Is Hasan Piker the Face of the American Left?
1st May 2026
Democrats have an extremism problem, and it’s not clear how they can solve it. After yet another gunman tried to assassinate President Donald Trump at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, liberals nobly renewed their commitment to moderation. “We need LESS violence in America, not MORE violence in America,” wrote CNN’s Van Jones. Quite right. But the American Left has not exactly put itself in a good position to calm down its radicals.
Consider: last Wednesday, the New York Times hosted superstar streamer Hasan Piker for a podcast with writer Jia Tolentino. Piker has fantasized on camera about murdering landlords and once told his viewers that “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill [Florida Senator] Rick Scott.” He joked with Tolentino about “microlooting”—that is, shoplifting—and equivocated about whether UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson deserved to die at the hands of his alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione.
Thompson “was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder,” said Piker, citing Friedrich Engels to suggest that the killing was retribution for “systematized forms of violence” in the healthcare system. Piker is just one online celebrity, but the problem is that he represents a significant portion of the base that Democrats must now cater to. One survey found that 41% of young voters, and 22% of Democrats, considered Mangione’s actions “acceptable.”