Is Hasan Piker the Face of the American Left?

Democrats have an extremism problem, and it’s not clear how they can solve it. After yet another gunman tried to assassinate President Donald Trump at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, liberals nobly renewed their commitment to moderation. “We need LESS violence in America, not MORE violence in America,” wrote CNN’s Van Jones. Quite right. But the American Left has not exactly put itself in a good position to calm down its radicals.

Consider: last Wednesday, the New York Times hosted superstar streamer Hasan Piker for a podcast with writer Jia Tolentino. Piker has fantasized on camera about murdering landlords and once told his viewers that “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill [Florida Senator] Rick Scott.” He joked with Tolentino about “microlooting”—that is, shoplifting—and equivocated about whether UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson deserved to die at the hands of his alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione.

Thompson “was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder,” said Piker, citing Friedrich Engels to suggest that the killing was retribution for “systematized forms of violence” in the healthcare system. Piker is just one online celebrity, but the problem is that he represents a significant portion of the base that Democrats must now cater to. One survey found that 41% of young voters, and 22% of Democrats, considered Mangione’s actions “acceptable.”

This will make it hard for mainstream politicians to tack toward the center without alienating their most youthful, energetic supporters—especially since many Democrats have been enthusiastically courting those supporters since 2020. That June, following the death of George Floyd, then-senator Kamala Harris solicited donations to cover bail for rioters and looters in Minnesota. Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and other congressional Democrats donned Ghanaian Kente-cloth stoles and knelt in a display of solidarity with protesters as they proposed unworkable and dangerous police reform. For a good long while, it was not only encouraged but almost compulsory on the Left to side with criminals in the name of social justice. None of this was a secret; all of it was put proudly on record.