On Violence Part One:

We have the Joe Rogan of the Left at Home

Hassan Piker is having a bit of a moment, and it’s because, for some nigh inexplicable reason, a noticeable number of moderate pundits and politicians have gone out of their way to make him out to be the leftist antichrist. Or to be more precise, the reason why seemingly every moderate liberal zionist and concerned never-Trump conservative has decided to dedicate considerable op-ed space to denouncing Piker is glaringly obvious; what is inexplicable is why they think any of this is going to work the way they want.

Recently, Jonathan Chait wrote a piece for the Atlantic meant to provide a tenable path forward for liberal zionism. In doing so, he highlighted both Benjamin Netanyahu and Hassan Piker as equal but opposite forces of extremism that must be opposed by the liberal zionist “movement”.

“Hasan Piker is an authoritarian. So is Netanyahu. If liberal Zionists want to survive, they must fight both.”

​

His general thesis is that the Democrats’ traditional steadfast commitment to Israel is currently an electoral millstone around their necks. Ending aid to Israel just may be a prerequisite for any Democrat looking to wrest control of the White House from J.D. Vance’s grubby little sausage fingers. But Chait just really wants you to know that his acceptance of this political reality is in no way, shape, or form a concession to the likes of Hassan Piker.

​

“Renouncing unconditional aid to Israel may seem like a full-scale surrender to the Piker wing of the Democratic Party. But Israel can survive without American assistance—even Netanyahu has proposed weaning his country off American aid in a decade or so. More important, to equate the withdrawal of the American subsidy with the left-wing position misconstrues just how radical the latter has grown.”

You see, Chait is more than willing to highlight all the ways Netanyahu and his hardline coalition partners are deliberately hindering any possibility of a peaceful two-state solution. And of course, the Palestinians have repeatedly turned down American proposals for “peace”. So we should just stop trying to intervene and let the Israelis and the Palestinians figure it out for themselves.

But Hassan Piker, who Chait stops just short of calling an anti-semite - opting for anti-zionist instead, doesn’t just want to condition aid to Israel. He wants to condition aid to Israel while also saying nice things about Hezbollah and Iran. Piker believes that the terrorism and violence committed by Hamas and other aligned groups occur in the course of legitimate resistance against illegal Israeli occupation. Hassan Piker doesn’t just want to condition aid to Israel; he doesn’t want Israel to exist as a Jewish state.

But Piker also wants to condition aid to Israel. So, no matter how sweatily Chait denies it, he does agree with Hasan Piker on that specific issue. Or does he?

Chait never defines “renouncing unconditional aid to Israel.” He claims this does not mean a full arms embargo as Piker demands. The closest he gets to specifying the new moderate realist position is by referencing Rahm Emanuel’s recent proposal: Israel could still buy American weapons, but at full price. It’s a position shared by many notable progressives like AOC and Ro Khanna. Ironically, this weakens the U.S. legal authority to condition military aid. But that’s just the details.

It seems pretty obvious that Chait is only seeking the minimum amount of distance from Israel necessary for political expediency, and if he had just written that Democrats need to run on conditioning aid to Israel, he might have been able to get away with this rhetorical sleight of hand while soaking up some of the credit Ezra Klein recently received for admitting Israel is an apartheid state. But he just had to bring Hasan Piker into the conversation, and in doing so, he has to admit that he has no interest in addressing the actual reason Israel has become so unpopular with American voters.

That would be the genocide.

The Great Game

It seems that these moderate voices envision a solution to the problem of Israel where Democrats run on opposing Netanyahu-- perhaps getting as far as ending aid--with a stated goal of marginalizing the Knesset far-right hardliners responsible for Israel’s unpopularity. This is a tricky path to navigate for the liberal Zionist trying to reconcile their steadfast commitment to Israel with what Americans have been witnessing on their phones and computers. Because at the end of the day, Chait and other Zionist moderates don’t want anything to fundamentally change. They want to win elections, but they don’t really want Israel to stop exterminating all the brutes.

Or as Chait summarizes the long-running default position of the Democrats:

“For decades, the Democratic Party’s consensus on Israel has combined diplomatic, military, and economic support, including several billion dollars in annual aid, and a friendly push for a two-state solution. In theory, Democrats have supported the national aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians while giving themselves room to condemn Palestinian terrorism along with the excesses of Israel’s occupation and West Bank settlement project.”

You may have noticed that while Chait believes the Democrat position to be a condemnation of the “excesses of Israel’s occupation and West Bank settlement project,” they’ve never offered military aid to the Palestinians to defend themselves from these condemnable acts. This is not an oversight on the part of liberal zionists and the Democratic Party; it’s a strict ideological commitment. Either because they genuinely believe that it’s the only true way to keep Jewish people safe or because they cynically value having a militarily dominant client state in the area, the Democratic Party will never disarm Israel, no matter how belligerent and bloodthirsty its leadership becomes.

This simply is not good enough for a voting public that has been continuously exposed to video evidence of unspeakable horrors being inflicted on innocent civilians, mostly children, by a rogue Israeli state that is not exactly being coy about its plans to take as much land from its neighbors as possible. Much like with people’s experience of a stagnant economy with sticky inflation or Joe Biden’s mental fitness, Democrats really tried to ignore the headwinds and tell themselves that the backlash to Israel’s genocidal war was overblown and manufactured by extreme online and out-of-touch radicals.

Fast forward a year and some change, and now DNC chair Ken Martin is catching heat for reneging on the promise to release the party’s 2024 autopsy to the public. Leaks have suggested this is because the DNC’s deep dive into what went wrong showed that the Biden administration’s approach to Gaza played a significant role in tipping the scales for Trump. Now that Israel has successfully dragged Trump into a massively unpopular and unnecessary war that began with the wholesale slaughter of school girls and is currently promising to make the pandemic-era inflation seem like a flash sale in comparison, the scales seem primed to tip in the other direction.

The problem for Democrats is that in order to take advantage of Israel dragging Trump down into the pit of Tartarus with them, they would have to make statements and campaign in such a way that would incur the wrath of Israel’s lobby. The fear here is that if Democrats are seen as adopting an anti-Israel stance, the money coming from groups like AIPAC and J-Street would dry up, or worse, be diverted to conservative opponents. So how do moderate democrats campaign on tying Trump to Israel and framing both as belligerent actors who need to be opposed, while also maintaining Zionist credibility?

Enter Hasan Piker.

A Quick Detour on the TurnPike(r)

Imagine, if you will, spending 48 hours straight watching nothing but Twitch streams while being slowly deprived of oxygen. Perhaps, in such hypothetical circumstances, it may be understandable for a person to declare Hasan Piker to be “the Nick Fuentes of the left”. For the seemingly endless supply of middle-brow opinion writers hoping to make this comparison stick, however, this is an inexcusable take.

Much like hearing a favorite indie band’s song in an iPhone commercial, I’m having a bit of a “I liked them before they became famous” moment with Hasan Piker. I was first introduced to him via anecdotes from his uncle, Cenk Uyghur of the progressive online news show The Young Turks. Cenk would, from time to time, mention his leftist nephew until Hasan started appearing on the show in person. His appearances on the show were noteworthy for fans like me because, while Cenk and Hasan agreed on many topics, they had a fundamental disagreement about capitalism. Cenk is a believer in capitalism, and Hasan, at a young age, had already well-developed anti-capitalist politics.

This political friction between Hasan and his uncle culminated in a debate over capitalism. Similar to his views on how economies should function, Hasan publicly owned Cenk on his own million-dollar media network. For many TYT fans, myself included, this marked the point at which we began to sense that our politics had evolved past many of the public figures who helped shape them. Cenk didn’t exactly handle this all that well, and now the channel that introduced Hasan Piker to the world is responding to Trumpism with obsequious pandering to conservatives in the name of bipartisan populism.

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t work.

At this point, Hasan was more than just a SWOLcialist; he personified the journey from squishy liberal progressive to firm left populism. A path well tread by many young first-time voters in the Obama era who had seen firsthand how liberal capitalist ideological commitments were simply incompatible with the “hope and change” they were promised. This cohort would go on to form a (mostly) coherent set of politics based on Marxist-informed dialectical analysis -- separate, distinct, and antagonistic to the Third Way neoliberal consensus that had dominated their formative adolescent years and their parents’ political imagination. They would come to be known as the Dirtbag Left.

For years, starting from about Obama’s lame duck period, through to Biden’s first and only presidential term, mainstream liberal discourse was adamant that the dirtbag left was at best an insignificant nuisance and at worst was a deleterious infestation. Too radical and unserious to pander to, and at the same time, any association between them and the Democratic party threatened to tank the electoral prospects of otherwise respectable liberal candidates. By this calculation, the only reasonable way for Democrats to deal with the dirtbag left was with repulsion and derision. It should be noted that it took until 2025 in Trump’s second term for mainstream democrats to recognize MAGA as a fascist project, while Chris Matthews compared the Bernie Sanders campaign to Nazi brownshirts in 2020 for the unforgivable crime of winning a primary election.

Things changed midway through the Biden administration. The cracks that were once only visible to those who had embraced a radical leftist viewpoint quickly became too big for even the average, comfortable consumer liberal to ignore. There were two breaking points in particular: the fact that Democratic politicians lied to voters’ faces as they watched Biden’s physical and mental faculties deteriorate in real time, and the genocide in Gaza.

All of a sudden, it wasn’t just disaffected yet idealistic 20- and 30-somethings who were openly embracing ideological revolt in the Democratic party; their parents and grandparents were being radicalized as well. It wasn’t just pink-haired baristas wearing “Jews for Palestine” t-shirts but gray-braided Act Blue donors too. And for all the years that the Democratic establishment chastised the left for playing spoiler and allowing Republicans to win (an assertion with scant empirical evidence), it was now glaringly obvious that the Adults in the Room were dooming us to another Trump term by stubbornly denying the reality of Biden’s health and Israel’s crimes against humanity.

As the Democratic party base continues to drift away from the neoliberal consensus and uncritical support for zionism, these very serious thinkers and political experts have only dug their heels in deeper. The seemingly coordinated op-ed barrage against Hasan Piker has a temporal explanation with Israel reaching its absolute nadir in public perception due to its years-long campaign of terror against the people of Palestine and the brand new war with Iran. Ideologically, however, Piker as the target is less about him and more about chastising the left-curious within the liberal coalition against adopting a politics that doesn’t accept the mass death of innocents as the necessary price for liberal comforts.

The irony being that they are threatening exclusion from a party that fewer and fewer people actually want to attend.

The Joe Rogan of the Left

It’s worth spending a bit of time on the substance behind centrist hatred of Hasan Piker. The inherent incoherence in trying to smear a person arguing for the end of a genocidal war and occupation as hateful is precisely why the anti-left op-ed brigade isn’t winning over the public consciousness. It’s also darkly comedic.

For instance, the Democratic senator from Langley Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, recently criticized Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for hosting a campaign event with Piker. Slotkin gave this quote to Jewish Insider about Piker:

​

“Any equating of all Jews or American Jews with Israel and the Israeli government is a problem right off the bat, and then it sounds like, from there, a cascading set of antisemitic tropes and just the kind of rhetoric that is — I want to read for myself, but sounds deeply antisemitic, consistently, and therefore not someone that should be helping anybody out in the Michigan political environment”

​

So just in case you were wondering, Piker has never “equated all Jews or American Jews with Israel and the Israeli government”. Quite the opposite, in fact, the dirtbag left (which includes many Jewish people) tends to call out Israel and American Zionists for equating all Jews with the actions of Israel. Specifically, the notion that Zionism is an inherent aspect of Judaism and thus criticizing Zionism is axiomatically antisemitic.

But can we really blame Slotkin here? After all, she did admit to Jewish Insider that “..she is not familiar with much of Piker’s language..”, but what she has heard has given her concerns. It’s understandable that she’d have misgivings about associating with Hasan when she’s probably only heard descriptions of his comments like this one from Jewish Insider in the same article:

“Piker has millions of followers on the streaming platform Twitch. He has said that “Hamas is a thousand times better” than Israel, and has described Orthodox Jews as “inbred.” He has also praised terrorists and said America deserved 9/11.”

​

Even if you don’t agree with Slotkin, at least her political calculus is coherent. If you’re concerned about appealing to a broad swath of voters, the last thing you want to do is associate yourself with a person who has a long history of comments that could be considered controversial or bigoted.

This is why Slotkin appeared on Bill Maher’s show shortly after giving these comments to Jewish Insider.

Okay, maybe “coherent” is a bit generous to describe Slotkin’s views on Piker while appearing with the guy who has equated all Muslims with ISIS:

“If vast numbers of Muslims across the world believe – and they do – that humans deserve to die for merely holding a different idea or drawing a cartoon or writing a book or eloping with the wrong person, not only does the Muslim world have something in common with ISIS. It has too much in common with ISIS.”

Who has warned that Muslims are coming to take over the Western world:

“The most popular name in the United Kingdom, Great Britain – this was in the news this week – was Mohammed. Am I a racist to feel that I’m alarmed by that? Because I am. And it’s not because of the race, it’s because of the religion. I don’t have to apologize, do I, for not wanting the Western world to be taken over by Islam in 300 years?”

And who has (checks notes) praised terrorists:

“We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2000 miles away, that’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, not cowardly.”

That last quote from Maher was the infamous reason his Politically Incorrect show was pulled from ABC, and the beginning of his status as a liberal firebrand. Ironically, Maher was the dirtbag left before there was a dirtbag left. A brave voice unafraid to challenge the taboos of polite and civilized discourse in the service of sincerely held liberal values.

Of course, those liberal values for Maher also included unhinged bigotry for anyone other than middle-class, gender normative, (ahem) classically liberal white people. The Michigan chapter of CAIR was quick to point out the rank hypocrisy of criticizing Piker for antisemitism attributed to him but not substantiated in any meaningful way, while patronizing a public figure with a long history of unapologetic and unequivocal islamophobia. But in a way, the hypocrisy is the point. It’s telling us something.

I’m not going to list all the criticisms of Hasan Piker and explain why they are bullshit. Instead, let’s end part one of our conversation, harkening back to the aftermath of the 2024 election and the instant reaction of liberal democrats in the ashes of their monumental failure. Of the several different diagnoses offered by experts and operatives, one that stuck out was the idea that democrats needed a “Joe Rogan of the Left” that could speak to disaffected potential voters (mostly young white men) and bring them back to the party. Famously, some liberals floated a $20 million plan to study the “syntax, language, and content” of the bro-casting mediasphere that Rogan represents and use that knowledge to develop a pro-democrat version of masculinity.

And while the ways that Democratic Party insiders talked about Joe Rogan and how to replicate his influence were grossly misguided, they do go a long way toward explaining how these people could lose a presidential race to a game show host.

Twice.

What Democrats failed to understand was that they already had a Joe Rogan of the left. His name was Joe Rogan. Rogan is a crank, but he is largely an apolitical crank. The only coherent throughline to his politics is a strong anti-establishment streak. He will agree and promote the views of anyone sitting across from him, as long as they present themselves as going against the entrenched consensus. And not coincidentally, this bias toward antagonizing establishment power is what made him the most popular podcaster in the world.

It’s also why Trump won. It’s also how Hasan Piker became a multi-millionaire through Twitch streams, and why the centrist pundit offensive against Piker has mostly backfired, making him more popular than ever. They aren’t trying to stop Piker from gaining credibility with the liberal electorate; they are reacting like children to the undeniable fact that they have lost all credibility with the voters whom they treat like idiots on a constant basis.

These are people who let it be known that they planned to spend $20 million in the middle of what most people are experiencing as a cost-of-living crisis in order to learn the language of the stupids and use it to trick their feeble little minds into voting for democrats. These are not serious people.

And yet, they will probably do well in this year’s upcoming midterm elections, thus relearning all the wrong lessons from this political moment. And there are indeed some important lessons to learn. One such lesson involves understanding the very weird phenomena of people from all over the political spectrum attempting to kill Donald Trump, and what that means for our collective understanding of violence. It’s something that Hasan Piker understands far more than the midwit cranks trying to insist his politics are more dangerous than turning a blind eye to genocide.

And that’s what we’ll talk about in part 2.

Solidarity Forever.