The Wrong Stuff
Hasan Piker and the politics of reactionary clickbait
It was during the ancient epoch of 9/11, George W. Bush, The War on Terror, and the rise of Fox News when some on the Left started pondering a long, and as it turned out unfulfilled, quest that began with a question like ‘Where is Our Rush Limbaugh?’ Michael Moore was considered a prospect for the role, particularly with his 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11. Yet Bush was reelected later that same year and Moore, despite some comedic talent, wasn’t really a daily presence as a filmmaker.
There was also a radio station called Air America that was supposed to carry the weight. Future senator Al Franken had a show that featured a difficult-to-forget MC Hammer parodied theme song for Paul Krugman- as good a foreshadowing of failure as anything ever created. The station never got above water financially and shut down in 2010.
We’ve since moved to the podcast age, Rush Limbaugh has shuffled off, and now one hears ‘Where is our Joe Rogan?’ Perhaps in fairness it can be noted there are some that refuse to label Rogan right-wing (despite his praise for Alex Jones, interviews with fascist cranks, conspiracy theory promotion, etc.). One Jacobin writer labels Rogan ‘America’s most famous swing voter.’ The Wall Street Journal recently asked ‘Is Trump losing Joe Rogan, America’s Most Important Swing Voter.’ A frightening idea if so, but given that Trump once ‘had’ Rogan, let’s just say Rogan is at least somewhat right-wing.
Why bring this up now? Because we are a few weeks into a pretty wide debate about a streamer named Hasan Piker. It started after Piker appeared at a couple of campaign rallies for Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. This provoked quite an unfavorable response from some Democratic politicians and a continuing defense of Piker from much of Left media. The Washington Post featured several articles. The Atlantic got involved. The New York Times did an interview (New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino was also interviewed at the same time). The Times’ Ezra Klein chimed in.
The interesting thing with Klein’s piece is that its original headline read ‘Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy.’ However, likely after readers and sponsors complained, there was soon an unannounced change to ‘This is Why There’s No Liberal Joe Rogan.’ Given that the Times has long been associated with the boring mainstream establishment, it’s worth asking why the mainstream would reject Piker.
Well, in the Times’ own interview Piker and Tolentino floated the idea that stealing from the Louvre would be cool due to the museum’s seemingly elitist status. The Louvre, of course, was founded by France’s revolutionary government (before it was a museum it was a royal palace) for the purpose of democratizing access to art. If that particular sentiment can be brushed off as radical chic of some kind, what should we make of the opinion that the U.S. deserved the 9/11 attacks? That Hamas is ‘1000 times better than Israel’ (Piker doubled down on that one on the Pod Save America podcast shortly before Klein’s Times headline was changed). Russia’s annexation of Crimea? ‘I call Crimea part of Russian territory. I call it cry me a river. A Russian river.’ Or this resurfaced video of Piker reacting to an interview with an older Vietnamese refugee with ‘Fuck you old lady. Shut the fuck up you stupid fucking idiotic old lady…Suck my dick old lady…Fuck this refugee.’ (in that video Piker is eating something before he says all that. Apparently, he does this all day long like a sort of Beavis and Butthead act). There is the sympathy with the likes of Hezbollah and the Houthis. Then there was that CCP ass-kissing trip to China (Piker has a thing for Chairman Mao) and of course Piker was on that recent much publicized Code Pink organized trip to Cuba. The trips themselves aren’t terrible, but do we have to hear that China is ‘hella gay’ with an ongoing crackdown on representations of “feminine men” in the country and not some word on both places being dictatorships, or some word on the Uyghurs? There is also Piker explaining the wonders of Chinese colonialism in Tibet (someone with a lot of time on their hands put together this 20 min reel of Piker drivel).
Writing a defense of Piker in The Guardian, titled ‘Why Do Elite Democrats Fear Hasan Piker?’ Jacobin founder and current president of The Nation magazine Bhaskar Sunkara writes ‘Has Piker said things that are offensive? Of course. He’s a streamer who broadcasts for hours every day – the medium almost guarantees it.’ That ‘almost’ is interesting, isn’t it? Like maybe it isn’t natural to speak of an older female refugee in that way? But what of Piker’s calling Orthodox Jews ‘inbreds’? Sunkara says we can let that go because ‘“Inbred” is an unfortunate but standard piece of American insult vernacular…He said he regrets applying it to Jewish people specifically and will not do so again.’
By the way, and since a main theme in the defense of Piker is that the backlash is mostly about his criticism of Israel, given that for decades the Left correctly insisted that there is a vast difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, it is notable that many are hellbent to at least prove there is room for anti-Semitism in the ranks. There is no more odious figure on American Left than Norman Finkelstein (see here) but even he was recently complaining about how many emails he receives nowadays about the Israelis killing Kennedy. Another truism from the George W. Bush years is that governments are governments and people aren’t governments (this was meant to be applied to Americans back then- indeed, this writer was visiting and being welcomed by the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil the first time he heard it). Now we appear to be seeing more often that the real problem isn’t the Israeli government but actually the Israeli people. Meanwhile there have been four attacks on Jewish charities and synagogues in London the past month. It is worth noting that none of this will add a thing to the cause of Palestinian liberation.
Getting back to Piker specifically, what exactly is he supposed to be delivering? Daniel Denvir, host of The Dig podcast (at times a good long-form show), recently argued, after the now standard ‘Third Way and their allies want to shut down Hasan Piker because, first and foremost, they want to protect a militaristic far-right Israeli government’ that ‘Hasan is a rare progressive in an online space where young men are being converted to fascism by people like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes. He is on the front lines fighting fascism.’
Surely anti-fascism was historically always best waged out of one’s living room but is the idea that if young men can’t get coarseness and bile from Piker, they’ll get it from the likes of Tate or Fuentes? If so, not likely. First, if the internet accomplished anything in politics it’s changed the definition of popular. That bar has lowered dramatically. Back in the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh’s show had somewhere between 15 and 27 million weekly listeners. Today, Tucker Carlson’s shows topped out at about a million (meaning often they get less). Piker’s stream gets around 6.5 million hours- about a third of Anderson Cooper on CNN and, if Streamcharts.com is to be believed a good percentage of Piker’s audience isn’t even in the U.S. A million views may be the ultimate dream of most podcasters but there are about 345 million people in the country.
It should be obvious by now the reason Leftists have a hard time breaking through on these formats is successful shows here are just working a different side of the brain. They are simply outrage machines. While conservatism obviously has a much easier time with this it doesn’t completely corner this market. The only time MSNBC ever consistently drew in higher ratings than Fox News was when Rachel Maddow and others on the network were obsessively ranting every night about Russiagate (then there’s whatever Cenk Uygur is supposed to be). That’s why giving anyone who can drum up a digital audience by simply pushing reactionary bullshit a seat at a table just incentivizes ever more such bullshit. Is it even conceivable that anyone tunes in to the likes of Candace Owens to actually learn something or is it more likely anyone, besides a small percentage of viewers who briefly are there to see the spectacle, who starts regularly tuning in are already on the spectrum?
The old adage about ‘preaching to the choir’ implies that doing so is a waste of energy because nobody new is being converted. Yet it’s the choir that shows up to service every week, not to mention the choir is easiest to monetize. The choir isn’t there to be converted or to really learn anything at all. Its members are there for other reasons- very likely many of the same reasons anybody would regularly sit through these shows. As for the rest of us, we’ll just have to build democratic socialism the old-fashioned way. That’s a good thing because no worthwhile project will ever come from the likes of Hasan Piker.