What the hell is wrong with Democrats?
Hasan Piker is more extreme than Nick Fuentes. So why does the left embrace him?
Imagine if a right-wing influencer went around saying he hates blacks. Imagine he expressed his love and admiration for the Nazis, the KKK, and the Confederacy. When white supremacists rape a group of black women, imagine he takes to Instagram to say the women are lying about it because they secretly wish a white man would rape them. Imagine he calls blacks “inbred,” says Hitler was “one of the great leaders of this world,” expresses his love for the Nazi flag, and speaks to College Republicans dressed as Adolf. Thankfully, we have no tolerance for such things in our society. Not even Nick Fuentes or Jared Taylor are as extreme as this, and they’re both pariahs. Indeed, many people have had their careers destroyed for far less offensive remarks. In 2018, Papa John’s founder John Schnatter said “nigger” while discussing how to avoid sounding racist, and it cost him his career. This week, despite the First Amendment, a Minnesota mother named Shiloh Hendrix was fined $1,000 because a Somali man chased her and taunted her to say the word “nigger,” and she did. Yet the imaginary person described above not only exists, he’s adored and defended by mainstream Republicans and major right-wing news outlets. Except now reverse the politics because we are, of course, talking about a leftist.
On July 18, Hasan Piker strode to the lectern at the College Democrats of America’s summer convention in Washington, dressed as Mao Zedong, the most murderous dictator in human history. Piker began as an unusually self-conscious celebrity guest, joking and speaking in the conversational cadence of a livestreamer. But his address gradually hardened into something else. He excoriated Republicans for not being Democrats, and excoriated Democrats for not being socialists, accusing them of “cooperating with fascists.” In an age when our nation is so deeply divided that it threatens our very republic, Piker has decided to celebrate the division and embrace a disgusting mindset that has taken hold across the political left. Namely, that the other side is evil and therefore killing them is justified. The right rejects this view, and the more to the right one moves, the less people support using violence against the other side, whereas the more to the left one moves, the more they support using violence, though this pattern has shifted in the past three years. Now over 40% of students who identify as Democratic Socialists support using violence to stop a speaker. Until about 2023, that figure was half as much for conservatives, and historically even lower. But as it becomes clear that the left is out for blood, the right is adopting a similar view.
The left’s attitude toward political violence is generated and maintained by the permission structure that casts right-wingers as fascists. But this is a lie. President Trump is not a fascist, MAGA is not a fascist movement, and ICE agents are not Nazis. On the other hand, the right casts left-wingers as communists and socialists, so you might say this is more of the same in the other direction. But the difference is, the claim actually holds more true of the left. Yes, McCarthyism was a tyranny, but also, many of those accused actually were communists, and later admitted it. Currently, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani openly identifies as a democratic socialist, as does Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, along with U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and many more. Some will object that this comparison is unfair and will want to say that the right has its own extremists who get platformed too. It’s a fair challenge. Talk radio and the fringes of right-wing media are not free of bigotry or conspiracy-mongering. There are hosts and commentators who traffic in antisemitism, racial resentment, and violent rhetoric. But the test isn’t whether extremists exist on both sides—they do—it’s whether they’re mainstreamed.
When far-right figures have made comparably ugly remarks, conservative media outlets have, with some consistency, either dropped them or refused to platform them in the first place. The Daily Wire dropped Candace Owens for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, despite her massive celebrity. CPAC Chair Matt Schlapp removed Fuentes, citing his “hateful racist rhetoric.” And there are many more examples like these. But notice what these examples have in common. In each case, the institution acted only after the remarks became public and forced its hand, and the figure was removed, not elevated. Nobody at the Daily Wire hired Owens because of her views on Jews. Nobody at CPAC invited Fuentes to headline knowing what he’d say. Piker’s case inverts this entirely. College Democrats didn’t stumble onto his record and scramble to distance themselves—his remarks about rape victims, Mao, and Hamas are years old, extensively documented, and easily searchable. They booked him anyway, as their featured speaker, at their national convention, because of his views.
If there’s a genuine right-wing equivalent of Piker, someone this openly bigoted, this enthusiastic about political violence, this recently rewarded with a major party’s own youth convention stage, then I’d genuinely like readers to send me the example. But there is no democratic fascist movement. And if there were, no Republican mayor or representative would embrace it. The closest example we have might be former Iowa Representative Steve King, who in 2019 questioned the negative connotations around “white supremacy” and “white nationalist.” But he’s not a good example because Republican leaders stripped him of committee assignments for those remarks. And sure, being a democratic socialist is not comparable to being a full-on fascist. Indeed, depending how one defines the term, I myself have identified as a democratic socialist. But again, as noted above, the right is not out to kill such figures, whereas Trump has already survived four assassination attempts and right-wing speakers on college campuses are taking a risk with their lives that left-wing speakers do not face. This warrants honest soul-searching among our American brothers and sisters on the left.
And there is apparently no limit to how extreme these socialists can be before the left considers cutting them loose. Let’s go back to Piker. This is a man who said “America deserved 9/11.” He said of Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who received a Purple Heart and lost his right eye to an IED explosion in Afghanistan, “Didn’t he go to war and like, literally lose his eye because some mujahideen, a brave fucking soldier, fucked his eye-hole with their dick?” He added that Crenshaw deserved what happened to him. He said, “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” adding that Hamas is “a thousand times better.” He said, “Even if there was multiple rapes that took place on October 7, this doesn’t change anything for me.” He said Jewish rape victims only made such claims because they secretly wanted Hamas to rape them, calling their accusations “rape fantasies.” He said Orthodox Jews as “inbred.” He said the Houthis are “heroes.” Yes, the same Houthis who use child soldiers and kidnap, torture, and kill critics, journalists, religious minorities, and aid workers, whose leaders own 1,800 literal slaves, and who hate Jews so much that the official slogan of the Houthi movement, known as Al-Sarkha or “The Scream,” translates to, “God is the greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.” Piker said he loves the flag of Hezbollah, the group that carried out the deadliest killing of Jews outside Israel since the Holocaust. He’s also a communist, and once said it’s “better” if wealthy American college girls are raped, rather than poor ones. He called on his fans to murder random Americans and “let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood.” He said, “Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world, a man who changed the entire universe, the entire planet.”
But has any of this made him a pariah on the left? Not at all. Not only did the College Democrats invite him to lecture them, but last year, the New Yorker Festival invited Piker to speak. Recently, Ezra Klein defended Piker against accusations of antisemitism. Pod Save America, co-founded by Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau, had Piker on its show. Gavin Newsom said he’d like to appear on Piker’s livestream. GQ wrote a puff piece about the guy including, and I am not making this up, a layout with Piker naked in a fucking bubble bath.
Piker was born on July 25, 1991, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Turkish parents. He spent nearly all his childhood and adolescence in Istanbul. At 18, he moved back to the United States for college, attending the University of Miami before transferring to Rutgers, then moved to Los Angeles where he worked for his uncle Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks. His father is Mehmet Piker, former vice president and board member at Sabancı Holding, one of Turkey’s largest conglomerates, valued at $37 billion. Yes, Piker is the communist son of one of the biggest bourgeois extractors of surplus value from the working class in the world. His father is also a founding member of Turkey’s Future Party, led by former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who would like to see a return of the Ottoman Empire in some muted form, along with global Islam.
As a nation, we need both parties. I wrote about this in my recent essay on The Odyssey, in which I argued, “A healthy civilization requires both a hard edge and a gentle heart.” Democrats have done enormous good in this country. Even the Democratic Socialists have sometimes drawn overdue attention to poverty, medical debt, abusive employers, unaffordable housing, and the corrupting influence of concentrated wealth. I harp on the left because its cultural influence is vastly greater, because it has quite recently morphed into something far more intolerant and openly bigoted compared to what I knew growing up, and because of its predilection for political violence. But I am fundamentally nonpartisan, and I believe we should all want both sides to be healthy and strong.
That said, a political movement does not prove its moral seriousness merely by identifying genuine injustices. It proves it by policing the hatreds that arise within its own ranks. Democrats and their allies in the media would instantly recognize Piker’s moral equivalent on the right as a racist extremist unfit for respectable company. They should apply the same standard here, but are refusing to do so, and should be ashamed of themselves. I am not calling for him to be silenced or deplatformed. As my readers know, I believe the best response to hateful speech is better speech. Yet almost no one on the left is holding him accountable in this way, and it’s gross, especially given how incessantly leftists call the right Nazis. But none of this is really a mystery. A movement that will not reject Hasan Piker is not really trying to oppose political hatred in the first place. It’s demanding the exclusive right to practice it.
Very well put. I predict it will fall on deaf ears, or more likely, elicit the hatred the essay describes.
"Hasan Piker is more extreme than Nick Fuentes. So why does the left embrace him?"
Because they agree with him.