These pieces are usually reserved for paid readers, but we’ve made this one free so it can be shared with your friends and family. It’s important that people understand what’s at stake and what we’re up against. We hope you find it useful and pass it along. At the end, we’ll ask you to consider becoming a paid member to help us keep doing this kind of work.
DEEP DIVE
Hasan Piker’s Horrifying Vision For America
Don’t call him a “useful idiot.”
It was fashionable to be a communist in the 1930s. Intellectual and artistic circles adored the ideology, from the writers in New York to the budding celebrity hub of Hollywood. Many were card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA.
But this was all before Senator Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare, which, despite its modern retelling as a pure witch hunt, did attempt to uncover real communistsoperating inside the United States government. More importantly, it was before ordinary Americans knew the full details of the brutal repression happening in the Soviet Union under the banner of communism.
Some left the ideology entirely. Whittaker Chambers is the most famous example — a onetime Soviet spy who defected, named names, and became a conservative icon. Others kept the faith, convinced that real communism had simply never been attempted. They quietly dropped the label. “Progressive” and “democratic socialist” became popular replacements, often used interchangeably.
Those people — during their years of defending and promoting Soviet communism — were classic “useful idiots,” a phrase commonly attributed to Vladimir Lenin. The term describes someone manipulated into serving a hostile cause without understanding what they’re actually advocating for. The Soviets knew they had foreign admirers and regarded them as disposable pawns — useful for now, irrelevant later.
That term gets thrown around a lot today. Recently, it’s been aimed at Hasan Piker, a leftist online streamer who has become a surprising favorite of mainstream Democratic politicians and media figures. But there’s the problem with that label: calling someone a useful idiot is actually the most charitable interpretation available. The phrase implies naivety, strips away agency, and blames ignorance.
But Piker, the young, wealthy streamer — rarely seen without designer clothing — makes little effort to conceal his views. By his own words, Piker knows exactly which policies he supports and which regimes he defends — and he doesn’t seem troubled by either. Yet despite that, he continues to be welcomed and actively boosted by left-of-center politicians and media figures into the American mainstream.
That’s why it’s vital to examine: who is Hasan Piker, what does he actually believe, and what does the future he’s pushing for look like in practice?
Hasan DoÄźan Piker was born in New Jersey in 1991 to Turkish parents, but grew up in Istanbul and was raised Muslim. His father belonged to the Turkish business elite, serving as vice president of one of the country’s largest conglomerates — a company whose asset value has reached roughly $10 billion in recent years. (Piker has said his family lost its wealth by the time he reached college.)
His mother is a professor of art and architectural history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His uncle, Cenk Uygur, is more familiar to most readers — the longtime leftist commentator and founder of The Young Turks. Piker interned at his uncle’s media company before striking out on his own, eventually building one of the largest followings on Twitch through a shock-jock style of political commentary. (In 2019, during one of his seven-to-ten-hour streams, he told his audience: “America deserved 9/11, dude.”)
He attracts young leftists who find him cool, attractive, and willing to say boldly what they all believe. In 2019, during one of his seven- to ten-hour streams, he told his audience: “America deserved 9/11, dude.”
Streaming success was only the beginning. Piker has since found a warm reception from politicians and from foreign governments willing to have him carry their message. He has become a political operator in his own right, and his profile now reaches well beyond the streaming world.
_AUTHORITARIANISM_
In November, before his recent Cuba trip in defense of the communist regime there, he flew to Beijing. While there, he sat for an interview on Chinese state television and praised the country at length, telling viewers that much of what they’d heard about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from Western sources was inaccurate — rumors, misunderstandings, lies he wanted to clear up.
He was asked in another conversation whether any country in the world has implemented socialism in a form he admires. Piker passed over the obvious, socialist-lite, answers — Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the welfare states most American leftists point to — and offered an unexpected one. “China is probably the closest,” he said. He gestured at “plenty of issues within the Chinese system,” declined to identify any of them, and moved on to praise the country’s high-speed rail network.
Piker has compared the Chinese annexation of Tibet to the Union’s defeat of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and suggested the result was a kind of civilizing improvement for the region. He has drawn the same parallel between Taiwan and the Confederate States.
Discussing China’s Uyghur camps in Xinjiang, he initially used the phrase “concentration camps” before correcting himself, settling on “re-education camps,” and adding that they “are all closed now.” Neither of those is true.
When he was pressed about the lack of LGBT rights in China — because he’s a liberal and is expected to care — Piker described the country as “gay as hell” and explained the CCP’s prohibition on gay dating apps as a kind of digital privacy measure.
It is worth pausing on what Piker is defending here. The Chinese state arrests citizens for symbolic protest — the now-famous blank sheets of paper held up during the 2022 protests being only one example.
During the pandemic, the CCP physically sealed residents to die inside their apartment buildings. The forced labor system in Xinjiang involves Uyghurs on an industrial scale. Hong Kong’s political opposition has been dismantled. Independent Taiwan exists today only because the United States and its allies have made an invasion costly enough to defer.
A common thread runs through all of his rhetoric. Piker offers loud, unembarrassed support for authoritarian and communist regimes that have used mass repression and violence as legitimate tools of statecraft. Paired with that is a steady contempt for the United States, which he describes as an imperial project that deserved the September 11 terrorist attacks, and whose economic system — capitalism — he believes, as Marx did, is a form of violence in itself.
Speaking earlier this year at the Yale Political Union, Piker told the audience that “the fall of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century.” The audience at Yale heard nothing about Soviet famine, the labor camps, the deportations of entire ethnic groups, or the political executions that defined the regime he was eulogizing.
During one of his livestreams, Piker described Mao Zedong as “one of the great leaders of this world.” Mao’s policies are responsible for tens of millions of deaths through famine, ideological purge, and forced collectivization.
The ugliest moment in his recent record involves a Vietnamese woman named Bach Hac. In a video that resurfaced last year, in a stream, Piker was viewing a BBC interview of Bach Hac, a refugee, describing what her family endured under the communist government in Vietnam. Piker’s response, captured on stream, was the following: “F*** you, old lady. Shut the f*** up, you stupid, idiotic old lady. Suck my d***, old lady. God d***, Yo, f*** this refugee.” The rest of the interview includes a child of Vietnamese refugees, retelling how the communists forced her father to spend his childhood living in the jungle.
Like his uncle, Piker spends an enormous amount of his airtime focused on Israel. He has refused to condemn Hamas — sayingthe group is “a thousand times better” than Israel — and has defended its actions on stream.
He has celebrated Democratic candidate Graham Platner, who has a Nazi tattoo on his chest, on the grounds that Platner had also defended Hamas. When one of his own viewers condemned the October 7 attack, Piker responded by calling her a “bloodthirsty, violent pig dog” and telling her to “suck my d***.”
Piker is direct about his own ideological position when asked. He defines communism as “the end stage … the final goal. It’s like the final evolution, a stateless, moneyless, classless society. A borderless society. We’ve never really had communism.” He treats the word “communist” as an accurate, even flattering, description of his views.
_MORALITY_
A vision this radical requires discarding the means for the sake of the ends. The Soviets told their subjects exactly that — you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Their suffering was the price of utopia. Piker operates on the same logic. He has set aside traditional morality in service of a higher purpose, and the rules the rest of us live by are, to him, obstacles to the better world he believes is coming.
Recently, The New York Times filmed a long group conversation that included Piker and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. Across that conversation, Piker said a series of things worth taking seriously rather than waving off as normal, if not hyperbolic, podcast banter.
He defended the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, arguing that Thompson had been responsible for what Piker called “a tremendous amount of social murder.” As in, Thompson had it coming because of the issues with our healthcare system. He said he would “steal a car” if he believed he could get away with it. He noted that stealing from “big corporations” was fine.
A free society depends on a baseline rule that individuals are not allowed to decide unilaterally which other individuals deserve to be killed, and which businesses deserve to be looted. Once that rule becomes negotiable — once executives become legitimately murderable on the basis of their alleged role in “social harm,” once shoplifting becomes ethical and private property has no value — this framework collapses.
Crucially, this moral framework that Piker chips away at is the bulwark that resists communism. A top-down forced collectivization that strips citizens of their private property, ownership, and freedom cannot happen unless Piker’s morality becomes the standard. That’s why he’s doing it, and it’s worth taking Piker at his word and asking what the country would actually look like if his politics were implemented.
_HIS AMERICA_
Start with the thing most young Americans take for granted: the ability to build a life on your own terms. Under the systems Piker admires, that disappears. In Mao’s China, you did not pick your career — the state assigned it. You did not choose where you lived; you were given housing where the party needed you. You could not start a business, because there were no businesses to start. The shop your grandfather built was confiscated. The savings your parents put aside were worthless. Whatever you had imagined for yourself was replaced by whatever the state had imagined for you.
In the Soviet Union, when Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s, peasants who refused to surrender their land to the state were arrested, shot, or deported to Siberia. The kulaks — peasants whose only crime was farming a little better than their neighbors — were declared an enemy class and liquidated. Entire families were loaded onto trains and dumped in the Arctic to die. Their farms were absorbed into collectives whose mismanagement produced the famines that killed millions in the years that followed.
The same logic was applied to anyone who had built a middle-class life before the revolution. Shopkeepers, small manufacturers, priests, former officials, and their children were classified as lishentsy — the “deprived ones” — a legal category created in the early Soviet constitution that stripped them of basic rights of citizenship. They could not vote. Their children were barred from universities. They were denied ration cards during food shortages, denied access to public hospitals, denied housing, denied jobs in state enterprises, which by then meant nearly all jobs. They were systematically excluded from society until many of them starved, fell ill, or were swept up in later waves of arrests.
In Cuba, three generations have now grown up under the system Fidel Castro built. They have never known a free press. They have never voted in a real, meaningful election. They cannot criticize the government. The grandchildren of the men who built Cuba before the revolution inherited a country where ambition is pointless because the ceiling is set by the party. Just compare those who fled Cuba to America, and those who tragically stayed. Who’s better off?
This is what Piker is asking young Americans to sign up for.
_WARMLY EMBRACED_
If Piker were a marginal figure, none of this would matter. But he isn’t. Aside from his success in growing an audience online, Piker is being absorbed into mainstream American liberalism in real time, and the people doing the absorbing are not hiding it.
This month, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein published a piece in defense of Piker, originally titled “Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy.” Pod Save America, the Crooked Media flagship podcast founded by former Obama White House staffers, has hosted Piker as a guest. He has appeared frequently across the broader Crooked Media network and was a featured guest at their live event, Crooked Con.
Politicians have moved into his orbit at a steady pace. Piker hosted Zohran Mamdani during Mamdani’s run for New York City mayor and was an invited guest at his victory party. He has interviewed progressive Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), California gubernatorial frontrunner Tom Steyer, and New York congressional candidate Effie Phillips-Staley.
Earlier this year, he attended a campaign event for Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. The question of whether to appear on his stream has become a recognizable signaling decision inside Democratic politics — a way for candidates to mark themselves as either willing to address the online Left or unwilling to legitimize him.
Beyond his own interviews, he guests on Voxpodcasts. He does Instagram appearances for The New Yorker. He has been profiled — admiringly — in Vulture, Cosmopolitan, Wired, The New Yorker, Variety, and GQ. The tone of those profiles is, almost without exception, soft. The interviewers are interested in his apartment, his relationship history, his physique, his clothes. They are mostly not interested in why a man who calls Mao a great leader is being positioned as the future of progressive media.
Are all of them useful idiots? Some, perhaps. Others, likely in agreement with Piker but have careers that require hiding their most extreme political views, certainly know what they’re doing. Either way, the answer doesn’t change much. Piker, simply put, does not have good intentions for this country or its people. And his mainstreaming into the Democratic Party reveals something about the party itself: its leaders are willing to platform fringe, radical elements, which should concern everyone. Let us know what you think →
Hasan Piker was supported by his wealthy family to spread his radicalism. The Young Turks, where he used to work, is funded by billionaires and venture capital.
Upward News doesn’t have billionaire backers, and we certainly aren’t bankrolled by our families. We rely on reader support — so if you like what we’re doing and want to keep us independent, please consider becoming a paid member. Support our mission: 15% off →
We can only keep doing this work if you choose to support us. Help us keep this project alive.
Thank you for being here.
❤️ If you think we’re doing a good job,please help us stay independent with a one-time donation.
🔎 Tip line: Have a story from your campus, community, or company that needs exposure? Send tips, questions, or ideas to tips@upward.news.
đź‘‹ To say hello, respond to this email.
Update your email preferences or unsubscribe here
© 2026 Upward News
PO Box 960019
Inwood, NY 11096, United States Terms of Service
RJ Hamster 