Hasan Piker is left's Nick Fuentes. Why do they embrace him? | Opinion

For all the legacy media’s obsessive warnings about far-right extremist Nick Fuentes, it has shown far less interest in confronting a dangerous left-wing counterpart: Hasan Piker.

The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has called Fuentes, a 27-year-old online influencer, a “Hitler-loving white nationalist.” The Times has run ominous headlines like “Nick Fuentes’s Rise Puts MAGA Movement in a ‘Time of Choosing’ ” and “Nick Fuentes: A White Nationalist Problem for the Right.”

The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang warns that Fuentes is “not just another alt-right boogeyman” and that the “rise of the white-nationalist streamer should worry us even more than it already does.”

And The Washington Post recently opined about how Fuentes “spreads hate online – and fans pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars.” 

Many of these hand-wringing pieces seek to tie Fuentes more broadly to the Republican Party and President Donald Trump’s MAGA base. 

Meanwhile, the news media largely ignores the rise of a similarly repugnant force on the left: Hasan Piker. Piker, 34, has more than 3 million followers and streams hours of political content each day on Twitch.

Piker is an anti-Zionist, capitalist-hating Marxist who appears far too comfortable with political violence, so long as it serves the “right” cause.

Yet while mainstream conservatives have largely kept Fuentes on the fringe, Democrats and much of the media have been far more willing to embrace Piker.

He was invited to be one of the “Creators for Kamala” at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. This April, he also campaigned with Michigan's Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

The Times ran a glowing profile of Piker a year ago, headlined "A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere’." It praised his “brand of masculinity” as both politically effective and a major source of his online appeal.

Then this April, The Times published an interview with Piker under the headline, “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” More on this interview in a bit. 

Piker's rise comes amid a troubling tolerance for political violence on the left

Piker’s growing popularity among progressives has coincided with a broader and deeply disturbing rise in left-wing tolerance for political violence.

Just on April 25, a gunman targeted President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, marking the third assassination attempt against him since 2024.

Polling also suggests an alarming ideological divide. A YouGov survey released in September following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk found liberals, particularly young liberals, were more likely than conservatives to express satisfaction over the deaths of political opponents. Among the “very liberal,” 25% said political violence can sometimes be justified.

After the December 2024 assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, another survey found that a shocking 41% of voters under 30 viewed his murder as “acceptable.”

That cultural environment makes Piker’s rhetoric especially concerning.

On his show, he has declared: “Yeah, kill them! Kill those motherf---ers and murder those motherf---ers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their f---ing red capitalist blood, dude.”

The New York Times platforms Piker's extremism

Despite Piker’s long record of violent and revolutionary rhetoric, The Times has shown little hesitation in legitimizing him.

In an April video conversation with Times opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, Piker casually joked, alongside plenty of laughter, about shoplifting or “microlooting” as a form of political protest.

The premise was absurd but revealing: that stealing from corporations like Whole Foods could somehow serve as populist resistance.

Yes, this was presented seriously by The New York Times.

Even more alarming was Piker’s discussion of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Drawing on Friedrich Engels, the Marxist theorist and coauthor of “The Communist Manifesto,” Piker invoked the concept of “social murder” to rationalize public sympathy for Thompson’s killer.

“Brian Thompson … was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder,” Piker said.

He went on to blame America’s private health care system for “tremendous amounts of pain” and argued that this systemic suffering explained why many people immediately understood or sympathized with Thompson’s death.

Rather than clearly condemning murder, Piker framed an assassination through ideological justification, portraying the victim as morally complicit in broader structural harm.

In other words, Piker sympathizes with a cold-blooded murderer for “social” reasons.

Democrats and the legacy media are right to call out Nick Fuentes. He deserves it. But that’s no excuse to ignore a very real extremist on the left.

Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at [email protected] or on X: @Ingrid_Jacques