By Jim Geraghty
Monday, August 10, 2026
“Why Is Everyone Scared of Hasan Piker?” asks the headline at Rolling Stone. Five paragraphs later,
correspondent Josh Eells writes:
Among his greatest hits: “America
deserved 9/11.” “There’s a lot we can learn from” the Chinese Communist Party.
“Let the streets soak in . . . red capitalist blood.”
The question in the headline doesn’t seem like such a
mystery anymore, huh? There are progressives out there who can make their case
for their worldview and who don’t argue that the worst terrorist attack against
Americans in history, that killed 2,977 people and 441 first responders, was
“deserved.” There are progressives out there who can acknowledge the downsides
of the Chinese Communist Party and its autocracy and horrific human-rights record. And there are progressives
out there who do not explicitly call for the streets to be soaked with blood.
The profile features Piker complaining that he keeps
getting “hammered” for “four quotes” after generating “more than 10,000 hours
of content.” Mmm, indeed, no one ever gives him credit for all the times he
didn’t argue that al-Qaeda was justified. That profile continues:
Piker is a matinee-handsome
progressive icon who’s uniquely talented at translating radical-left politics
for the kind of Gen Z bros who think “hegemony” has something to do with
Equinox: a Eugene Debs who dead lifts, Abbie Hoffman with abs.
In fact, once you look at Piker’s background more thoroughly than Rolling Stone did,
you see that what makes Piker stand out is that he “shares as much
misinformation as anyone on the right,” as Alex Mahadevan, who works to debunk
misinformation as the director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute, told the New York Times.
Piker says out loud all the things that other leftists
either don’t think at all, or have the good sense to not say out loud in front
of a microphone and camera recording them — “It doesn’t matter if rape happened
on October 7th,” and that he described the sexual violence of 10/7 as “rape
fantasies.” Piker said has “no issue”
with Hezbollah, that “Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler
colonial apartheid state of Israel,” “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every
single time” and “the biggest terrorist internationally is the Republican
Party.” He’s claimed Orthodox Jews are “inbred,” contended Zionism is
“mental illness,” called the Houthis “moral,” and said his favorite flag is the
one of Hezbollah.
Oh, and he uses a shock collar on his dog.
The hard-left fanbase of Piker adores him because he
publicly vents his spleen in a way that justifies violence, murder, terrorism,
and rape against everyone they despise, primarily Israelis and Republicans.
Whether or not you believe in “hate speech” as a legal
concept, there’s no getting around the fact that a big chunk of Piker’s
brand is hateful speech. He creates a bond with his audience by declaring, “I
hate these groups of people, and want to see them die terrible, violent deaths,
and it’s okay for you to feel that way, too. You’re not alone.” That’s
constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. It’s also a horrible
thing to do, and not the sort of thing that any respectable Senate candidate should be campaigning
alongside and de facto endorsing.
Credit Rolling Stone for at least briefly
acknowledging that Piker’s lucrative profession blatantly contradicts his
rhetoric.
For a Marxist, Piker’s job is
about as pure capitalist as it gets. He controls the means of production, and
his profits are based entirely on the market. A subscription to his channel
runs $6 per month; with nearly 50,000 subscribers, minus Twitch’s 30 percent
cut, that’s somewhere north of $2 million per year.
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