Hasan Piker Is the Left’s Candace Owens. The Press Treats Him Like a Rock Star.

Hasan Piker has been on my radar the way a lot of things are on my political news radar — peripherally, occasionally, enough to know he exists and maybe even matters without really knowing much about him.

Now, I edit and write for a political media criticism outlet, and have spent close to three decades tracking political narratives and the voices that carry them. Piker gets Mediaite coverage when something he says breaks through into mainstream news. Which, it turns out, happens fairly regularly, but almost always for the same reason: He says ugly things on purpose. For the clicks.

I didn’t know the full extent of it until Monday, when CNN ran a segment on The Lead that I found genuinely interesting, not because it was sensational, but because it clarified. Jake Tapper laid out the record calmly and stepped back. His guests did the analysis. By the end, I had a much better understanding of Piker than I had before: that his public profile and his actual record are almost completely different, and that the gap between them didn’t happen by accident.

Piker has told his audience some remarkably ugly things, like it “doesn’t matter” whether rapes occurred during the October 7 attacks because it “doesn’t change the dynamic” for his analysis. He said it would be “fucking hilarious” if Orthodox Jews got killed fighting in Lebanon, describing them as “inbred” — and stood by it. He called Hamas the lesser of two evils. There was the “Zionist pig dog” business. He said America “deserved” September 11, a comment he later walked back, unlike most of the others.

None of that is obscure. None of it was hidden. Tapper didn’t break news of these past comments; he just put them in one place and pointed at them, which, given what came before,  turns out to have been something of a radical act in today’s political media landscape. Because what came before was a year of the mainstream press building Hasan Piker into something Democrats could use.

Roughly a year ago, The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran what felt like a coronation as Piker becoming the face of a new progressive masculinity, the left’s answer to Joe Rogan, an essential voice for a generation that would sooner eat glass than watch cable news. GQ sent a writer to his backyard gym and filed something that read like a fan letter with a press credential. The Guardian. Wired. Four major outlets, roughly six months, all organized around the same portrait: handsome, influential, authentic, occasionally edgy.

The “doesn’t matter” comment about October 7 sexual violence does not appear in any of these profiles. Not buried. Not contextualized. Just completely omitted as if it was never said.

There’s a term for this that got its workout during the Trump years, largely as a liberal critique of conservative-friendly press coverage. Sanewashing. The argument was that the press kept subordinating the behavior to the strategy — that the most disqualifying material kept receding into atmosphere while the horse race consumed the foreground. It was a fair critique. It was also supposed to cut both ways.

Piker’s career runs on the same shock-jock architecture that built Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Say something outrageous. Generate outrage. Collect the clicks. The politics are different of course — he’s working a progressive younger audience radicalized by Gaza rather than a MAGA base radicalized by immigration — but the machinery is identical. When legacy media covers Carlson or Owens, that machinery is the story. The inflammatory statement leads. The record gets examined. When they covered Piker, they wrote about his workout regimen and his pearl necklaces.

The reach is the story. The influence is the story. The record is not.

So Tapper ran the segment. And then something interesting happened.

Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo publication came after Tapper almost immediately — suggesting his background made him an unreliable narrator, implying corporate interests and Zionist influence had clouded his judgment. It did not mention that Tapper had aired multiple segments critical of Israel that same week. It treated the segment as a cancellation campaign rather than a journalism call.

This is worth pausing on, because the Zeteo framing does something specific and telling. It collapses “criticism of Israel” and “calling Jews inbred pig dogs” into the same category, then accuses anyone who distinguishes between them of operating in bad faith. Plenty of journalists (including at this outlet)  have covered Israeli policy critically without drawing this kind of response. What Tapper documented was categorically different: a public figure dismissing the rape of Israeli women as analytically irrelevant, calling Jewish deaths hilarious, deploying ethnic slurs. That isn’t a foreign policy position. Treating it as one isn’t a defense of Piker. It’s sanewashing with a press release attached.

Here’s the reversal that nobody in these profiles attempted. A podcaster with three million followers says rape in a terror attack “doesn’t matter.” Describes a religious group as “inbred” and stands by it. Does that record vanish into a Times Magazine profile organized around his physique and his cultural fluency? The profile doesn’t get written. It shouldn’t — because those statements would be correctly understood as disqualifying.

The asymmetry is hard to miss.

Piker, to his credit, has been clear about what the favorable coverage is for. He told Wired it functions as protection against deplatforming efforts — his framing, not mine. He gamed the press. That’s fine, that’s what he does. The more interesting question is why the press found it so easy to be gamed.

The answer is the transaction it always is. Institutional credibility for youth-demographic clout. Piker wanted mainstream legitimacy. The outlets wanted proximity to his audience. Everyone got what they came for. The record was the price of admission and nobody blinked.

Now Democrats are paying for it. They followed the press’s lead, decided Piker was a viable asset, and are finding out that the record nobody emphasized has a way of surfacing anyway — in opponent research, in primary coverage, in Monday night CNN segments. Zohran Mamdani is explaining the photos. Abdul El-Sayed is defending the rally. The laundering has a shelf life.

Hasan Piker doesn’t especially interest me. The press decision to absorb his record into the background — and then attack the one anchor who decided not to — interests me a great deal. That transaction isn’t new, and I won’t pretend Mediaite has never made some version of it.

The tell is always what gets left out.

Watch above via CNN.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!