Let’s Compare Hasan Piker’s Comments to Elite Centrists’

[srobin21]

Let’s Compare Hasan Piker’s Comments to Elite Centrists’

 

Statements far more reprehensible than anything Hasan Piker has said are regularly written and spoken by prominent liberals in respectable outlets. But because war and Islamophobia are acceptable in elite Democratic circles, they don’t raise an eyebrow.

 

By Branko Marcetic – Jacobin – April 30, 2026

 

There’s a lot going on right now: a war that threatens to plunge the entire globe off an economic cliff; a small group of the ultrarich hoarding ever more wealth as economic misery piles up for the rest of us; an unprecedented, multipronged assault on free speech and the press; and the president’s mounting efforts to take over and rig future elections; to name a few.

 

But that’s not what’s on the Democratic establishment’s mind. If you’re a corporate Democrat, the most important matter in the world right now is a Twitch streamer.

 

After bleating for more than a year that they desperately needed “a Joe Rogan of the Left,” centrist Democrats are now predictably melting down over the prospect that they might actually get one. For weeks now, the party and its various media arms have been screeching about the growing popularity of socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, and that his various public statements — that “America deserved 9/11,” that shoplifting and other types of theft are no big deal or even “cool,” that Americans “understand” why a rapacious health insurance CEO was murdered, as well as his being an apologist for authoritarianism and human rights abuses and supposedly holding bigoted views — are beyond the pale and disqualify him from being a prominent voice in Democratic politics.

 

But it’s actually so much worse than that. Jacobin has identified at least fifteen other appalling, sometimes bigoted statements that seem to have escaped notice:

 

1. “It is possible to kill children legally.”
2. “This is war. It is combat. It is bloody. It is ugly, and it’s going to be messy. And innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward.”
3. “Some of these people [killed] are entirely innocent non-combatants, including children. This is an unspeakable tragedy. It is also one of the unavoidable burdens of political power.”
4. On assassinating a sixteen-year-old boy: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children.”
5. “A fascist Russia is a much better thing than a Communist Russia.”
6. “If the poorest [African] families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed.”
7. “Sweatshops that seem brutal from the vantage point of an American sitting in his living room can appear tantalizing to a Thai laborer getting by on beetles. . . .  Looking back, our worries [about sweatshops] were excessive.”
8. On more than 1,100 Bangladeshi workers crushed to death in the collapse of an unsafe factory building: “Foreign factories should be more dangerous than American factories.”
9. “The Arab world’s problems are a problem of the Arab mind.”
10. “[Migration] went too far, it’s beeen disruptive and destabilizing.”
11. On Egypt’s former bloodstained autocrat: “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.”
12. “Xi Jinping is not a dictator” and Chinese people “don’t seem to want” democracy.
13. On the brutal tyrant who took power in Saudi Arabia in 2017: “The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East. . . .  It’s been a long, long time, though, since any Arab leader wore me out with a fire hose of new ideas about transforming his country. . . .  Perfect is not on the menu here.”
14. On the electoral success of a prominent Jewish politician: “I’m reading last night about the fall of France [to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis] in the summer of 1940, and the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over.’. . .  So I had that suppressed feeling.”
15. On Hillary Clinton: “Is she hemmed in by the fact that she’s a woman and can’t admit a mistake?”

Okay, you got me. Some of the more keen-eyed among you have already realized Hasan Piker didn’t say any of these things.

 

The first quote is from the Atlantic, about Israel’s unprecedented and deliberate murder of children in Gaza, from the same author who last week blubbered over what Piker’s rhetoric about stealing meant for the nation’s “moral code.” Quotes number two and three are also about Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian kids, only from former State Department spokesperson John Kirby and now Editor in Chief of CBS News Bari Weiss. The fourth one is Barack Obama’s former press secretary Robert Gibbs justifying his boss’s assassination of the innocent teenage (and US citizen) son of an accused terrorist he had already killed. The next three are all from longtime New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

Continues at:

 

https://jacobin.com/2026/04/hasan-piker-democrats-centrists-violence