The real problem with Hasan Piker

Hasan Piker is exceptionally good at ranting about politics while playing video games. In the late 20th century, this would have made him a fun (if exhausting) hang. In today’s era, it has rendered him one of the most influential left-wing commentators in America, an increasingly popular surrogate for progressive candidates, and a flashpoint in the Democratic Party’s internal debates over Israel and “platforming.”

For the last month, some moderate Democrats have called on their party to shun Piker in light of his “antisemitic” and “hateful” remarks — among them, that “America deserved 9/11,” that “Hamas is 1,000 times better than Israel,” and that ultra-Orthodox Jews are “inbred.”

This ostracism campaign has gained little traction. In recent weeks, the center-left columnist Ezra Klein defended Piker against charges of antisemitism, while the flagship podcast of Resistance liberalism — Pod Save America — had the streamer on its show. And even resolutely pro-Israel Democratic politicians, such as Rahm Emmanuel and Gavin Newsom, have suggested they would appear on Piker’s livestream.

From a political perspective, that makes sense. Piker’s audience is formidable and comprised of people who share at least some of the Democratic Party’s basic goals. But the merits of the streamer’s own politics are another question — and one that doesn’t merely concern the legitimacy of anti-Zionism, as much commentary has suggested. Piker may be worthy of engagement. But his worldview does not deserve any enlightened person’s admiration.

Many on the left beg to differ: Prominent progressive candidates have touted him as a surrogate, and socialist commentators have extolled him as a valiant critic of “Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, of US warmongering, and of a Democratic establishment that supports both.” In their account, it is Piker’s uncompromising commitment to egalitarian principles — not his unfortunate (and retracted) comments about Orthodox Jews and 9/11 — that have earned him centrists’ ire.

This narrative has a kernel of truth: Many centrist Democrats have excused Israel’s subjugation of Palestinians in the West Bank and its mass murder of civilians in Gaza. But Piker is prone to similar moral errors.

On topics as varied as Chinese communism, Russian imperialism, and Islamist terrorism, Piker’s commentary is often just as ethically rudderless as what it claims to oppose: If Washington’s jingoists downplay or rationalize the crimes of America and Israel, Piker does much the same for those nations’ adversaries.

The best word for Piker’s ideology may be “campism” — a strain of leftism that judges foreign movements and regimes more by their degree of hostility toward the West than by their adherence to progressive values.

Such tribalism is poisonous, whether it surfaces on the left, right, or center. When political movements decide that their allies’ abuses are forgivable because their enemies’ crimes are so much worse, they open the door to atrocities.

Campism is a bit like disco; it made more sense in the 1970s.

During the Cold War, much of the world was divided between the American and Soviet blocs — or, in the socialist jargon of that day, the world’s “first” and “second” camps.

In that context, some Western leftists felt that it was more important to propagandize for the communist bloc than to criticize its myriad crimes. Other socialists insisted that the left must oppose both American capitalism and Soviet communism. The latter sometimes derided the former as “campists.”

After the Soviet Union’s fall, the rationale for campism fell apart. Yet the desires that fueled it — to see global conflict in Manichaean terms, to demonstrate one’s superlative contempt for American imperialism, and to identify with the West’s geopolitical adversaries — lingered on. On the fringes of the Western left, some continued to comport themselves as apologists for an “anti-imperialist” bloc of foreign actors that had little in common with each other — or American socialists — beyond their hostility to the United States.

Although Piker identifies as a Marxist, not a “campist,” his thought is shaped by the latter tradition.

This is easiest to see in his commentary on China. The streamer is a great admirer of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), both past and present.

In one broadcast, Piker vowed that he would never make fun of Mao Zedong, since the CCP founder was “one of the great leaders of this world, a man who changed the entire universe.” After receiving some pushback on this stance from viewers, Piker conceded, “There was a lot of fucking excesses, let’s be real. But the People’s Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong.”

Suffice to say, it is difficult to reconcile Piker’s moral horror at Israel’s human rights abuses with his cavalier attitude toward Mao’s.

With the Great Leap Forward — a campaign to rapidly industrialize China through forced collectivization — Mao orchestrated the deaths of up to 45 million people, most from famine.

This carnage was not merely the result of Mao’s economic illiteracy. Rather, when the flaws of his agricultural system became apparent, Mao’s regime lashed out against its starving people. According to the historian Frank Dikötter, the CCP summarily killed or tortured to death between 2 and 3 million people during the Great Leap Forward.

Such statistics can sanitize the horrors they represent. So, it’s worth grappling with some of the details that Dikötter documents:

State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.

In his commentary on Israel, Piker has suggested that foreign actors should be judged, at least in part, on the basis of how many civilians they kill. Thus, since Israel has killed far more Palestinians than Hamas has killed Israelis, Hamas is “1,000 times better than Israel.”

I think this is pretty flawed reasoning. But here, I would just note that Piker’s stance is wholly incompatible with his reverence for Mao. Israel has killed more than 70,000 people in Gaza since October 7 — or about 0.15 percent as many as Mao killed with the Great Leap Forward (and that’s not counting the 1.2 to 1.7 million people he killed with the Cultural Revolution). If Piker truly judged regimes by the scale of death and suffering they’ve caused, he could not possibly venerate Mao’s.

Piker’s paeans to the contemporary CCP are similarly campist and incoherent.

During a recent, livestreamed visit to China, Piker was harassed by Chinese police for filming in Tiananmen Square, the site where the regime massacred pro-democracy protesters in 1989 (an event it still seeks to banish from public memory). The experience only reaffirmed his belief that China’s security services are far less repressive than their counterparts in America, Europe, or Japan.

Asked whether there was any country that “had done socialism the way that you like” on the Triggernometry podcast, Piker said that China was “the closest.”

This was a curious choice. Piker and his fellow American socialists typically advocate for large welfare states, powerful trade unions, an egalitarian distribution of income, and progressive social policies.

Yet on each of these fronts, Scandinavian social democracies — such as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark — display far greater adherence to socialist ideals than China does.

In fact, China maintains an exceptionally small welfare state, dedicating only about 8 percent of its GDP to social spending. By contrast, that figure is 19.8 percent in the United States and 26.1 percent in Sweden (the average among all OECD countries is 21.2 percent).

Notably, this isn’t merely because China is at an earlier stage of development. Rather, its threadbare safety net also reflects the ideology of its leadership. Chinese President Xi Jinping argued in 2021 that high welfare spending in other countries had “fostered a group of lazy people who got something for nothing,” and that “once welfare benefits go up, they cannot come down.”

Meanwhile, China’s labor policies are exponentially more repressive than America’s (let alone Scandinavia’s), as independent trade unions are outlawed. Nor is the Chinese economy especially egalitarian in other respects. China’s level of income inequality is 24 percent higher than Sweden’s.

Finally, China does not allow LGBT people to marry or adopt children, whereas the United States, the Nordic social democracies, and most Western countries do.

Even an authoritarian socialist — one who believes that economic equality and social liberalism are more important than electoral democracy — should have little fondness for China’s social model. A democratic socialist, on the other hand, should abhor it.

How then does Piker justify his position? In part by simply denying that China’s police state is more repressive than America’s, or that its policies are hostile toward LGBT people.

But he also contends that “the point of government is to improve the material conditions of all people.” Therefore, the CCP’s success in reducing extreme poverty makes its system preeminent.

This is not persuasive. China’s economic development over the past three decades is doubtlessly impressive (although those gains followed the country’s embrace of market reforms and integration into global capitalism, making it an imperfect proof of concept for socialist economics).

And yet, the poor nonetheless enjoy much higher living standards in the United States, Sweden, and other Western democracies than they do in China. And Western democracies have achieved such poverty reductions through more egalitarian economic and political institutions.

This is not to deny the extraordinary successes of Chinese industrial policy. When it comes to rapidly building out energy and transit infrastructure — or cultivating advanced manufacturing — the CCP’s accomplishments are indeed formidable. And America can learn from them.

But there is little reason for a person with Piker’s ostensible values to revere a political economy in which welfare spending is low, labor unions are repressed, income is inequitably distributed, LGBT people are oppressed, and dissidents are imprisoned.

His position therefore seems to be grounded mostly in the fact that China supports socialism in theory, and opposes American global influence in practice.

While I’ve focused on China, the same campist sensibility informs Piker’s commentary on many other subjects. To name a few examples:

• He has said that he has “no issue with Hezbollah.” It is hard to see how someone committed to progressive values could feel this way, given Hezbollah’s targeting of civilians, open antisemitism, and advocacy for the elimination of homosexuality by “all means necessary.” If one judges foreign paramilitaries chiefly by their hostility toward Israel and the United States, however, then it will look much more appealing.

• He defended Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea as a justifiable act, due to the peninsula’s historic ties to Russia. It is difficult to see how condoning a great power’s illegal conquest of a weaker nation’s territory is compatible with a principled “anti-imperialism.” On the other hand, Russia is an adversary of the US.

• He has celebrated the Houthis, an Islamist group that has established authoritarian rule over much of Yemen. The Houthi regime is viciously misogynistic, forbidding women from traveling without a man (or written permission from a male guardian). It also disappears dissidents, executes men for sodomy, and attacks civilian vessels in the Red Sea. It does, however, oppose Israel. For Piker, this evidently makes the group worthy of praise.

In saying all this, I don’t mean to assert that Piker puts campism above progressivism in all cases.

To his credit, he has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s mainland, raised $200,000 for Ukrainian relief funds, condemned Hamas’s targeting of Israeli civilians on October 7, and decried China’s treatment of the Uighurs (although, he has qualified his critiques of the CCP by saying, “I’m not audacious enough to say I know better than the million-plus people inside the Communist Party trying to govern a country of 1.4 billion”).

In other words, his campist tendencies are tempered by some genuinely humanist impulses.

I also don’t think Piker is an antisemite, or that Democrats are duty-bound to shun him. But I do believe that many of his positions are internally contradictory — and, in some cases, abhorrent.

A skeptical progressive might reply: So what? Surely, whether a leftist streamer holds an enlightened position on Mao matters less than whether congressional Democrats hold a righteous one on Israeli apartheid.

After all, there is no real risk of the US government getting excessively friendly with the CCP, Hezbollah, or the Houthis. By contrast, America is actively helping Israel maintain a humanitarian nightmare in Gaza, facilitate settler violence in the occupied West Bank, and exile 600,000 Lebanese civilians from their homes.

So why criticize Piker — who stands against these injustices — rather than the exponentially more powerful Democratic establishment?

To this, I would say three things. First, why not both? We all have plenty of pixels at our disposal.

Second, if the broad left does not possess moral authority, it will struggle to bring about progressive change. Israel’s apologists insist that its critics are motivated by sectarian biases rather than humanitarian principles. When influential leftists celebrate one of history’s greatest mass murderers — and other progressives evince no offense — they lend credibility to such charges.

Third, and most critically, forming roughly accurate conceptions of complex geopolitical conflicts, economic phenomena, or political challenges is difficult. And any movement that discourages criticism of its most misguided radicals — so long as there are greater evils in this world — is liable to develop profound and persistent delusions.

The human mind gravitates toward tribalism. The impulse to excuse our allies’ moral errors in light of our enemies’ greater ones is universal. Which is unfortunate, since its consequences can be catastrophic, as Netanyahu’s Israel and Mao’s China grimly illustrate. All factions must therefore guard against such tribalism — by engaging with their adversaries and critiquing their confederates.