Former high-ranking Biden administration officials should arguably be facing charges at the International Criminal Court for complicity in the Gaza genocide. Instead, they’re embraced by polite society and enjoy influential posts in corporate media , academia and Washington think tanks .
Their concealment of Biden ’s declining mental faculties helped precipitate 2024’s disastrous electoral results.
Democratic leaders in Congress, ostensibly in an oppositional role, continue to respond to President Donald Trump ’s militaristic authoritarianism, both at home and abroad, with characteristic fecklessness and even tacit support .
And 10 years into America’s MAGA nightmare, Democratic leadership is no closer to offering voters a vision of the future that will pull the rug out from under Trump’s faux populism .
All of these issues are cause for introspection and accountability — two instincts we know establishment Democrats lack . It is no wonder, then, that their allies in corporate media — who share the same character flaws — are helping them slander one of the left’s most prominent critics of their joint inadequacies: Hasan Piker. Piker is an outspoken anti-Zionist and advocate for Palestinian dignity and freedom. The wildly popular leftist streamer (he has over 3 million followers on the Jeff Bezos-owned Twitch streaming platform) is a unicorn in the overwhelmingly right-leaning digital media environment. His appeal to young men is exactly what Democrats lamented they were lacking following their walloping in 2024.
But his massive popularity poses a serious challenge to Israel’s supporters in the U.S. Piker is an outspoken anti-Zionist and advocate for Palestinian dignity and freedom. His increasing prominence has also made him a sought-after surrogate for progressive candidates. Last year, he campaigned for Zohran Mamdani in the hotly contested New York mayoral primary. This March, Piker campaigned with Michigan Senate primary candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
All of this led to a torrent of condemnations from centrist Democrats (and Republicans), who have launched bad-faith accusations of antisemitism. Corporate media outlets like CNN and The Atlantic have since jumped on the dogpile.
On CNN’s “Inside Politics,” for example, anchor Dana Bash took to the airwaves after Piker’s appearance with El-Sayed, telling viewers Piker is “attempting to airbrush his past statements.”
The first of these was about Hamas’ conduct in its Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Bash displayed Piker’s words on the screen and read them aloud:
It doesn’t matter if f***ing rapes happened on Oct. 7. Like, that doesn’t change the dynamic for me. … The Palestinian resistance is not perfect.
Bash claimed this was evidence of Piker “excusing sexual violence by Hamas terrorists.”
But she lifted the lines out of context in a way that completely distorted their meaning. In that stream , Piker argued against viewers who denied that Hamas committed any sexual violence or rapes on or after Oct. 7. He countered that there is “real evidence … from hostages … that [sexual violence] did happen, and that is very important,” and further stated: “I’ve never discounted the likelihood that sexual violence did occur on Oct. 7 and after.”
He continued, leading into the excerpt Bash quoted:
None of [this] justifies Israel’s actions. So it doesn’t even matter. None of this justifies that — Palestinians have a right to dignity, a right to emancipation, a right to live fucking free lives — free from this occupation. It doesn’t matter.
It’s a brash statement, but Piker is clearly not “excusing sexual violence”; he’s saying sexual violence doesn’t excuse genocide.
Bash was one of the key spreaders of the unsupported assertion that Hamas perpetrated widespread and systematic sexual violence that day — one of the chief claims that the U.S. and Israel used to manufacture consent for the Gaza genocide — and one which she has never retracted.
By contrast, Bash and the U.S. corporate media, with few exceptions , regularly fail to elevate the documented evidence of widespread, systematic sexual violence by Israel against Palestinians.
Bash, who is complicit in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, feels entitled to condemn Hasan Piker for insensitive comments aimed at debunking the harmful lies spread by Bash and her ilk. The fact that Bash is placed in the position of judging Piker illustrates the inverted moral standards of the genocide-supporting U.S. corporate media.
Bash then criticized another of Piker’s comments:
He also claims Hamas is, quote, “a thousand times better than Israel.” Hamas is a designated terror organization, not just by the U.S., but by the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Terrorist designations are political , not objective, as any good journalist surely knows; that Israel is not a designated terror organization, according to those countries, says more about its political alliances than about the legality or ethics of its actions. In just the first two months of the Gaza genocide, Israel killed more Palestinians than the sum total of Israeli deaths by any Palestinian acts of violence or armed conflict since its creation in 1948.
Another of Piker’s previous comments shared by Bash was his previously retracted claim that “America deserved 9/11,” which Piker himself recently addressed on “Pod Save America”:
That was me responding to Daniel Crenshaw , ironically enough, on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” where he was making this ridiculous argument that, like, we have to go out and fight these people all the time because they hate us, because they ain’t us. I was like, “That’s insane. That’s not the reason.”
[My claim] was actually echoed by Robert Kagan , one of the godfathers of neoconservatism, just last week, where he came out and was like, “Yes, actually, we have been messing around in the Middle East for, you know, upwards of 60 years, and that’s precisely the reason why 9/11 happened.”
These statements, however tactless or provocative they might be, demonstrate Piker’s engagement in the work of challenging dominant narratives — championed by corporate media — that advance imperialist aims.
Bash also highlighted Piker calling Zionism “a racist ideology.” “Now, just a little bit of fact-checking here,” Bash retorted that Zionism is …
… an ideology supporting the notion of a Jewish state, the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. He just called that a racist ideology, the right for Jews to have self-determination.
Bash’s “fact check” overlooked the reality that the creation and maintenance of a “Jewish state” necessarily means the denial of “self-determination” for non-Jews, and is therefore a racist project .
It is a matter of historical record that the creation of the state of Israel — known to Palestinians as the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) — resulted in the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from land they had inhabited for millennia. That the belief in a “Jewish state” requires non-Jews to receive unequal citizenship rights was affirmed by the Knesset , Israel’s legislature, in 2018.
When Bash brought in a three-journalist panel to discuss Piker’s comments, Semafor White House correspondent Shelby Talcott said, “I think everyone can agree [they] are unacceptable.” She compared Piker to right-wing extremists: “You have the same issue in the Republican Party , where you have fringe folks sort of trying to weasel their way into this quote-unquote mainstream orbit.” No one on the panel dissented.
Bash and CNN were not alone in pillorying Piker. The Atlantic has thrown its full weight behind this endeavor , publishing four pieces criticizing Piker over just nine days .
In the first of these articles, headlined “Israel Moderates Are Losing the Democratic Party ,” Jonathan Chait complained that the growing influence of progressive characters like Piker in the Democratic Party might drown out supposedly sensible centrist ideologies.
Chait began by parsing some of the same past comments of Piker’s that Dana Bash did. As Chait accused Piker of laundering Hamas’ actions, Chait himself laundered Israel’s Oct. 7 atrocity propaganda:
Although he allowed, after Oct. 7, 2023, that “the Palestinian resistance is not perfect” — who hasn’t raped, kidnapped and massacred 1,200 civilians from time to time? — he defends Hamas as “a thousand times better than the fascist settler-colonial apartheid state.”
Of course, the myth of systemic sexual violence on Oct. 7 remains false, whether its spread by Chait or Bash. And while Hamas clearly kidnapped and massacred Israeli civilians, Chait felt the need to juice the numbers: Even the Israeli government only claims that 800 of the 1,200 individuals who were killed that day were civilians, with the rest being mostly security forces. (Even 800 may be high, given that it’s acknowledged that some of the Israeli civilian victims on Oct. 7 were killed by friendly fire .)
Chait took El-Sayed’s choice to associate with the supposed terrorist-sympathizing Piker as evidence that El-Sayed must share all of these views himself:
If El-Sayed doesn’t think that people should discuss his rally with Piker, why would he hold a rally with Piker? The answer, of course, is that he believes Democrats should discuss Piker, but only to agree with him.
This sort of deflection is a common move for political activists when their ally has done something too embarrassing for them to openly defend, but that they do not wish to condemn. They are recognizing the unpopularity of the views they want to mainstream.
Putting aside the falsities, the idea that El-Sayed was attempting to mainstream views held by Piker, as opposed to seeing an opportunity to attract votes from Piker’s audience, is based on a standard that neither Chait nor centrist corporate media as a whole would typically apply to establishment Democrats’ embrace of right-wing figures. Kamala Harris , for example, was not assumed to hold all the same views as neocon Republican Liz Cheney when they joined forces during Harris’ 2024 presidential bid.
Chait also seemingly overestimated the “unpopularity” of Piker’s views, despite the fact that his argument rests on a warning that Piker’s influence over the Democratic Party is growing. Since the manufactured scandal over Piker’s appearance with El-Sayed, the candidate has nevertheless risen to first place in some polls.
The corporate media assault on Hasan Piker isn’t only about policing criticism of Israel. The Atlantic’s other hit pieces on Piker show it is about maintaining corporate influence in politics as well. Chait also seemingly overestimated the “unpopularity” of Piker’s views. The Atlantic ran not one but two articles ginning up outrage over offhand comments made by Piker during a recent appearance on The New York Times “Opinions” podcast .
During the podcast, Piker and the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino adopted some irreverent positions while decrying the hypocritical moral standards in our hypercapitalist society.
The host, Nadja Spiegelman, prompted the discussion by introducing Piker and Tolentino to what she called “microlooting,” an internet trend she says involves stealing things from massive companies in protest of corporate wage theft. During the interview, both guests said they see no moral harm in stealing items from a grocery chain like Whole Foods, internet piracy or destruction of property as forms of protest, but were skeptical about the effectiveness of “microlooting” as a protest tactic. Americans “lack the capacity, unfortunately, to engage in some kind of organized disruption that would be infinitely more effective,” Piker said.
They also both eschewed what they see as hypocritical outrage in discussions about theft and violent crime. Piker noted that these discourses fixate on policing the underclass rather than on systemic exploitation and violence:
The rules are already designed in a way where if you steal from the poor, you become rich; if you steal from the wealthy, you go to prison. So there’s only one direction where you can do unlimited theft and erode the social contract for the 99%. There’s an invisibility baked into the system that allows the wealthy to engage in this behavior, because — it’s a cliche at this point — but wage theft is the most consequential amount of theft that takes place in the United States of America.
“A similar invisibility exists in structural violence, as opposed to individual acts of violence, as well,” Piker pointed out.
Piker and Tolentino’s comments were helpful translations for how many Americans contend with ethical life given the vast disparities of wealth and power in this country. But The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood and Thomas Chatterton Williams don’t seem to care.
Instead, Wood — the man who prompted outrage two years ago when he defended Israel’s genocide in Gaza on the grounds that “it is possible to kill children legally” — framed their comments as distressing in his article, richly headlined “Something Is Happening to America’s Moral Code.” “Piker’s romantic view of crime is, shall we say, not shared by the Chinese Communist Party,” Wood scolds.
Similarly, Williams lambasted the two podcast guests for supposedly contributing to America’s moral decay:
And so a very silly conversation leads to a series of positions that are far from frivolous. Its overarching premise is that the law loses its legitimacy when political and economic elites violate — or are merely perceived to violate — the social contract. In such a world, ordinary people become entitled to ignore rules as they see fit. Neither Piker nor Tolentino explicitly endorses violence. But it is a short conceptual bridge from where they sit behind microphones to political murder.
Never mind that Wood and Williams are working from a total caricature of Piker and Tolentino’s actual beliefs; it is patently absurd for The Atlantic to dedicate this much ink reacting to offhand comments made on a podcast while at the same time regularly defending the greatest moral catastrophe in modern U.S. history — support for an ongoing genocide.
Hasan Piker’s growing popularity has everything to do with the bankrupt moral character of establishment Democrats and their allies in the media. The elitist pearl-clutching on display in the ongoing false controversy over Piker only shows that his critique will continue to be sorely needed.
The post Who’s Afraid of Hasan Piker? appeared first on Truthdig .