You are welcome. I didn’t think it was controversial at all since he openly says so, but fair enough.
True, it’s a real boy-who-cried-wolf situation, like I mentioned above:
Honestly IMO Piker is worse than a Marxist who only presents unobjectionable things about unions and public healthcare on CNN.
A lot of the controversies where “the media took him out of context” are really the kind of irony poisoning that right wingers do except it’s in favor of communist countries or Hezbollah instead of fascists.
That’s very meta. You could be talking about the subjects of the thread, and/or the participants in the thread!
Well it sounds like a legit lawsuit.
But I fucking hate Piker. Everything I’ve ever read from him makes me hunch up like a cat.
And right now he’s a pain in my ass, because he campaigned with El-Sayed and El-Sayed won’t just fucking say “I don’t agree with Piker, I just wanted his publicity” instead he dodges the fucking question every time which makes me not trust him and makes it harder to convince others to trust him. Now I have to vote for the guy who won’t disavow Hasan fucking Piker.
Piker appears to have the political nuance of your average 15-year-old. And El-Sayed thinks, “yeah, that’s a good play.”
Christ.
(bolding mine)
I have been one of those people basically my whole life, and this is literally the first time I have ever heard anyone claim that those two terms don’t mean the same thing. There isn’t any consensus about what that thing is, of course!
Also, there are a great many tendencies with “ideological roots” in Marxism, and claiming the ones you’re OK with aren’t really part of Marx’s legacy is a textbook “No true Scotsman” fallacy.
He’s essentially as close as you can possibly get to a Nick Fuentes of the left.
Wikipedia starts off the article on Social Democracy by saying that it should not be confused with either Socialist Democracy or Democratic Socialism.
Meanwhile, the article for Democratic Socialism specifies,
This article is about socialism emphasising democracy. For the form of democracy emphasising socialism, see Socialist democracy. For the ideology focusing on the humanisation of capitalism, see Social democracy.
It’s true that until recently in the US both ideologies were something of a footnote and there wasn’t much of a distinction made; but as these movements have gained more momentum in the US, I think the distinction is important.
But it would be fair to say that many Americans call identify by these terms in a very sloppy way and that policies are more important than terms when it comes to American politicians who may very well be identifying by a term that doesn’t match their stated policies.
This would be a totally fair critique IF my problem with Democratic Socialists was their Marxist legacy which I was willing to ignore for Social Democrats. That’s not the case. My problem with Democratic Socialists is that I fundamentally disagree with their end goal of doing away with capitalism and private ownership of the means of production. I fundamentally agree with the end goal of Social Democrats - a capitalist system with a stronger safety net sounds great. If the term Social Democrat in the US didn’t have the baggage of mask on Democratic Socialists using it to infiltrate Liberal spaces, I’d probably call myself a Social Democrat. In the context of other countries, I’m more than happy to identify with Social Democracy parties, like the late Israeli Labor party or the new The Democrats party.
Social democracy has roots in Marx as well as plenty of socialist strands of thought. I don’t think anyone denies this. But in 2026 being a social democrat says next to nothing about if you’re a marxist.
Social democracy also has roots in conservatives like Bismarck whi believed an expansive welfare state would protect conservative governments from revolution, but we aren’t all Bismarck-ists.
I don’t agree with orthodox Marxism but it’s not an objectionable belief system - I think they believe some silly things but I don’t think their beliefs inspire them to be hateful or anything. The “hiding your power level” is more objectionable to me. And Marxist-Leninism is an objectionable ideology to me given that it basically relies on whitewashing the horrors of the USSR.
This may come as a shock, but I would be willing to bet MOST people on this board would not have had any idea who Hasan Piker was until this current spate of reporting regarding this lawsuit.
I had literally never heard of the guy prior to you ranting about him (in another thread). In fact, I’ve still never seen him mentioned once in any of my news sources outside of the SDMB, all of which are on the left.
That’s interesting because I found out about him from an Atlantic article complaining about something he said during one of his regular appearances in the New York Times. The Atlantic was complaining because Piker and some others had appeared to promote theft from major corporations as an act of resistance. They were all bragging about things they’d stolen (it was very cringe, like taking a lemon from Whole Foods.) Piker admitted he saw no moral problem with stealing a car.
Knowing nothing about Piker I thought the reaction to that interview was all a bit hysterical and obviously he wasn’t literally endorsing theft, but having since learned more about him, I’m not so sure he wasn’t serious.
A lot of what I’ve picked up has been from The Atlantic as well as news coverage of his relationship with El-Sayed, the Michigan Senate candidate I voted for in the primary. Piker is considered an anti-Semite by many and based on some of the things I’ve heard that seems like an accurate conclusion. A lot of Jewish people in Michigan are having a hard time voting for El-Sayed in part because of his association with Piker.
I was torn between both El-Sayed and Haley Stevens in the primary but ultimately El-Sayed got my vote because Haley is an Israeli government apologist who said she supported unconditional unlimited funding of Israel. The whole Israel/Palestine issue is a real deal in Michigan where we’ve got the greatest concentration of Arabs outside of the Middle East and a pretty significant contingent of Jews as well.
So while you may not have heard of Piker, he’s pretty relevant right now to what’s going on in politics, and he’s definitely in the news.
I don’t know why these aren’t generating previews.
Link to NY Times article. “A Provocative Streamer Creates Headaches for El-Sayed in Key Senate Race.”
This article from The Atlantic is one of the few articles I’ve seen that actually tries to engage with the real Hasan instead of the skin deep “I just want healthcare” veneer.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/10/hasan-piker-podcast-democrat/688956/
It’s definitely worth a read but in case the paywall blocks you:
The full article is much longer, and much more damning. If you have access to the page beyond the wall (or if someone could share a gift link), I strongly recommend it.
Removed quoted material - Miller
That was supposed to be a gift link but I’m not sure if it worked. Thanks!
Yeah, I put him squarely in the camp of “dangerous extremist.”
I admit that given everything going on in my life during the primaries I was literally cramming for the vote on the night before. I did not have time to go deeply into this whole business with Piker before I voted, but even then I was on the fence, because it wasn’t a good look for El-Sayed.
But after I did vote for him, and I saw El-Sayed dodge this question so many times - why this guy? Man it just pissed me off. There’s nothing I hate more than politicians who won’t take accountability.
(Oh, but one thing that annoyed me about the Atlantic article is the implication that because Piker is okay with theft, that means everyone’s okay with theft… Give me a fucking break. Piker is his own moral crisis, I don’t have anything to do with him.)
Yours worked but I linked a different article, the one titled “What Hasan Piker Believes”.
I actually hadn’t read the one you linked previously (although I’m familiar with the NYT podcast being discussed) so I do appreciate that gift link!
Yeah, it greatly concerns me too. Not enough to vote for anyone other than the Democrat if I lived there, but still, off-putting.
My most charitable guess is that El Sayed has no time to watch Hasan Piker’s content and is relying on staff and advisors who are sympathetic to Hasan’s positions (aides and campaign workers tend to be more extreme than the candidates they assist, which makes a certain kind of sense).
True - that’s the worst thing about Piker - the way his odious views can be used to paint Democrats with a broad brush.
He definitely sounds like a complete dipshit who shouldn’t be given any sort of platform (which might explain why I haven’t heard of him outside of the SDMB).
Not only does he have a platform, he makes seven figures a year performing his act on it.
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I’ve removed most of the quoted text from Babale’s post, as it was beyond the limits of fair use.
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