Hasan Piker, left-wing star and self-identified Marxist, may have activated a shock collar on his dog when he reached off-camera during one of his podcasts last year, but he denies the accusation. There's no clear evidence he did it, but the camera caught him when he was viewing a video of a South Vietnamese refugee saying that she’d suffered at the hands of the communists in her home country. Piker's response: “Fuck you idiotic old lady. Shut the fuck up. Who has fucked you harder—Ho Chi Minh or the United States of America. Fuck this Christian supremacist psychotic refugee. Why don't you go back to Vietnam.”
Who’s the psychotic one? That's a toxic load. And now that Piker has infiltrated their party and is campaigning with their candidates—e.g. Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democratic Party’s nominee for a US Senate seat—the Dems have the delicate task of dealing with his incendiary rhetoric and extremist views. Piker deleted the segment involving the Vietnamese woman, but it lives on the internet.
Piker detests the capitalism that has given him a life of luxury—he drives a $140,000 Porsche Taycan—but won't brook any criticism of communism. He wears his love for Mao Zedong, whom he's called “one of the great leaders of this world,” on his sleeve. Historians have determined that the Chinese dictator, whom Piker has compared to the Founding Fathers of the United States, was responsible for the deaths of up to 70 million people. Had his well-off family been in China during Mao’s reign of terror, they’d have been stripped of their assets and forced into struggle sessions. Still, from a safe distance, Piker’s partial to murderous revolutionaries, including Castro, Lenin, and Che Guevara.
One group that Mao targeted for executions during his class-struggle campaign in the early-1950s was landlords. About landlords, Piker once had this to say on his podcast: “Kill those motherfuckers. Let the streets soak in their red, capitalist blood, dude.”
Dude, that's some scary class-enemy rhetoric against people who provide necessary rental housing. When that language brought him unwanted attention, Piker said he was being “hyperbolic.” People can choose to believe that if they want to, but the Democrats are going to have to get a much bigger—and sturdier—tent if they roll the dice and choose to embrace someone who sounds like a modern version of Robespierre.
Piker’s core audience is young white males, who gravitate to him despite the fact that he does things like endorsing a statement once made by current Zohran Mamdani aide, Cea Weaver, in which she called for the government to “impoverish the white middle class,” and called home ownership a “racist, failed public policy.” Piker, a Turkish-American who identifies as white, owns a 5.5-bathroom house in West Hollywood purchased for $2.74 million.
Piker weaseled out of that contradiction in his usual way, stating in a 2023 interview that he was a homeowner himself and what he really opposed was people renting out their homes to make money. So when he says that he “loves” Cea Weaver after she calls for the abolition of home ownership it makes him look like a phony socialist who's more of a shock jock than anything else.
That's the bad news for the Democrats. Assuming he continues to make inroads into the party, the good news is that Piker's influence is undeniable, making him useful. Across the five social media programs he's popular on, Piker has almost 11 million followers. Factoring in the overlap of those following him on multiple platforms, a safe estimate of his individual follower count would be around five million. In the most recent 2026 Democratic primary cycle, Piker actively supported three winners: Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, and El-Sayed. He also supported Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, who came within a hair of defeating her Democratic primary opponent even though he'd outspent her by almost two to one.
Political strategist James Carville has claimed he’ll leave the Democratic Party if Piker’s allowed into the tent, while others are trying to figure out ways to be more flexible with a polarizing, yet exciting figure the UK has denied entry to. The party’s facing a coalition and message dilemma: Piker can reach left-leaning, politically alienated young voters, but his confrontational and violence-embracing agitprop creates reputational and electoral risks for candidates who embrace him, and therefore the Democratic Party in general.
It's like a big, traditional orchestra pondering whether or not it should bring in a brilliant, but very untraditional, musician as a featured soloist. It'll put young people in the seats, but it might throw the whole balance of the orchestra off and keep people away from the concert hall. Welcoming into the fold the Hamas defender—"Hamas is a thousand times better than the Israeli state”—who said that America “deserved 9/11” would be a calculated risk. But the lengthy, neutral-toned profile that The Wall Street Journal just published on Piker suggests that the welcome mat is already half unrolled.
The Democrats are desperate for the younger voters Piker reaches (like an older brother, he says), especially the disenchanted males who’ve abandoned them. The leadership of the center-left, “Third Way” portion of the party leadership has explicitly urged Democrat candidates not to “cozy up” to Piker. While there are legitimate reasons for this concern, the insurgency movement he speaks for is where all the energy is in the Democratic party at the moment. There are plenty of indications that the Democrats would benefit from moving towards Piker's populist economic views.
It’s a gamble to associate with the radical who once said, “We are the country that defeated the USSR, unfortunately.” But If Abdul El-Sayed defeats Republican Mike Rogers in the November general election in Michigan—a state that Trump took in 2024—to become the first Muslim US Senator, that would be a sign that the momentum is moving towards taking that risk.