Hasan Piker is the left’s answer to Nick Fuentes, says historian Victor Davis Hanson.
Hasan Doğan Piker was born in the United States to Turkish parents. He grew up in Istanbul and was brought up as a Muslim. Piker is known as an American left-radical activist who makes statements and pronouncements that prompt conservatives The Hill to react.
Piker is an influencer, podcaster, commentator and a strong critic of Israel, who has captured the attention of many on the radical left. Piker is antisemitic and appears as a supporter of terror groups such as Hamas and the Islamic State.
Precisely with regard to antisemitism, Piker might well share a platform with far-right figure Nick Fuentes, who has on several occasions been accused of holding similar views.
Trump får kritikk etter middag med Kanye West og den hvite nasjonalisten Nick Fuentes
The Hill opens its article on Piker by recounting that it had journalists present during the shooting at the correspondents’ dinner at the Washington Hilton, and complains somewhat ironically that they never received their main courses.
The advantage was that the dinner lasted for a shorter time than usual, the writer Chris Stirewalt believes.
The reactions of the guests, whom Stirewalt describes as “spoiled journalists and influencers behaving as if they had survived the siege of Sevastopol”, did not impress him.
Please forgive them for recounting their ordeal to an audience that includes the many social workers, police officers and others who go to work every day knowing that today may be the day they meet their potential murderer.
A country where children conduct drills to handle active-shooter situations at school is hardly a country that is impressed by a gala dinner being interrupted.
This seems somewhat unfair on the part of the writer. After all: who knows how one would react if a person opened fire in a venue in which one is present, particularly if one is in the same room as a president who has previously been subjected to several assassination attempts?
If one is exposed to such a situation, most people would hardly think that one ought to remain calm simply because children are also exposed to similar events.
Some Republicans believe that the demonising rhetoric from President Trump’s many critics contributed to provoking the attack. Certain Democrats claim that Trump himself was behind the shooting, and NRK Dagsrevyen of course joined in, as it has done several times previously.
Former President Barack Obama called for clarification of the motive of the shooter Cole Allen, after his manifesto was made known to the entire world.
Hasan Piker, the left’s answer to Nick Fuentes
Hasan Piker, influencer and left-radical activist, was a guest on a New York Times podcast last week. There, he spoke very casually about crime.
Piker took part alongside Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker in a “lively discussion” about the “trend” of “stealing small items from large companies”, and fully embodied the role that has made him so popular and divisive among progressives and Democrats: the slick, scandalous ideological bad boy.
Piker described stealing art from the Louvre as “small items”, something he regards as a correct Marxist reaction to the oppression of capitalism.
When the subject turned to the murder of Brian Thompson, the director of the insurance company UnitedHealthcare, Piker began to speak about the concept of “social murder”, coined by Karl Marx’s co-author Friedrich Engels in 1845.
The concept of social murder roughly means that when someone is arbitrarily judged to be an enemy of the people, you may kill them and escape punishment.
“Americans have a very strict attitude towards crime and punishment. They view this issue in very black-and-white terms. And yet, because of the extensive suffering that the private healthcare system had inflicted on the average American, I saw that so many immediately understood why this death had occurred.”
The banality of evil
It was acceptable to kill Thompson, since he himself was already guilty of murder, Piker claimed. The killing was therefore a form of justice.
Host Nadja Spiegelman nodded in agreement.
“I wonder whether something like murder, for example the killing of a health insurance executive, is merely a release valve for anger, or whether it is actually an effective political act?”
This is not merely a foolish question, it is a malicious question, writes Stirewalt. Murders committed by self-appointed enforcers are no more a “release valve” or “political act” than it is “law and order” when police kill a helpless suspect in custody – something that always provokes strong reactions from both the left and the right in politics.
Such acts are murder and a violation of the dignity of human life. To justify them as means of achieving desired political outcomes is more than merely distasteful. It is “the fearsome, word- and thought-defying banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt warned us against.
The left in the United States has now reached a level where murder is discussed as “an effective political act”. It is difficult to appear more radical, not to say extreme. Many left-leaning Americans believe that President Trump himself must bear all the blame.
The reactions following the assassination attempts against Trump are a telling symbol. Several of his critics have previously expressed near disappointment that the attempts did not succeed. Others have claimed that Trump himself staged the assassination attempts, even after the shooting in Butler, where Trump was millimetres from death, and a firefighter on stage a few metres behind Trump actually lost his life.
It is uncertain whether Cole Allen was familiar with Piker, or had heard of Arendt and Engels. In any case, that would not make Piker responsible for Allen’s alleged crimes, Stirewalt points out.
But regardless of how well Allen knew Piker’s particular form of revolutionary chic, his manifesto arrives at similar conclusions:
“So long as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is obliged to submit to what is imposed unlawfully.”
Victor Davis Hanson attempts to determine why Trump has been subjected to more assassination attempts involving firearms than any other president in the history of the United States, and he concludes that people such as Hasan Piker, whom Hanson calls “the left’s answer to Nick Fuentes”, are a partial explanation.
Hanson, as usual, has several good points, which you can see in the clip of a few minutes below.