By Jeremiah Johnson
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
For the past few months, Democrats have been engaged in a
strange and increasingly heated debate: Should the party be friendly with
socialist livestreamer Hasan Piker?
Over the past few years, political livestreaming has
grown rapidly in popularity, contributing to the ascent of figures like Piker,
one of the largest political influencers across social media.
He’s best known for near-daily live broadcasts and viral
clips in which he expounds on the news of the day from a leftist point of view,
while frequently endorsing controversial views on political violence and
dictatorships.
But Piker is becoming increasingly prominent in offline
left-wing circles, too. He has campaigned alongside Democratic Senate candidates, been a
guest on some of the largest podcasts
in America, and appeared on CNN
and NBC
News. He’s received the tacit blessings of Democratic tastemakers like Ezra Klein and Jon Favreau.
This is a miscalculation. Embracing Piker is a step toward a Democratic mirror
of the GOP’s extremism problem.
It bothers me that Democrats need to spend time
discussing this. Donald Trump and his merry band of MAGA minions are actively
lighting the country on fire. Engaging in intraparty fights right now feels
indulgent at best and needlessly destructive at worst. But the discourse around
Piker refuses to go away. He continues to grow in prominence, continues to be
welcomed into mainstream Democratic media spaces, and continues to be treated
as a valuable voice for reaching younger voters.
Democrats trying to normalize Piker are making a mistake.
He is not just a cool, edgy guy who wants universal health care. Nor is he
disliked simply because he speaks up for Palestinians, as his supporters would
claim. The core problem with Hasan Piker is that he is, at the most basic
level, an ideological authoritarian. He promotes violence and repression
whenever that violence and repression have a socialist lean.
***
Perhaps the most concerning part of Piker’s growing
popularity is his open embrace of authoritarian governments.
During a two-week trip to China last year, Piker offered
his thoughts on the country’s economic and political system in a series of
livestreams. What did he have to say? Nothing but good things. He fell over
himself to applaud the country’s technological development and urbanism to his
millions of followers.
Given that Piker is a full-time political commentator,
you might assume he’d have something to say about China’s lack of basic rights,
the Communist Party’s repression of Tibet, the Uyghur genocide, the
anti-democratic crackdown on Hong Kong, or Beijing’s threats to Taiwan. Yet
Piker either made excuses for these abuses or outright ignored them. He went on
Chinese
state television to praise the country and rail against the “rumors” and
“misunderstandings” about China peddled in the West.
When confronted with China’s human rights abuses, Piker
frequently defends China’s government. When asked about the discrimination
against LGBT people—China does not allow gay marriage, bans gay dating apps,
and severely represses effeminate male celebrities—Piker first refused to
acknowledge the problem before actively defending the ban on gay dating apps on the
specious grounds that the ban was about ‘privacy’. He continued to champion the
country even after his team was harassed by Chinese secret police for filming
in Tiananmen Square. Setting aside that Piker’s first instinct was to show the
secret police a meme of Mao Zedong on his phone (which led to the police
confiscating his phone), hours later he was already arguing that America is worse.
We should be clear about what the Chinese Communist Party
is. China is a country where mobile execution
vans exist. The CCP runs a police state where you can be arrested for
wrongthink as simple as holding up blank
pieces of paper. The party is more than happy to literally
weld people shut inside their homes, brutalize student political organizers, and jail or kill
critics. It is still actively using Uyghur slave labor on a massive scale in Xinjiang. Beijing
has also crushed other ethnic minorities and broken any semblance of
political freedom in Hong Kong. The only reason it has refrained from invading
and subjugating Taiwan is the Western world’s protection. China’s government is
a nightmarish, totalitarian dictatorship.
And yet Piker always seems to have its back. He has
downplayed the genocide in Xinjiang, recasting the concentration camps there as
“reeducation” centers and claiming
they’re all closed now (they are not). He has described
Chinese colonialism in Tibet as a good thing, using arguments reminiscent of
“civilize the savages” justifications for Western imperialism. He has deemed
the idea of a politically free Hong Kong “ridiculous.”
Piker ends up parroting the CCP because he genuinely
admires authoritarian governments. When asked which country does socialism in a
way he approves of, he doesn’t point to social democracies like Sweden or
Norway. He says that China
is the closest to his vision of socialism. He recently said that he would “never make fun of Mao Zedong,
one of the great leaders of the world.”
And his support for authoritarian systems isn’t limited
to China. After a trip to Cuba last month, he called the Cuban government the “most
moral” country in the world. Cuba, like China, is a country that jails and
kills political dissidents for having the wrong opinions. Piker wishes the
Soviet Union had won
the Cold War, says he has “no issues” with
Hezbollah, considers Hamas “a thousand times better” than Israel, and uses his platform
to promote Houthi terrorists. He has said that the U.S. deserved 9/11, defended
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and even boosted North
Korean propaganda.
Piker’s extremist worldview often takes the form of calls
for political violence here in the U.S. He’s advocated
for people to kill landlords, joked
about the rape of wealthy women, and pushed for violence against U.S. lawmakers.
It’s important to document these comments as extensively
as possible to emphasize the core point: Hasan Piker does not care about
liberal democracy. He is an authoritarian. He would happily take away your
human rights, as long as the boot stamping on your face was made in a socialist
factory.
Recent discourse around Piker has centered on questions
of antisemitism, but his support for openly anti-Jewish terrorist groups is
just one component of his broader embrace of extremism. The pattern with these
controversies—and the core problem with Piker’s politics—is that he
propagandizes for murderous totalitarian regimes.
***
In his recent column on Piker, New York Times opinion columnist
Ezra Klein argued that Americans should be more willing to talk to people with
whom we disagree politically. To Klein’s credit, he is consistent on this
point. The left got very angry with him for making a similar point about Charlie Kirk, and now the right and
center are angry with him because he’s advocating for keeping Piker inside the
Democratic tent.
The problem with Klein’s argument is that other Democrats
aren’t inviting Piker to their events and on their shows in order to have tough
debates about his controversial stances. Bill Buckley versus Noam Chomsky, this
is not. Virtually every podcast in today’s media environment is a hugfest, a
conversation where the host spends 99 percent of the time sympathetically
nodding along with the guest’s points. Nobody profiling Piker is grilling him
on why he defends Chinese colonialism. They’re writing puff pieces and lusting
over how physically attractive he is.
The Democratic Party needs a big tent. Donald Trump is
uniquely dangerous, and it’s irresponsible to turn away allies, even if those
allies are problematic in some ways. In theory, if Piker showed signs of
moderating and wanted to help Democrats defeat Trump, it would behoove
moderates to swallow their complaints and accept him in the tent. The issue is
that Piker has no interest in changing or in helping Democrats. The only
Democrats he promotes are far-left socialists running in primaries against moderates.
He’s already talking about how he might not vote for Democrats in 2028. He repeatedly talks
about how Democrats are just as bad as Republicans and how Kamala Harris would
be doing the exact same things as Donald Trump. Even after attending the
2024 Democratic National Convention, he did not endorse Kamala Harris for
president.
Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to talk with people who
disagree with them, whether on the right or the left. But there’s a difference
between having a conversation and letting the extremists choose the direction
of the party. Hasan Piker is an authoritarian socialist who openly disdains
liberal democracy. His views should not be glossed over, he should not be
coddled in friendly interviews, and he should not be considered a leader in the
Democratic Party.
