Let’s Compare Hasan Piker’s Comments to Elite Centrists’
Statements far more reprehensible than anything Hasan Piker has said are regularly written and spoken by prominent liberals in respectable outlets. But because war and Islamophobia are acceptable in elite Democratic circles, they don’t raise an eyebrow.
Elite centrists regularly utter ghastly statements dehumanizing Palestinians and other victims of imperial violence. But unlike Hasan Piker, they are defending the imperial status quo, so their fellow elites don’t bat an eye. (Taylor Hill / FilmMagic)
There’s a lot going on right now: a war that threatens to plunge the entire globe off an economic cliff; a small group of the ultrarich hoarding ever more wealth as economic misery piles up for the rest of us; an unprecedented, multipronged assault on free speech and the press; and the president’s mounting efforts to take over and rig future elections; to name a few.
But that’s not what’s on the Democratic establishment’s mind. If you’re a corporate Democrat, the most important matter in the world right now is a Twitch streamer.
After bleating for more than a year that they desperately needed “a Joe Rogan of the Left,” centrist Democrats are now predictably melting down over the prospect that they might actually get one. For weeks now, the party and its various media arms have been screeching about the growing popularity of socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, and that his various public statements — that “America deserved 9/11,” that shoplifting and other types of theft are no big deal or even “cool,” that Americans “understand” why a rapacious health insurance CEO was murdered, as well as his supposedly being an apologist for authoritarianism and human rights abuses and holding bigoted views — are beyond the pale and disqualify him from being a prominent voice in Democratic politics.
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