As Sepideh M has been posting in the comments lately, there’s a Third Way attempt to cancel Hasan Piker going on. I hold no brief for or against Piker — I’ve listened to some of his stuff and I think it’s of varying quality. He’s being called an anti-semite, which is a charge that is so blatantly misused that it’s losing all meaning, which I think is part of the mission of those who misuse it. (If everything is anti-semitic, then nothing really is, especially actual anti-semitism.)
This piece on the Beehiiv named “String in a Maze” was a pretty good take on the reason Piker’s being hit:
I’m not particularly interested in litigating the details of the allegations against Piker, but suffice it to say that what I’ve seen is pretty weak. [Jonathan] Cowan implicitly concedes as much, saying that “[l]eft-wing antisemites are savvier than the Nazi-endorsers on the right…the antisemites of the left cloak their attacks in critiques of the present Israeli leadership.” That’s a cute sleight of hand – there isn’t solid evidence that Piker is antisemitic, but that just gets chalked up to him being too “savvy” to reveal his true beliefs. (Cowan goes on to explain that he considers the use of the terms “apartheid” and “genocide” in the context of Israeli politics to be antisemitism, which gives you a sense of his angle here).
The dispute here isn’t really about Hasan Piker exactly. Piker is a proxy for the broader dispute about the future of the Democratic Party, and a symbol of the growing dissonance between the party’s establishment and its increasingly disillusioned base.
In that light, the pearl clutching over Piker’s influence is telling. Politico recently asked 14 potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates whether they’d appear on a livestream with Piker. A few, including Senator Cory Booker, said no. That’s interesting, because in the past Booker has expressly rejected “purity politics,” specifically in the context of his associations with Jared Kushner, Mark Zuckerberg, and John McCain. He went so far as to write about the issue in his latest book, arguing that Democrats are shrinking their coalition by “cancel[ing] everyone who fails a purity test.” Booker’s calculus seems to change when he’s asked to include people to his left in that coalition.
The author goes on to point out that Booker bragged about his conversations with Grover Nordquist and Newt Gingrich.
I put Booker in the Newsom box when I think of 2028 candidates: so ambitious that he’ll say anything, which is the opposite of what Democrats want right now, which is someone sure in their principles with a history of defending their convictions.
Speaking of cancelling pundits, here are the topics that centrist icon Matt Yglesias is discussing with his podcast partner, Jerusalem Demsas:
Has affirmative action gone too far? Should we abolish internet anonymity? Is liberal hypocrisy worth defending?
I’m surprised that they were unable to get Pete Hegseth — the guy who blocked promotions of people of color and women to general staff positions — on their show. I’m sure Hegseth thinks affirmative action has gone too far. Perhaps Yglesias and Demsas want to weigh in on whether it’s “liberal hypocrisy” to criticize Hegseth, since many liberals opposed Kristi Noem, who’s a woman.
I don’t like being put in the position of defending Hasan Piker, but I also think it’s more than a little ironic that the centrists who claimed that Harris lost because she didn’t go on Joe Rogan are trying to cancel the one person that I know about who has leftist views and something near the reach of Joe Rogan. Given that people like Yglesias and other Third-Way centrists are able to get massive amounts of attention attacking Democrats and, more importantly, the ideals of the Democratic Party, I’m going to say that they’re far more damaging to Democrats than Piker.
If you want to know why Democrats will never have their own Fox News or other media arm, it’s because the people in charge of the party can’t abide any criticism from the media they pay for. If they give a penny to any kind of media outlet, they expect that outlet to tow the party line. That’s why their efforts, such as FactPost News, are boring flops. Piker has 1.6 million followers on Twitter. FactPost has 187,000, almost an order of magnitude less. Piker isn’t on BlueSky, but MeidasTouch has a million followers on BlueSky while FactPost has 35,500. There’s just no audience for the bland, boring nonsense that those in charge of the Democratic Party are peddling.
