Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy

After the 2024 elections, there was a panic among Democrats about the absence of a liberal Joe Rogan. Could one be found? Could one be created? It was an epic exercise in missing the point. You cannot have a liberal Joe Rogan because Rogan is not particularly political. His audience cohered around conversations with comedians, M.M.A. fighters, bodybuilders and psychonauts. That’s what made him politically influential: He could reach millions of people who were not otherwise interested in politics.

The problem Democrats actually had — one of them, anyway — was that they didn’t like Rogan and criticized others for going on his show. They tried, repeatedly, to cancel him for his comments about trans people and his skepticism of Covid vaccines. To the extent that he is now a right-coded figure, it’s not because he started that way. Rogan’s political views are mixed. He backed Bernie Sanders in 2020. He supports universal health care and abortion rights; he dislikes vaccine mandates and lax border control. But it shouldn’t have been a surprise when, after years of being attacked by the left, he endorsed Donald Trump in 2024. The simplest way to tell people which side they’re on is to tell them how much your side hates them.

That brings me to a more-important-than-it-might-look controversy that has burst out over the leftist streamer Hasan Piker. He had a breakout moment over the past year, as Democrats began obsessing over the absence of a liberal Joe Rogan and Piker, who mixes leftist politics with a bro-ish aesthetic, was proffered as a possible answer (a category error because, again, the whole point of Rogan’s political power is that his show mostly avoids politics). But pick over Piker’s years of streaming, and you can find offensive things he’s said. Among them: That America “deserved 9/11,” that his favorite flag is Hezbollah’s, that a liberal Zionist is akin to a “liberal Nazi.”

“Streamer has said offensive things” isn’t really a news story. But then Abdul El-Sayed, the more D.S.A.-ish candidate in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, began rallying with Piker. That led Third Way, a centrist group that previously demanded that Democrats “draw a line in the sand” and shun “Hasan Piker and his fellow Jew-haters,” to send a letter to El-Sayed demanding details about “how closely you align with his most abhorrent views.” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said Piker reflected “the dangerous normalization of antisemitism in our politics.” Politico then asked a number of possible 2028 Democratic hopefuls whether they would appear on Piker’s show: Gov. Gavin Newsom and Rahm Emanuel said they would. Representatives Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez already had. Senators Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego and Elissa Slotkin said they wouldn’t.

I think there’s rather a lot wrapped up in this controversy, so let’s take it piece by piece.

Is Piker a “Jew hater,” as Third Way alleges? In an interview with the writer Aaron Regunberg, Piker addressed some of his worst comments. I find some of his answers compelling and others less so. The comparison of liberal Zionists to Nazis, for instance, is repugnant and not much improved by Piker clarifying that he opposes ethnostates. What made the Nazis notable wasn’t their support for an ethnostate. Ethnostates are common. What made the Nazis notable was their effort to exterminate the Jewish people. And Piker’s assertion that his opposition is to all “reactionary ideology” is hard to square with his admiration for Hezbollah.

But to focus only on those comments is to miss much else that Piker has said and believes. He has also said: “From pogroms to the Holocaust, Jews have always been singled out by those in power as a scapegoat for the instability and economic volatility that people in power caused. A resilient, nascent antisemitism is a constant threat.” He has called antisemitism “gross,” “immoral” and “a hate crime.” He has promoted Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia who is Jewish, as a 2028 presidential possibility. In previous presidential primaries, Piker supported Bernie Sanders, who is also Jewish. It is an unusual form of Jew hatred that calls out antisemitism and promotes Jewish Americans for the presidency.

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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. He is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” and the author of “Why We’re Polarized” and, with Derek Thompson, “Abundance.” Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox. Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads. 

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