A Party of Posers

Lessons from the interminable Hasan Piker debate

Disclaimer 1: This post is longer and more political than usual. I erred on the side of more detail because I think the details matter here. If you prefer to only hear from me on cooking, screen time, and learning, skip this one.

Disclaimer 2: Many of the people I write about here are people I know personally. I have worked with the Crooked Media team on the Obama campaign and collaborated with them on a podcast. Abdul El-Sayed was a mainstay at Arena events. Neera Tanden was a colleague on the Obama campaign. Bridget Phetasy and Ahmed Alkhatib have both appeared on my podcast. I like all of them. The criticisms and praise here are about the substance of what they have said and done, nothing more.

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There’s an old trope about the married couple who, on the surface, are arguing over dirty dishes. But what they are really sparring over is something deeper and long-unaddressed.

A few weeks ago, I found myself in the Democratic Party equivalent of a fight over the dishes. I did something I’d long vowed never to do again. I jumped into a Twitter/X debate. This one was over the role of a streamer named Hasan Piker.

I was reacting to a controversy over Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed's decision to campaign with Piker. For reasons we’ll get to, I felt that El-Sayed’s decision was a sign of the moral decline of my party. Others and I then broadened the conversation into a general critique of the left-wing media figures who have warmly welcomed Piker onto their shows.

Piker’s politics are hard to describe succinctly. He is often shorthanded as “left-wing,” but he’s anything but liberal. On immigration, on women, on America itself, he sounds more like the extreme right than anything that could be honestly dubbed progressive.

Let’s take a tour of some of his prominent views on the issues of the day, because in order to understand the drift of the Democratic establishment, you first need to understand the man they’ve welcomed into the party.

It’s Russian Territory, Bitch

He originally dismissed warnings of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine as fearmongering by “bloodthirsty maniacs” inside the US government. He pivoted once the invasion began. The Russia that, weeks earlier, supposedly wanted peace was now, in his telling, resisting Western imperialism (this is a pattern - if some external aggressor does something indefensible, he blames it on the US). NATO was the real aggressor. On Crimea: “I call it a part of Russian territory, bitch.” That series of positions alone puts him squarely in the Tucker Carlson wing of the right. But Piker didn’t stop there. He called Ukraine field reporter Dylan Burns a “war pervert” for filming inside Ukraine, then pressed on it, denied knowing who Burns was.

Xinjiang is Awesome

Piker visited China for two weeks of live-streaming and sat for an interview with CGTN, the Chinese state-controlled outlet. He said he was there to debunk “misunderstandings” about the country and called it “just another normal country.” Filming during a flag-raising ceremony at Tiananmen Square, near Mao’s portrait, he said he had no patriotism in his heart for America. China analyst Bill Bishop said the visit was part of a Chinese propaganda program to bring over “useful idiots” with large US audiences.

China’s investment paid off. Piker became defensive of the regime, dismissing questions about why he failed to visit Xinjiang, the site of an ongoing ethnic-cleansing campaign against the Uyghur population, by saying, “Xinjiang is awesome, it’s just really far.” He went on to mock liberals for citing the “Maoist standard English version” of human-rights concerns: “Uyghur, Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square.” He filmed a video praising the Chinese model for its ability to make quick decisions and restructure its economy overnight. After watching a video on Chinese healthcare, he posted that he might have to move to China. In an interview with Ethan Klein (not to be confused with Ezra), he refused to answer whether Taiwan was part of China.

Here are just a few of the other positions Piker has taken in recent years:

• He said America “deserved 9/11.”

• He referred to Orthodox Jews as “inbred.”

• He has said that if you care about Medicare fraud, you would kill Senator Rick Scott.

• He has said that from a “utilitarian perspective,” it is better for rich women to be raped than poor women.

• His former co-host Ethan Klein has accused him of using a shock collar on his dog, an accusation Piker denies.

• During a 2018 interview with a Cosmopolitan reporter, he scrolled through and showed nudes his fans had sent him. From the interview: “He reads the message attached aloud: ‘I’m sure you have hot girls throwing themselves at you all the time, but I’m a huge fan of TYT and love all your work....’ As promised, there are photos in his inbox of fans wearing the shirt, but it’s about 70 percent nudes. ‘Whoa, that’s crazy,’ he says, methodically opening each message. ‘That was, like, actually her blowing someone. ... I don’t ever, like, talk to any of these people. ... That’s butt stuff. Cool.’”

Sociopathic Tendencies

Beyond his individual positions, Piker engages dissenters with a level of hostility and arrogance that could be best described as Andrew Tate-like.

If you want just one example, watch this clip of Piker tearing into an elderly Vietnamese refugee named Bach Hac. In a 2020 BBC segment about why her Vietnamese refugee community largely supported Trump, she had said this: “As Vietnamese refugees, we have endured suffering under the communist regime.” That set Piker off. He called her a “stupid fucking idiotic old lady” with a “gamer headset.” He asked her who had fucked her harder, America or Ho Chi Minh. He told her to suck his dick. He told her to go back and live in South Vietnam “in the same conditions.” He called her a “Christian supremacist psychotic fucking refugee.” When his chat told him to be careful, he doubled down: “I fucking hate these people, dude.”

He is often branded as a voice for the Palestinians, given his unwavering criticism of Israel. But he has shown complete disdain for any members of that movement who challenge him. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who has appeared on my podcast Lost Debate a few times, is a case study. Ahmed is a Gaza-born American who has lost more than thirty relatives in this war. He survived an Israeli airstrike himself at age eleven, an attack that took his hearing and killed two of his friends. He now runs the Atlantic Council’s Realign for Palestine project from Washington, advocating nonviolence and a two-state solution. His offense, in Piker’s universe, was criticizing Hamas. Piker and his ally, BadEmpanada, turned their audience against him. What followed, according to Alkhatib, was a months-long harassment campaign that included coordinated false reports that knocked his personal Facebook account offline, FBI complaints accusing him of laundering money to Israel through the Atlantic Council, and death threats that, by Alkhatib’s own account, required FBI intervention. He was grieving a family member killed in Gaza at the same time. Piker was streaming from West Hollywood. His pro-Palestine politics turn out to be pro a very specific kind of Palestinian: the kind who agrees with him.

Despite Piker’s history, El-Sayed campaigned with him anyway. Standing next to Piker at Michigan State on April 7, 2026, he told Politico it was “critical” that Democrats embrace the streamer. On Fox & Friends that morning he offered the boilerplate: “Of course I oppose rape. Of course, I don’t think 9/11 was justified. Just because you appear with somebody, doesn’t mean you agree with them on everything.” He told the Sumud podcast Piker’s comments had been “taken out of context.” Which comments? About what? Taken out of which context? He never said. El-Sayed never named Alkhatib, China, Russia, Bach Hac, or the many people Piker has told to suck his dick.

El-Sayed did what a growing number of progressive media figures do when discussing Piker. They validate him (”critical” for Democrats to embrace him) while dismissing any criticism as “cancel culture.” Of course, talking to someone is different from embracing them. There is also a grey area where you may not explicitly endorse someone, but you give them repeated access to your audience without meaningfully challenging them.

The Soft Couch

That brings me to the guys at Pod Save America (PSA).

Long before El-Sayed rallied with Piker, PSA had been Piker’s most reliable establishment platform. Jon Favreau hosted him on his solo show Offline in April 2023 for a cordial chat titled “Hasan Piker Wants the Left to Persuade, Not Scold.” If you had to read that title twice, I don’t blame you. Somehow, the expert on respectful disagreement and persuasion is the guy who shouts down dissenters with aggressive sexual insults and whose followers’ harassment of critics has, by Alkhatib’s own account, required FBI involvement.

Did Favreau challenge him on any of that? Not once. Piker told Favreau, in the same conversation, that his guiding principle is to ban anyone in his chat who “starts chirping about some random shit.” He described his own most viral controversies as moments when he might “pop off on someone from a misunderstanding.” Favreau did not ask what misunderstandings he meant. He did not raise the Vietnamese refugee. He did not raise 9/11. He did not raise Russia or China. He did not raise the Twitch bans. He had announced in the intro that he and Piker had “different views, which we could have debated for hours,” but that he thought it was more useful “to hear Hasan’s perspective.”

Jon Lovett then brought Piker onto PSA proper in November 2024 for two hours on how to win back young men. A year later, in November 2025, Piker shared a Crooked Con panel with Jessica Tarlov of Fox News, Tim Miller of The Bulwark, and Symone Sanders Townsend of MSNBC. He was treated as a peer, though Miller did push back on some of his Middle East views. Lovett got out in front of the criticism on X: “We’re going to ‘platform’ people you don’t like and that’s ok. We’re going to push back, or just listen sometimes, and that’s ok.” Notice the reserved right to do nothing.

Compare Lovett’s approach there to PSA’s treatment of Dean Phillips one year earlier. The Minnesota congressman came on the show in November 2023 to explain his primary challenge against Biden. Crooked billed the episode as a “heated conversation.” The hosts grilled him on when he was getting out of the race, what he could possibly accomplish, why he was bothering. A man who said America deserved 9/11 got a warm chat about persuasion. A sitting Democratic congressman running in his own party’s primary, against a Joe Biden the PSA guys would later (a bit too late) criticize as too old, got the Tim Russert treatment.

In early April 2026, as the Piker debate was in full bloom, PSA co-host Tommy Vietor appeared on the Raging Moderates podcast and defended the way they had engaged Piker. I’ll drop in a few key quotes and dissect them.

“I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything Hasan has said. As you mentioned, he streams for like 12 hours a day. I’m sure he said a lot of stuff I agree with, some stuff I disagree with, some stuff I found offensive.”

Notice that the sheer volume of Piker’s output is now offered as a reason not to litigate any of it. The more you say, the less responsible you are for what you say. This is coming from a podcast that routinely plays short clips from right-wing streamers and ridicules them.

“Hasan has a huge platform. And every time someone attacks him, it makes it bigger.”

So if someone has a big audience, we should not criticize them? Is that true of Fuentes? Andrew Tate? Tucker? Candace? Megyn Kelly?

“Democrats need to end this stupid debate about platform or like not talking to certain people because we disagree with them.”

He retreats to the generality of “platforming” without acknowledging three things. First, how you engage someone you platform matters. If I had Fuentes on without challenging him, as Tucker did, Vietor would rightly call it out. I am sure he has called out Tucker for that. Second, how often you platform someone is itself a statement of value. It says: this person has something important to say. Third, many prominent figures on the left are not merely talking to Piker. They are praising him, as El-Sayed did or as Favreau sort of did when he introduced Piker in April 2023 as “one of Gen-Z’s most influential political commentators.” Crooked’s official description for the November 2024 episode called Piker “the massively popular progressive streamer” — note the “progressive” as a flat descriptor, not a contested label.

The Paper of Record

Around that time, Ezra Klein wrote a piece in the New York Times largely backing the PSA/El-Sayed approach. The piece ran Sunday under the headline “Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy.” By Monday morning, the Times had quietly swapped it for “This Is Why There’s No Liberal Joe Rogan,” with no editor’s note.

Love or hate Rogan, comparing Piker to him is its own tell. It is the comparison of people who imagine the meaningful unit of media is duration, as if a man who can deliver twelve hours of a daily cartoon version of an Oberlin seminar must, by virtue of his lung capacity, be Rogan’s equal.

Putting the headline aside, Klein makes many of the same arguments the PSA guys do. He laments cancel culture and warns against “the impulse to cut off those with whom we disagree.” He describes Piker as left-wing and frames him as a member of the progressive coalition. He does this without spending any time on the litany of positions any Democrat would normally treat as disqualifying. He spends the piece almost entirely on Israel and antisemitism, the one terrain where he has a defense ready: that Piker is an anti-Zionist, not a Jew hater, which is the most simplified and extreme criticism leveled at Piker. China, Russia, the Vietnamese refugee, the harassment campaign against Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, the Hezbollah praise, the calls to kill Rick Scott — none of it comes up. Nor does the fact that Piker himself will not reliably vote for the Democratic nominee for president. He did not endorse Harris in 2024. He has said he would “probably vote third party” over Newsom against JD Vance in 2028. The man Klein is asking Democrats to embrace as part of the coalition will not embrace them back. As many have said, the “liberal Joe Rogan” should at least be a liberal.

The piece is built on contradictions that would take a separate five thousand word essay to dismantle. We are told that Piker has streamed so much that it is unfair to cherry-pick offensive statements. Klein then confidently asserts that Piker is not antisemitic. The basis for that assertion is, of course, a handful of cherry-picked statements pointing the other way. Throughout the piece, Klein erects one straw man after another, almost always in the form of the weakest arguments from the pro-Israel side, and then offers the platforming of Piker as an opportunity to show young voters that Democrats have heard them on the Palestinian question. The implication is that the price of being heard on Palestine is the normalization of a man who has called Hamas a thousand times better than Israel, who has said it ‘doesn’t matter if [...] rapes happened on October 7’ and that it doesn’t ‘change the dynamic’ for him (a comment he says was taken out of context), and who has organized harassment campaigns against Palestinians who disagreed with him.

A few weeks after Klein’s piece, the New York Times aired an interview between Jia Tolentino of the New Yorker and Hasan Piker on its “Opinions” podcast. The framing was a “lively discussion” about the “trend” of stealing small things from big corporations. What Piker actually delivered on tape was an argument that Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO shot in the back on a Manhattan sidewalk in December 2024, had been engaged in “social murder,” and that Americans “understand” why Luigi Mangione allegedly killed him. He added, for good measure, that he was “pro-piracy” and “pro stealing from big corporations.”

Tolentino, who lives in a $2.5 million Brooklyn brownstone, volunteered on tape that she had stolen lemons from Whole Foods while shopping for her mutual aid group. Stealing from a big-box store, she explained, was “neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action.” She did it anyway. Piker, from his $2.7 million West Hollywood mansion, was enthusiastic. Asked whether universal shoplifting would simply raise prices, he answered, “Yeah, chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go.” Host Nadja Spiegelman coined a term for it: “microlooting.”

The internet promptly erupted in ridicule from across the political spectrum. The Atlantic ran “Theft Is Now Progressive Chic.” AEI’s Robert Pondiscio gave the cleanest line: “I just cancelled my subscription to @NewYorker. I’ll be shoplifting it from now on. Fair is fair, @CondeNast.” Comedian Bridget Phetasy noted the double standard: “Nick Fuentes will never be invited to Yale. He will never be at Vanity Fair parties. He will never sit down and have casual conversations about killing and stealing with someone from the Times. He won’t be defended by Ezra Klein. Hasan runs in the most elite circles.” Neera Tanden added: “This whole Piker discourse has been embarrassing to every person who has tried to make him the spokesman for Democrats.”

Favreau shot back:

“Zero people have tried to make Hasan Piker ‘the spokesman for Democrats.’ He showed up at one campaign event with one candidate in a primary and sat for some interviews. What’s embarrassing is the number of people on here treating him like he’s a 2028 contender or DNC Chair.”

Tanden replied on the same thread:

“Love you guys but you’ve given him more airtime than some people considering a run for President. Sorry if I think it’s important to state out loud on here my disagreements with a guy who says it’s ok to murder people, Jews are inbred, America was responsible for 9/11 and Russia…”

Around that time, Favreau had welcomed Piker back onto Pod Save America for an episode titled “Hasan Piker Has Thoughts on the Hasan Piker Discourse.” That title alone tells you the framing. Not Piker’s record. The discourse about it.

There was more pushback than in the prior Piker appearances (Favreau was getting a lot of heat about those past episodes), though it was still fairly timid. Favreau pressed Piker on “Hamas is a thousand times better” and Piker doubled down. He pressed him on October 7 rapes and Piker pivoted. He pressed him on 9/11. Piker re-affirmed, on tape, that America deserved 9/11 because “we have been messing around in the Middle East for upwards of 60 years, and that’s precisely the reason why 9/11 happened.” His one revision was to insist that he was “anti-civilian death,” a clarification that does not, on inspection, retract anything. Russia, China, Bach Hac, Alkhatib, the Hezbollah praise, the calls to kill Rick Scott . . . none of it came up.

Yair Rosenberg of The Atlantic flagged one of the more revealing exchanges in a follow-up piece titled “The Problem With Hasan Piker’s Einstein Story.” On the podcast, Piker had claimed his views on Zionism were essentially Albert Einstein’s: that Einstein “wrote about what Zionism was turning into, and he warned that what he was seeing was exactly what the Nazis were doing.” Rosenberg, who wrote his undergraduate thesis on Einstein’s relationship to Zionism, dismantled the claim. Einstein was a Zionist who assisted the project for decades. He never condemned Zionism as a whole. He signed exactly one letter, in 1948, criticizing a specific right-wing Israeli political party as “akin” to the fascists. That was the entire basis for Piker’s claim that Einstein agreed with him. Favreau let it stand. Rosenberg’s broader point was sharper: the obsessive focus on Piker’s Israel comments has allowed the rest of his worldview to evade scrutiny.

But the moment that stood out to me was Piker’s criticism of the Democratic Party on immigration:

“On the one hand, you say Donald Trump is a dangerous force. I see that. I recognize that. But then you turn around, and you take on his anti-immigrant narratives and anti-immigrant messaging from the 2020 election that you won and decide you’re going to be the sincere candidate that ends up, you know, dealing with the growth of migration in this country. It’s a failure.”

So, according to Piker’s telling, one of the key reasons he hasn’t embraced Democrats is that they aren’t sufficiently pro-immigrant. Six days earlier, the Bach Hac clip had gone viral again. Piker screaming at an elderly Vietnamese refugee, calling her a “stupid fucking idiotic old lady,” telling her to go back to South Vietnam. The same man was now lecturing Democrats on how they talk about migrants. Piker’s pro-immigration politics, like his pro-Palestine politics, turn out to be conditional. Immigrants who agree with him are part of the cause. Immigrants who do not are told to go home. None of that came up in the interview, of course.

The New Establishment

The irony of the whole debate is that Echelon Insights released a poll in late April asking voters about Piker. The results:

• Favorable: 7%

• Unfavorable: 15%

• Never heard of him: 60%

So we spent weeks debating a person most Americans have never heard of.

But remember, we are the couple fighting over dishes. On the surface, this fight was about Hasan Piker. What it was really about, at least to me, was whether the Democratic Party establishment has learned the right lessons from Trump. Sadly, this saga reveals they’ve gotten less electable and more confused.

First, throughout this debate, I watched one prominent progressive media figure and non-profit leader after another rail against the “establishment.” This is a helpful refrain because it gives them a boogeyman, usually in the form of some diminished organization like Third Way. Of course, Crooked Media, MS NOW, and the New York Times are the establishment. They control the largest audiences and largely frame our public debates. They can have any Democratic politician or thought leader on whenever they want. So who they engage with and how they engage are exercises in power and influence. Every warm welcome to a Hasan Piker and every “heated conversation” (their words) with a Dean Phillips lays down incentives for those who come next. But they do not want you to focus on that, so they keep railing against a Potemkin establishment instead.

Second, the new establishment has drifted further into amorality in the Trump era. If you dissect their public statements, they believe what matters is audience size and volume of words. The larger those two numbers are, the less morally culpable you are for what you do and say, and the more attractive you are as a collaborator. If you are a far-right figure, of course, that same courtesy is not extended. This is the left-wing variant of the “no enemies to the right” sentiment that podcasters like Megyn Kelly have long advocated. It is the kind of sentiment that led Kelly to give Candace Owens a pass for her conspiracy theories about Erika Kirk.

Third, the new establishment often does not have a firm grasp on what they believe about the material world. One reason is that too many of our most prominent voices have no experience outside of politics and media. They have not run a school. They have not served in the military. They have not treated a patient, prosecuted a case, worked a trade, or built anything. They are fluent in a kind of macro-bullshit-speak that sounds smart but rarely survives contact with the real world. So if you pick an issue like education, you would be hard pressed to find anything meaningful or courageous that most of our party’s key media figures and politicians have said. When they sit down with someone who appears to have the courage of his or her convictions, they are largely spectators, even when that someone, as with Piker, is spouting complete nonsense.

Fourth, too many of our most prominent voices cannot take the measure of a person. They seem unwilling to rigorously grapple with someone’s views or their behavior. When I look at Piker, I see a self-absorbed sociopath. I imagine anyone I grew up with on Staten Island would spot the same thing. It is alarming that so many powerful people cannot. The very people who could not tell the difference between Bryan Stevenson and Ibram X. Kendi now cannot tell the difference between Rashid Khalidi and Hasan Piker.

Finally, and most importantly, the new establishment has abandoned the core ethos of the Obama movement. We did so during key moments when we embraced a sloppy version of identity politics, and we paid the price for it. The more recent failure has been to look at a generation that we have, in many ways, let down, and try to win them back by mirroring the worst voices that have filled the vacuum.

Bridget Phetasy captured this dynamic in a recent post: “The more I watch all these streamers, the more I feel bad for them. We’ve failed that entire generation so badly and in so many ways. They’re so fucked up.”

Phetasy is right. Our party has presided over the collapse of our schools. We watched reading and math scores plummet and chronic absenteeism explode. We inflated grades, lowered expectations, and made every excuse for why our kids couldn’t achieve. We let higher education become a debt machine that priced opportunity out of reach for the people who needed it most. We watched the public square get colonized by algorithms that reward outrage. We told a generation that hard, slow, deliberate work was the path to success, then built and obsessed over platforms that reward the opposite. Piker is a symptom of that failure. So is the thirstiness among prominent Democrats to court him.

The instinct of too many in our establishment now is to chase that audience by sounding more like Piker, or by giving Piker more airtime, or by softening the standards that used to apply to public figures who said and did the things Piker says and does. That is the wrong response. The right response is to give a confused generation something better than the thing that confused them.

What our party elders should be doing, as Obama did for us, is lead, not follow. Hold a high standard for how to treat someone you disagree with. Demand a level of depth and consistency. And move forward with the confidence that you can lead a movement that is kind, truthful, and inclusive.

(Written by a human, edited with Anthropic)