Dark Woke

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, April 24, 2026

 

Ethics in politics can seem confusing.

 

For instance, if you’re a special-ops soldier cashing in on your inside knowledge of the president’s war plans, you can expect to be prosecuted.

 

But if you’re a high-level crony cashing in on your inside knowledge of the president’s war plans, you can trust that neither Todd Blanche’s Justice Department nor the majority party in Congress will care.

 

Similarly, if you’re the influence-peddling son of a Democratic president leveraging your connections for cushy corporate positions, you’ll be appropriately vilified by right-wing media for corruption. But if you’re the influence-peddling son of a Republican president leveraging your connections for cushy corporate opportunities, the same right-wing media will help you promote your ventures.

 

It’s baffling—under traditional ethics, in which rules of proper conduct are supposed to apply universally. But under postliberal ethics, the apparent double standards melt away: The president’s friends, family, and allies are properly treated one way while everyone else is properly treated another.

 

People aren’t supposed to be treated equally under postliberalism. They’re supposed to be treated the way they “deserve.”

 

Or so it seems to me. To the average populist, all of this will sound like nonsense.

 

The whole reason postliberalism caught on in the first place, he or she would note, is because traditional ethics don’t actually apply universally in practice. Trump spoke candidly about that in 2016 when he declared America’s supposedly equitable liberal system of government “rigged.” Getting ahead in the proverbial swamp is all about who you know, he maintained, and he had the receipts to prove it. The elites monopolize power for themselves, exploit the average joe, and smugly pronounce the arrangement “fair” and “ethical.”

 

So there’s no such thing as “postliberal ethics,” our hypothetical populist would conclude. The president is practicing the same ethics as his predecessors. He and his toadies have merely dispensed with the lofty hypocrisy around such things, dropping the hollow pretenses of propriety.

 

The fact that Trump’s second term is already the most freakishly corrupt presidency in American history, in which tapped-in criminals are regularly set free while the commander in chief shakes down his own government for billions, is wholly coincidental, you see.

 

Which brings us, strangely, to Hasan Piker.

 

Radical chic.

 

Piker is a far-left agitator who streams commentary regularly on the platform Twitch. Until about three weeks ago, my exposure to him was limited to bon mots clipped from his stream by critics and posted on social media to illustrate what a chud he is. “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time” is a nice example.

 

You know his type. “Leftist provocateur shocks, titillates American cultural establishment” is a very old story, made more tedious in 2026 by the volume of right-wing provocateurs aspiring to do the same. I’ve never understood why someone who’s serious about politics would care what Hasan Piker thinks.

 

So imagine my surprise when the mainstream liberal commentariat collectively decided this month that it’s time to start caring what Hasan Piker thinks.

 

As best I can tell, Hasanmania was touched off by Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who held a campaign event with Piker on April 7. Five days later, influential New York Times columnist Ezra Klein made the case for engaging with Piker’s brand of radicalism rather than ostracizing it. (The Times has been doing that for a while, actually.) In short order, the Obama bros of the popular Pod Save America podcast hosted Piker for an hourlong chat.

 

On Wednesday, the Times nudged the Overton window further left again when it posted a lengthy conversation between Piker, the paper’s culture editor, and progressive New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. It may as well have been titled épater la bourgeoisie. The topic: Is theft—or “microlooting,” as the editor memorably put it—ever justified?

 

Would it shock and/or titillate you to learn that the consensus among this radically chic trio was yes?

 

“I’m pro-piracy all the way, like, across the board,” Piker declared at one point. Not quite across the board, it turns out: He ruled out stealing books from a library or fleeing a restaurant without paying. But when the prospect of a heist at the Louvre was raised, he brightened up. “We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature,” he said.

 

He was more restrained than Tolentino was when asked to name something that isn’t socially permitted but should be. (Stealing intellectual property, Piker replied. “Maybe things like blowing up a pipeline,” she countered.) And both declined to endorse killing a health insurance executive, a position not everyone on the left shares—although Piker couldn’t let the subject pass without an ominous caveat about the crime of which Luigi Mangione is accused.

 

"Friedrich Engels wrote about the concept of social murder,” he said. “And Brian Thompson, as the United Healthcare CEO, was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder."

 

The whole conversation is like that. Every crime condoned by the participants (and even ones technically not condoned, like the Mangione case) is rationalized as a form of retaliation against some greater injustice. “I’m pro-stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers,” Piker frankly explains at one point.

 

Which sounds a lot like Trumpism’s approach to ethics to me.

 

Theft is bad.

 

It’s the same logic at heart. Per Piker, what Americans have long thought of as “traditional ethics” is actually a rigged system in which it’s fair for the powerful to exploit the average joe but improper for the average joe to respond in kind by, say, stealing. Unless and until that playing field is level—until the proverbial swamp is drained—the victims of our crooked system are morally entitled to play by its own twisted rules.

 

That nihilistic postliberal view, treating ethics as a sort of racket and one’s enemies as morally entitled only to what they “deserve,” created a permission structure that turned Washington into an unprecedented bazaar of open corruption almost instantly after Trump’s second presidency began. There’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have the same catastrophic effect on left-wing behavior if Pikerism became au courant.

 

It’s folly, for starters, to believe that all progressives would draw the same ethical lines that Piker and Tolentino did in their Times chat. The basic through line of their conversation is that crimes are fine against the powerful but not against the powerless, and that those crimes should be aimed at impersonal institutions like corporations rather than at individual people. But a consensus that immoral behavior is sometimes justified will not beget a consensus about which immoral behavior is justified. Opinions on that will vary (who is “powerful” and “powerless”?) and that variation leads nowhere good.

 

Look no further for an example than the president, who told reporters yesterday that he’s “not happy” about the apparent insider trading happening on his watch. Even if he means it, he’s still to blame: Having championed an ethical system in which almost anything goes, go figure that some of his deputies might define “almost anything” differently than he does.

 

Piker’s ethics, if widely adopted, would also hurt smaller businesses far more than large ones, ironically. Whole Foods can absorb losses caused by a rash of shoplifting, but the local mom-and-pop grocery store cannot. And while Piker might scrupulously distinguish between those two businesses when weighing whether it’s ethical to rob them, the sort of degenerate who’s keen for an excuse to steal will not. “Microlooting” will be indiscriminate, inevitably.

 

The Times editor who moderated the conversation between him and Tolentino unwittingly alluded to that at one point. “My friends and I have started calling this microlooting,” she said of shoplifting, “because it has a slight political valence to theft, as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something.” The thrill of getting away with something will motivate 95 percent of the chuds who act on Piker’s encouragement; any “political valence” to their acts will transparently be nothing more than a way to backfill a moral justification.

 

And people looking for a thrill won’t care if they get it from Walmart or from the struggling bodega on the corner.

 

To make matters worse, mainstreaming petty theft would wreck the quality of life in working-class neighborhoods far more severely than in upper-class ones. You know what happens when minor crimes like broken windows are tolerated in a community: In a culture of impunity, some will feel emboldened to attempt more ambitious and dangerous crimes. Probably including a few of the unpunished window-breakers themselves.

 

The very progressive city of San Francisco just got a lesson in that. Officials there recently replaced waist-high turnstiles in the subway system with six-foot doors to make it harder for passengers to ride without paying. Turnstile-hopping is exactly the sort of petty offense I’d expect Piker and Tolentino to condone—high cost of living, travel should be free, yadda yadda—but the new policy is paying big quality-of-life dividends, per The Atlantic. Crime in the subway has dropped steeply, and workers are spending far less time cleaning up after unruly riders.

 

“Most fare beaters may be just trying to get a free ride, but most of the vandalism was apparently committed by fare beaters,” the magazine concluded. Punishing the minor crime averted the more serious stuff. There would be many broken windows in the Hasan Piker utopia by comparison, with everything that implies.

 

The kicker to all this is that left-wing cultural radicalism will empower Piker’s enemies on the authoritarian right. It already has: Without the open borders of the Biden years, the riot-rationalizing and “defund the police” hysteria after George Floyd’s murder, and the determined effort to mainstream transgenderism, Democrats might have held down Trump’s gains with working-class voters in 2024 and finished him off politically.

 

“If liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do,” David Frum warned in 2019—correctly, it would turn out. It’s no less true that voters will hire fascists if liberals insist that only fascists will punish theft. Which, to be sure, is an absurd result in the age of Trump, a man leading a de facto criminal syndicate who’s put child molesters back on the street. His commitment to “law and order” is a millimeter thin.

 

But a fraudulent millimeter-thin commitment beats no commitment at all.

 

Why now?

 

Center-left commentators understand all of this, I assume. So why have they chosen this moment to cram Hasan Piker down our collective piehole?

 

As it so often does in politics, I think the answer boils down to fear, anger, and jealousy.

 

Democrats are palpably jealous of the right’s success in new-media formats like podcasting that cater to a young constituency. Ezra Klein made no bones about it in his piece calling for dialogue with Piker, titling it “This Is Why There’s No Liberal Joe Rogan.” The left craves a loquacious bro of its own with a knack for connecting with 20-somethings, and a guy who prefers Hamas to Israel is currently the closest thing they’ve got.

 

By promoting Piker, they’re actively trying to put him on the radar of the sort of heterodox Joe Rogan listener who’s not averse to progressive takes so long as they come packaged with a little verve and a lot of contempt for the political establishment. If Hasan can convince people like that to start voting Democratic, liberals will tolerate him convincing the same people that Maoism is dope.

 

Democrats are also angry at the president and Republicans for, oh, lots of things, but generally for being lawless, cutthroat authoritarian scumbags. We got a taste of that anger Tuesday when Virginia liberals carried the party’s ruthless mid-decade redistricting scheme to victory in a statewide referendum. “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries pledged afterward, still furious at the right in triumph.

 

The term “dark woke” has been used to describe the left-wing belief that defeating Trump 2.0 will require behaving in a manner no less cutthroat than the president and his minions. That’s what we saw in Virginia. At such a moment, is it any surprise that Piker’s unapologetic chuddery might break containment on the fringe and gain traction in the center? The logic is remorseless: To beat a sociopathic felon, it takes a sociopath who thinks theft is cool.

 

Fear probably explains Hasanmania better than anything, however.

 

Despite an unpopular war, a new burst of inflation, and sky’s-the-limit hikes in gas prices, Democrats are still viewed less favorably by Americans than the ruling party in Washington. The last presidential election established that they’re badly out of touch with the working class on cultural matters; the two years since have established that the party establishment is also badly out of touch with its progressive base on opposing Israel and confronting Trump aggressively.

 

The sudden interest in Piker is an obvious, if desperate, olive branch to the left from the center to signal we’re listening. Not all progressives would vote for Hamas over Israel (whatever that means), but certainly Piker’s sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are closer to the average 20-something leftist’s than Chuck Schumer’s are. Piker’s cartoonish class-warfare agitation is also a better fit for the liberal (and national) mood as the affordability crisis deepens than the mushy technocracy of Washington Democrats. He might be a millionaire who wore a Ralph Lauren shirt during his Times chitchat with Tolentino, but he’s a proletarian peasant compared to, say, Nancy Pelosi.

 

And he’s young. In a party that’s grown notorious for geriatric leadership, up to and including demonstrating symptoms of senility in a national presidential debate, the simple fact that a guy in his mid-30s has built a minor cultural following preaching Marxism must seem miraculously hopeful to the broader left.

 

Maybe his newfound mainstream acceptability will temper his radicalism, as tends to happen in politics. Or maybe, in a media landscape of chud provocateurs as competitive as America’s, he’ll be forced to start calling for Israel to be nuked or whatever in order to retain market share. Either way, I don’t think the liberal fascination with avatars of nihilistic postliberalism is anywhere close to being over. Prepare your piehole accordingly.