Democrats have their own extremist problem

Platforming terrorists and promoting authoritarianism should have no place in a liberal Democratic party

For the last few weeks, I’ve been grappling with one of the worst colds/flus I’ve had in my life. During that stretch, I leaned on one of my guilty internet pleasures - watching livestreamers on Twitch. The content on these streams is rarely good, but it’s often comfortingly bad, like the terrible daytime television I used to watch when I stayed home sick from school as a kid.

Watching impish livestreamers was a tonic that uplifted my mucus-drenched spirit, but in the midst of the cheesy nonsense I also noticed something less fun. Political livestreaming is growing in popularity, and the Democrats have a growing extremist problem in that space. And if they don’t act, it could become as bad as the extremism problems facing Republicans.

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The biggest livestreaming ‘event’ of the last month was Hasan Piker’s tour through China. Piker is the most prominent political streamer on the internet, and he spent around two weeks traveling through China, streaming from the country and giving his thoughts on China’s economic and political system.

Watching Hasan’s tour, I was shocked by how open the propaganda was. Piker spent his weeks in China absolutely glazing the hell out of the Communist Party, praising them endlessly while ignoring controversial topics and actively running defense when his chat protested.

When questioned about China’s lack of LGBT rights, Hasan said the country is ‘gay as hell’ and defended the CCP banning gay dating apps as a ‘privacy issue’. Ignore that gay marriage is illegal in China, that the country can be brutally patriarchal and homophobic, that the government has specific campaigns to censor, shame and harass effeminate men. Gay as hell! Hasan did several of the classic propaganda tour activities:

• He spent some time promoting traditional Chinese medicine and gushing over almost-certainly-poached elephant tusks.

• He was ‘spontaneously’ gifted a rare edition of Mao’s Little Red Book, which he treated as though someone had given him a copy of the Bible autographed by Jesus Christ himself.

• He went on state television to talk about how great China is, and dismissed criticism of the CCP as ‘rumors’ and ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘lies’ that he wanted to help correct.

Of course, no trip to China would be complete without a visit from the secret police, which Piker actually did experience - he was harassed while streaming in Tiananmen Square by plainclothes officers who made his group stop broadcasting, turn over their phones for inspection, and leave the area.¹

We should be very, very clear about who the Communist Party of China are. They run an evil police state where you can be arrested for wrongthink as simple as holding up blank pieces of paper. They are more than happy to literally weld people shut inside their homes, brutalize student political organizers and jail or kill anyone who criticizes the CCP. They use Uyghur slave labor on a massive scale Xinjiang, they’ve crushed other ethnic minorities, they crushed any semblance of political freedom in Hong Kong, they practice cultural genocide like it’s going out of style, and the only reason they haven’t yet invaded and crushed Taiwan is the Western world’s protection of said island. They are a nightmarish, totalitarian dictatorship.

And yet Piker always seems to have their back. He’s downplayed the genocide in Xinjiang, calling the concentration camps there ‘re-education’ camps and claiming they’re all closed now.² He’s said that Chinese colonialism in Tibet was a good thing, and that the Tibetans were basically nasty savages who needed to be civilized. Somehow every take of Piker’s ends up parroting a pro-CCP worldview.

And this isn’t an isolated case of Piker just being pro-CCP. He’s defended the idea of socialist re-education programs explicitly. He wishes the USSR had won the Cold War, he’s cool with Hezbollah, he thinks the Houthis are awesome and he’s used his platform to give a voice to literal, actual terrorists. He defended Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, and while he doesn’t outright defend Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine he sure does spend a lot of time blaming the American government for somehow starting the conflict. He said that America deserved 9/11. He repeats neo-Nazi talking points about the Holocaust. He promotes political violence.

Hasan Piker, in short, is a political extremist of the worst kind. He is a terrorist-promoting authoritarian bootlicker. He would gladly put his opponents in camps and use violence against them, if ever the situation arose. And he’s only becoming more and more popular and influential in the progressive American political scene.

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This may seem like a big overreaction to some of you. Sure, you might think, Hasan is an idiot and holds some genuinely bad views. But what’s the purpose of writing up a whole article on it? It’s not a larger problem! Isn’t this just the worst kind of clickbait, where you focus heavily on one guy and drag up all the worst things he’s said?

I’ve written extensively about the rise of online extremism on the right. I’ve covered the rise of Nick Fuentes, the gender war origins of the MAGA movement, how conservatives manufacture outrage and vice signal to extremists, the hypocrisy of conservatives who are shocked by racism in their coalition, and the consequences of handing power to young, extremist idiots. For several years now I’ve been banging the drum about how deeply extremist views have infiltrated the conservative movement, and I hope that buys me the credibility to say this: The same process is happening on the left as we speak.

The extremist problem on the left is not yet as severe or as wide spread as it is on the right, where even sympathetic conservative commentators estimate 30% of GOP staffers in congressional offices are Groypers. Democrats are not that far gone. But genuinely extremist views are gaining in popularity both in the Democratic party and in left-of-center politics generally in America. And I don’t mean extremist in the sense of “I’m a socialist which means I like government funded healthcare and lots of regulations”. I mean actual authoritarian views, illiberalism, and political violence.

It’s not just Hasan Piker. ‘Tankies’, or openly authoritarian leftists, are becoming more and more common on social media. It’s incredibly common to see historical revisionism around the USSR, Maoist China, or any other communist government that killed a lot of its own citizens in the quest for socialism. Publications like The Grayzone will cover for virtually any dictator - they’ve defended Assad’s government in Syria, denied the Uyghur genocide, and are outright propagandists for Putin’s regime in Russia. The blog LA Progressive also engages in Uyghur genocide denial and whataboutism. Leftist group Code Pink has frequently defended the authoritarian regime in Venezuela, and they’re hardly alone - a wide variety of leftist institutions and media types are willing to go to bat for authoritarian socialist regimes

It’s also not just media and non-profit groups falling into this trap - it’s increasingly common in real world leftist organizing groups. The DSA itself gave Maduro a bear-hug in 2021, with many of the organization’s leaders traveling to Venezuela and personally doing propaganda with Maduro. This is a frequent occurrence for the DSA - having learned nothing from promoting a murderous dictator in Venezuela, last month the organization’s leaders took a trip to Cuba where they met with Cuba’s dictator to “learn about the challenges and achievements of Cuban socialism”. One of the editors of Zohran Mamdani’s slick campaign videos also runs a YouTube channel where he pumps out pro-China propaganda, such as calling the idea of Uyghur repression a CIA plot.

All of this is starting to have a real impact on our politics. Earlier this year An Quanzhong, a community activist with close ties to Democratic congresswoman Grace Meng, was convicted of acting as an unauthorized agent of the Chinese government and of harassing Chinese dissidents living in the US. Linda Sun was a former aide to New York Governor Kathy Hochul before she was arrested for spying for the CCP:

As a political aide, she eliminated references to Taiwan, according to prosecutors, and ensured that officials did not mention the plight of the Uyghurs, a primarily Muslim ethnic minority that has faced persecution from the Chinese Communist Party.

In exchange, prosecutors said, Ms. Sun and Mr. Hu received a panoply of payoffs that included travel benefits, orchestra tickets and a series of Nanjing-style salted ducks, delivered over the course of more than a year.

China makes a significant effort to monitor and bully Chinese Americans, efforts that are so extensive they have secret outposts based in cities like New York from which they conduct intelligence and policing operations. We know that the Russian government pays American right wing influencers to spread their talking points. If you think the Chinese government isn’t doing the exact same thing in progressive political circles, you’re a fool. And useful idiots like Hasan are happily opening the door for them.

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Hasan Piker doesn’t have an ideology in the classic sense. What he has is a massive case of Oppositional Defiant Disorder that leads him to frame every argument as America Bad and anything against America as good (or at least excusable). This the foundation of every geopolitical view he has - the United States is a uniquely malevolent evil in the world, and anyone or anything that resists America is good. Any action can be downplayed, excused or apologized for as long as it comes with some sort of fig-leaf of ‘fighting American imperialism’.

This is why, when Piker was harassed by Chinese security forces for filming in Tiananmen Square, his immediate reaction was to jump on a livestream a few hours later and proclaim that America is worse. This kind of brain-rotted whataboutism never stops at just proclaiming that America is bad. It inevitably leads to the claims that whatever the other guy is doing is good, actually. It’s why Piker is so quick to downplay his harassment by Chinese police, or to downplay China’s repression of LGBT people, or of the cultural genocide of ethnic minorities. It’s why he was happy to talk on his trip about how the idea of a free, separate Hong Kong is ‘ridiculous’. And it’s why when he’s asked about which countries are doing socialism in a way that he likes, Piker doesn’t mention Denmark or Sweden or Norway. He says China is the closest model that the US should follow and learn lessons from!

Hasan Piker himself is not as personally vile as Nick Fuentes. And the authoritarian strain on the left is not as deeply entrenched as it is on the right. How could it be, when the federal government is now sending 1488 signals via tweet, and there are dozens of examples of actual GOP members of congress using neo-Nazi talking points (Congressman Steve King in 2019: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”) Things aren’t great in the Democratic party, but I do want to be clear that they’re much, much worse on the conservative side of the aisle.

And yet there is one way that I think things on the Democratic side are worse. Liberal and progressive institutions don’t seem to realize they have a problem at all. Nick Fuentes is an evil, despicable person, and is still treated that way by the vast majority of officials within the conservative movement. When he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, it caused an uproar. Piker, by contrast, is in good standing with virtually the entire liberal establishment.

Piker has received glowing profiles from Vulture, Cosmopolitan, Wired, The New Yorker, Variety, and more. These profiles absolutely fawn over him, and in some cases it’s clear the journalist would prefer to have a romantic candlelit dinner with Piker rather than ask him any sort of tough questions. If you think that’s an exaggeration, take a quick look at Piker’s profile in GQ:

As Piker burns through his 70-minute workout, exhausting himself in the process, he strips his shirt off. An army of girls and gays—not to mention admiring looksmaxxers—would kill to be where I am now, next to Piker, as he pants in a pair of neon shorts with black Calvin Klein boxers poking out and sunlight glinting off the sweat beaded on his chest hairs.

Groans, gossip, and athletic guidance fly from all angles: “Good, Has, get taller!” “Face down, ass up!” Toward the end, Piker starts describing how a chicken wrap he’s been loving recently is very fibrous and “bottom-friendly,” leading another gymgoer to tease him about his diet. “Have I been having anal sex? No,” Piker responds. “I’ve always had nice poops.”

Piker is frequently mentioned by other Democratic voices as the answer to the left’s “Joe Rogan problem”. He’s hosted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar and Zohran Mamdani on his stream. He’s guested on podcasts for Vox, and does Instagram hits for the New Yorker. He’s a favorite of Crooked Media and the Pod Save America crowd, appearing frequently on their various shows and even being invited as a featured guest to their ‘Crooked Con’ live event.

I believe that Democrats need to build a big tent. But a group with no boundaries whatsoever loses coherence, so here’s the line I draw: I do not want to be in a coalition with anyone who does propaganda for vicious authoritarian governments. That seems like a pretty simple, basic test. Whether it’s Russia, China, Venezuela or whoever else, the bare minimum for participation in polite society should be that you do not excuse, apologize, or carry water for mass murdering totalitarian regimes. The fact that media institutions like GQ, the New Yorker, and Crooked Media still promote Piker as some sort of youth whisperer should be a source of deep shame and embarrassment for everyone involved.

Hasan Piker is not your friend. He does not believe in liberal democracy. He is not a cool, hot bro who just wants people to have healthcare. He is a genocide-excusing, terrorist-promoting, authoritarian bootlicker. He’s happy to excuse crushing the rights of gay people, ethnic minorities, and anyone else as long as the boot stomping them into the ground was made in a socialist factory. He would gladly see you thrown in an actual, non-metaphorical reeducation camp for disagreeing with him. The fact that he’s welcomed at Zohran Mamdani’s victory party is alarming. No elected politician should be able to interact with him without facing the same kind of questions they’d face for talking to Nick Fuentes. No podcaster should have him on their show unless the topic is Piker’s promotion of authoritarianism and violence.

In some ways, this is an old story. The political right in America has always had noxious racists trying to infiltrate their institutions, and the political left has long had insane communists trying to do the same thing. The bare minimum response when extremists try to infiltrate your camp is that you need to recognize it’s happening, and you need to at least try to keep them out. I worry that the Democratic party and the progressive media ecosystem are failing this basic test. The left’s extremism problem is not yet as bad as the right’s - but if they continue to do nothing, it might not take long for them to get there.

1. Amusingly, he tried to show the police a meme of Mao he had on his phone, seemingly to convince them he was ‘on their side’

2. This is untrue, large numbers of Uyghurs are still held in camps and used as forced labor.