad ideas that are at the heart of your opponent's real agenda, which is your real enemy.
It does pretty well with clicks, so it's a common tactic.
The thing about Hasan Piker is not that he is as bad or worse than Nick Fuentes, who is nominally on the 'right ' (he really is just a provocateur more than an ideologist, but why waste time arguing about that distinction?), it's that Hasan Piker has been normalized in "progressive" circles, as has communism in general.
As I note in my column today, every 2028 Democrat presidential candidate will want to appear on Piker’s stream. That’s is where they are right now. https://t.co/4qTeSj3TTN https://t.co/sSeTuKvtin
— Karol Markowicz (@karol) July 22, 2026
Democrat candidates are now campaigning with him, and supposedly "moderate" Democrats refuse to denounce him; the DSA trots him out as a spokesman, and he is getting standing ovations as the featured speaker at College Democrats' meetings.
Piker isn't even pretending that he wants to support Democratic Party candidates unless they bow down to the most radical elements of the DSA communists, and still those supposedly "moderate" Democrats flock to be seen with him and vow to their voters that they will move in his direction.
To every Democratic politician touting DSA primary wins as proof the party is a 'big tent': listen closely to antisemitic Twitch influencer Hasan Piker at this weekend's College Democrats of America convention.
— Gerald Posner (@geraldposner) July 20, 2026
He is not 'energizing the base' —he's declaring war on any Democrats… pic.twitter.com/cmVNAaKFb5
Piker openly embraces Mao, says the fall of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, and calls for the blood of capitalists to run in the streets. He dismisses the murder, mostly through starvation, of 40 million+ Chinese people as an unfortunate excess—a big "oops," and can't think of a communist action he would condemn.
“Oops, I accidentally killed 40 million people.”
— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) July 21, 2026
Piker was absolutely not joking, by the way.
pic.twitter.com/MXoVgHBv6e https://t.co/x02Mgoh1QM
Hasan Piker isn't important because he has a decent enough sized audience to make himself wealthy; he's important because The New York Times has profiled him, handed over its Editorial page to him several times to opine as a legitimate liberal voice, and even asked him to write a piece on the meaning of Charlie Kirk's death to him.
Hasan Piker framed the 9/11 front page
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 22, 2026
This is an enemy of America pic.twitter.com/lxxLFDGuho
There are always crazy fringe figures who grab your attention as a car crash does. It's why Groypers get so much ink, and why the media treats flat-earth fanatics as if they are a group that matters and is representative of conservatives in general. Kooky and extremism sell.
Piker matters because real people running for office want to appeal to him and his followers. They are shaping their campaign pitches and policies to please people like Hasan Piker.
Hasan is a “shock jock?”
— MoCo Strategy & Policy (@mocopolistrat) July 22, 2026
What sport does he play, again? The equine arts, right? And not the cool cowboy kind - the polished riding boots and chin-strapped helmet kind. https://t.co/bdeVUa9IVx
Congressman Adam Smith, a moderate Democrat who has been a strong supporter of Israel and one of the few sane voices on military matters in Congress, admitted that he voted to defund Israel's Iron Dome at least partly because he, his family and his staff have been stalked, threatened, and even assaulted for supporting Israel.
Sounds like Adam Smith's anti-Israel vote last night was cast under duress.
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) July 16, 2026
Smith: "I am deeply concerned about the tactics used by those on the far left to advocate cutting off aid to Israel. To date, my family and I have had our home vandalized, a fire has been set in my… https://t.co/zMTGRjPRrN
Smith: "I am deeply concerned about the tactics used by those on the far left to advocate cutting off aid to Israel. To date, my family and I have had our home vandalized, a fire has been set in my driveway, my neighbors' lives have been disrupted in the middle of the night, town halls meant to be forums for dialogue have been shut down, and a staff member has been physically assaulted."
Does anybody think that half the Democrats in the House really supported defunding the Iron Dome, in the middle of a war where American servicemembers are stationed in Israel, but for the Hasan Piker wing of the Party? They are kowtowing to him and his ilk, and these people are terrorist-adjacent, and some are actual terrorists.
They love and support Hamas, openly disdain America and call it evil, and promote political violence.
Democrats flocked to Piker AFTER he declared that America deserved 9/11, and now he is proudly displaying the front page of The New York Times from 9/12/2001 as if it were a great moment.
Bernie Sanders is one of the most popular Democrats in the country, and the father of this DSA moment. This is his former Press Secretary from his 2020 Presidential Campaign discussing Adam Smith after that vote:
Warmonger Adam Smith has been invited on Breaking Points to “debate” the DSA’s popularity, but his socialist, anti war, pro-Palestine challenger @cmkshama is excluded because, in Ryan Grim’s words, she isn’t “newsworthy.”
— Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) July 21, 2026
Kshama was the first socialist to sit on the Seattle… https://t.co/bWKsoFk37A
Warmonger Adam Smith has been invited on Breaking Points to “debate” the DSA’s popularity, but his socialist, anti war, pro-Palestine challenger @cmkshama is excluded because, in Ryan Grim’s words, she isn’t “newsworthy.”
Kshama was the first socialist to sit on the Seattle city council since 1877, and in that role, won the fight for $15. Meanwhile, Smith is the Zionist ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, who only backed down off his support of the Israel/US Military tech merger bc of pressure from Kshama in this race.
Smith was rude, dismissive, & prevaricating in response to Krystal's questioning. He holds the racist & contradictory beliefs that Israel should only exist as a Jewish supremacist state, & that no democracy can exist if Arabs have equal rights. He also admitted that while he would vote to remove section 224 from the NDAA, he wouldn't vote against the NDAA if his effort to remove 224 failed. (He also objected to Krystal's accurate characterization of section 224 as allowing the merging of Israel's military intelligence with the US's, revealing his true sympathy for the bill).
At no point during this discussion of the "left" did anyone feel like it was worth informing the audience that establishment corporatist warmongering Smith is facing a primary challenge on August 4th. The Breaking Points audience has to look elsewhere for coverage of that race.
The Democratic Party is being overrun by these people, and most Democratic Party officeholders are bowing down to them, because they firmly believe that this is where their base is these days, and they are most certainly right.
"There needs to be blood": Democrats' voters tell them to "get shot" in Trump resistance push https://t.co/tqOWVnFshu
— Axios (@axios) July 7, 2025
If Hasan Piker really were just a shock jock with an audience drawn to him by his flair for being outrageous, the Democrats wouldn't be flocking to him to get his support.
But they believe that he is representative of their voters, and are willing to go through him to speak to those voters.
Democrats call this the "big tent" strategy. To me it looks like moral bankruptcy.
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