Hasan Piker is the pro-Hamas twitch streamer who has been pointed to by some, including the NY Times, as the answer to question 'Does the left have a Joe Rogan?' Piker isn't nearly as popular as Rogan but he does have 3 million followers on Twitch and another 1.7 million on YouTube and 1.6 million in Instagram. He streams his show seven hours a day, seven days a week.
Piker is, at a minimum, a socialist and probably a communist, but in the last year he's devoted a lot of time to attacking Israel and supporting Hamas and other terror groups. Today, NY Times podcaster Ross Douthat has a new interview with Piker in which he definitely tries to pin him down on the issue of leftist violence.
The first third or more of the interview is really just Douthat giving Piker a chance to talk and define his own views and perspective. Piker says he is against violence and claims that some of his remarks are taken out of context by a conservative outrage machine that is focused on targeting him. Piker suggests he's a target of this outrage, just like Gavin Newsom and Jimmy Kimmel. But Douthat points out there's a big difference in the kind of rhetoric Piker uses compared to the kind Jimmy Kimmel uses.
Douthat: All right, so let’s make this a little more concrete. You are telling a story where it’s you and Jimmy Kimmel and Gavin Newsom, and you’re all targets of the conservative apparatus. But you’re pretty different from Jimmy Kimmel and Gavin Newsom, in part, for a lot of reasons we were just discussing: They’re liberals. They’re good, milquetoast liberals, whatever they may say.
And you are more radical. You’re post-liberal in some way — you want a different horizon, a different future. But beyond that, you are also willing to push your rhetoric further than they do — certainly further than Jimmy Kimmel does...
...this is my reading, and I’ll let you tell me why I’m wrong in a minute. I think you push further. And I think you like to play with the rhetoric of violence.
So you were suspended from Twitch, I think, for a day. There was an argument you were having about Medicare fraud, and the G.O.P. was going to crack down on Medicare fraud.
You said: Well, if they really cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott.
Piker deflects and blames this on the conservative outrage machine, though he admits his language was hyperbolic.
Piker: Yeah, but you’re right. That is hyperbolic language for sure. And it’s one statement in a grand sea of others that, of course, gets highlighted through the same outrage machine. And then people demand punishments, and then those punishments do come down, and it causes me to be even more careful with my language.
Then Douthat really gets to his main point by looking at how Piker has talked about Luigi Mangione.
Douthat: And I just want to bring this to a fine point. There’s the great case of Luigi Mangione, who is charged with murdering the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare in broad daylight in New York City. And you’re going to tell me that you’ve always said that murder is wrong, and that Luigi Mangione should not have committed murder, but you’ve talked a lot about Luigi.
Piker: Of course. I think it’s one of the most consequential instances of adventurism, which I always will say is wrong, because I think it invokes social instability, which I think is bad, in general, to exist under...
What I try to do in this situation and many others is to explain why people feel this way, because for them, when their grandparent has cancer and then that treatment is denied or the coverage is denied, even though they’re paying these incredibly costly premiums to this health care company, they view that as murder. They view that as a tremendous wrong that was done to them.
As Piker sees it, he's some kind of leftist release valve that is there to prevent things spilling over into violence. But Douthat just isn't buying it. He calls Piker the "hype man" for leftist violence.
Piker: And I seek to address these problems so that there aren’t decentralized forms of violence, where people make up their own minds and assume that they have the righteous vindication and they’re going to go out and do things like this.
Douthat: I don’t know, man. I think you’re kind of a hype man for it, though. Like, yes, I agree: You’re doing analysis. And people would have celebrated Luigi Mangione, obviously, without you, Hasan Piker, talking about him all the time.
Piker: Of course.
Douthat: But I listen to the way you talk about him. You’re fascinated by him, too. You’re participating in the fascination, and you’re doing a thing where you’re like: Well, I’m not saying violence is good, but you’ve got to understand that there’s other forms of violence in society besides this one. And people who like Mangione, they’re saying: This violence maybe isn’t as bad as that kind of violence.
This just seems to me like you’re not the guy who starts the revolution, but you’re the violence appreciator. That’s how I feel about your Mangione coverage.
Piker says that's not fair and claims he's someone who just wants to see a more just system. But again Douthat nails him by returning to Luigi Mangione using an analogy to his own writing.
Douthat: I have a lot of personally negative experiences with the American health care system. I had — technically still have — chronic Lyme disease, which is a disease that officially doesn’t exist. It definitely exists. And I’ve known a lot of people in that world who have a very specific version of the kind of anger you’re describing, that’s directed toward the medical establishment and how it interacts with insurance companies. And these are people who have had their lives ruined by this illness that the system does not effectively cover or treat.
But it’s really important, as a society, that if one of my friends who had chronic Lyme disease went out and killed someone who they felt was involved in denying them treatment — and maybe was —
...it would be irresponsible for me to do a podcast and be like: Man, that person looks badass. I think that would be irresponsible, even if I was appreciating something real.
It’s not you saying, “It’s really interesting how people have this reaction to it,” that I’m challenging or questioning. It’s the extent to which, again, you’re like: He’s an adventurer. It’s the propaganda of the deed, man — Well, OK, yeah. But a society that has those adventurers is going to be in a lot of trouble pretty quick.
Piker tries again to deflect and say he's not valorizing violence, just pointing to it as a sign of cultural failure. He suggests that Charlie Kirk's shooting was just one of dozens of school shootings (using that term broadly). But again Douthat points out there's an obvious difference about how the left reacted to Kirk's shooting compared to how it has reacted to other school shootings.
Douthat: But I think the reason people are upset in this particular case is that when school shootings happen, there is not — except in very online communities — valorization of the school shooters. Nobody calls a school shooter an adventurer. And obviously we don’t want to live in a world with school shootings, but we especially don’t want to live in a world where it seems like people who are in the public scrum, like you, are sort of appreciating violence.
I think Hasan is doing more than appreciating the violence. I think he's glorifying it and trying to make it cool and even fashionable. His response, once again, to Douthat is that systemic violence is also violence. Thus, the violence is happening all the time. But as Douthat points out, the result of that view seems like a broad justification of actual violence against what is actually just speech.
Douthat: But this analogy is itself part of why people think you are normalizing the things that are taboo, which would include right-wing forms of violence. But if your theory is that all of these things are incitement — that if you support putting more people in jail, that’s incitement; if you support border security, that’s incitement; it’s incitement all the way down — you’re basically saying: The person who incites violence against a politician is in the same position as the person who supports border security. And that seems like an argument that lends itself to encouraging people to commit political violence, because you’re saying: It’s all normal already. What’s a little more? What’s one more act of incitement in a world of incitement? You’re just normalizing it when you make that argument.
It's the same old speech is violence argument we've seen before from the woke left. Saying you're pro-life and pro-border control (which is political speech) makes you part of systemic violence in their eyes, and therefore violence against you is justified in some sense. If everything conservatives say is violence then violence against conservatives is really no big deal and maybe kind of cool.
Piker asks Douthat if he thinks he is just tap-dancing around the issue.
Douthat: I’ll be honest. I think there’s a reason that certain kinds of Marxism and socialist radicalism, when they take power or try to come to power, tend to resort to violence. And it is inherent in the argument that you’ve made. I’m not saying it’s an argument that doesn’t have a certain power. If it didn’t have a certain power, lots of people wouldn’t have believed in it...
I understand that someone can say, as a radical on the left: This violence exists and we want to redirect the violence. And do I think that you, Hasan Piker, prosperous media personality in Los Angeles, are enthusiastic about the expropriation of wealth and punitive violence by Communist death squads? I don’t think you are. But I think that the reason you have strong taboos is to prevent that slope from slipping in that way.
We should have strong taboos about glamorizing and celebrating violence, but as we've just seen many people on the left aren't even willing to pretend they dislike violence when it's against someone like Charlie Kirk.
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