https://jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/the-case-of-hasan-piker-how-to-avoid
~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
 |
 |
I’d be fine if I never heard the name Hasan Piker again.
Not necessarily because of Piker, the extremely popular and influential leftist streamer, but because there isn’t a corporate Democrat alive who won’t stop posting about Piker and talking about Piker and freaking out about Piker and asking nominee Abdul El-Sayed about Piker. It’s endless and exhausting and that’s the point.
Piker has become the topic du jour on centrist social media and every cable news show that approximately twenty-five hundred people put on in the background while they scroll their phones and more posts about Piker. When El-Sayed is actually invited on one of these shows, he’s not asked about policies or what direction he wants to take the country. No. He’s bombarded with quotes from Piker’s livestreams and tasked with distancing himself.
Forgive me. I’m having a moment of deja vu.
People might have forgotten now as the moment has been more or less pigeonholed in favor of a hagiography that now smooths out Barack Obama’s narrative as he has been the de facto leader of the Democratic Party for close to two decades, but there was a period of time in which Obama’s candidacy for the party’s nomination was in extreme peril as comments by his pastor at United Church of Christ, Jeremiah Wright. Wright had been taped sermonizing that the attacks of September 11th had been “America’s chickens coming home to roost” after years of imperial violence.
You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing the clips and watching one host after another on every channel pontificating on what the consequences would be and hyperventilating over what the comments might infer about Obama himself. Hillary Clinton, at that time fighting a blood war with Obama over the nomination, saw it as a possible last-ditch effort to stall the gathering momentum.
Obama would denounce Wright eventually and deliver one of the defining speeches of his career, the incident would become a footnote, and eventually he would complete his takeover of the Democratic Party machine.
The Obama / Wright controversy is instructive. In the time of insurgent candidates threatening entrenched party machinery, the framing is key. As elements of party and capitalist superstructure notice a threat to control of how issues are discussed and approached, one of the quickest means of defense is to highlight either the insurgent’s “extremism” or, lacking that option, find anyone near them that can help to make the argument that the change itself is “dangerous.” El-Sayed and other leftists have taken positions that are extremely more popular than what corporate Democrats offer and so options are limited. El-Sayed, for all intents and purposes, seems to be a pretty stand-up guy. Of course, who knows, but there’s no evidence of the contrary just yet. Corporate Democrats can’t debate the issues, can’t slander the candidate beyond dogwhistling Islamaphobia (which they have done), and can only flirt with framing that the electorate is either dangerous themselves or else are susceptible to manipulation. This will change, but it’s dangerous footing.
Enter Piker.
Since 2018 Piker has streamed almost constantly. If he isn’t on the campaign trail with friendly candidates, you can likely find him sitting in front of a camera every day of the week for upwards of hours at a time. He’s loud, combative, and, in the dominant parlance of streamers, he is regularly outrageous. Piker’s popularity has risen parallel to the rise of leftist sentiment among young people looking for a critique of capitalism that is accessible and entertaining. If the whole “the Democrats need a Joe Rogan” thing hadn’t been so stupid and blatantly transparent, you could make the case with Piker.
I’ll lay my cards on the table: Piker isn’t my cup of tea. I’m a leftist, but it isn’t a homogeneous identity regardless of what centrists and the Right will try and tell you. My particular brand of leftism is rooted in labor fights, community organizing, and a tradition that has been held in parts of the country for hundreds of years. The Online Left doesn’t particularly do it for me. There are different flavors, ranging from ironic detachment to people who want to flirt with the militant and authoritarian tactics of despots. I’m not into either of those. You can see the problems with capitalism without throwing up your hands and having a laugh at how fucked we are, which is just an excuse to not get involved. I see the dictators of communism as just variants of other authoritarians, all of whom used whatever ideology they branded themselves as cover for their own enrichment and empowerment.
The point here isn’t to actual engage with what leftism is and what actual critiques of power and capitalism are, but to frame a conversation centrists don’t want to have. Piker is loud and visible and campaigned for El-Sayed. It is much more beneficial for entrenched interests to latch onto Piker and draw leftism as a whole, which, a reminder, is broadly popular with Democratic voters and, considering the Far Right has used the fascist feint and strategic capitalist critiques as a means of gaining power, the broader population. So, Piker becomes the focus and it’s helpful to avoid the whole uncomfortable truth and the debate they can’t win.
And, what’s more, it is ownership of what is “acceptable” and what isn’t. The comment that keeps making the rounds is Piker saying that America “deserved 9/11” on a livestream in 2019. Piker apologized days later for the remark and called it “inarticulate,” but the nature of the comment and the faux-outrage is telling. Piker did communicate that the attacks of September 11th happened because of U.S. actions in the Middle-East and that remains factually accurate. People can stomp and clap and repeat George W. Bush’s bullshit claim it was because “they hate our freedoms,” but anyone serious about politics and who thinks about it for more than a milliseconds understands the tragedy was part of the blowback for actions in the region.
In corporate and centrists circles, this is yet another matter of controlling framing. You cannot have an adult and informed conversation about why something like 9/11 ever took place. It’s unacceptable and this is because control of perception is key to their remaining in power. If you do look critically at major events like 9/11 or the War on Terror, what emerges is proof that the people who still control political machines and corporate media have ceaselessly supported policies and actions that have hurt millions of people around the world and have brought America to its place of crisis. They were wrong. Consistently and undeniably wrong. And you’ll notice there’s no hand-wringing over any of this or any number of mainstream pundits or voices who are continually voicing genocidal beliefs or advocating for actions that would undoubtedly kill many, many more innocent people. That isn’t a conversation they want to have because, again, they cannot win it. Instead, the conversation is wrestled through mainstream consensus to a place where it becomes about a person who said something inarticulately even while the spirit of the comment remains true.
Again, Piker isn’t my guy. Never has been. But he does represent not only an ascendent desire for leftist politics but also a shift from ironic detachment by younger leftists into actual organizing in order to change the political paradigm. The moment he got off camera and put on a suit and got on the ground for a campaign he went from being a personality centrists could roll their eyes at to an actual threat to their power and control. Hence, this exhausting campaign to focus exclusively on what he has said on-camera.
El-Sayed has repeatedly distanced himself from these comments, which is part of the streamlining of an insurgent candidate that a machine expects, but unlike Obama, who happened to be a centrist candidate himself, the mark against El-Sayed is that he intends to pursue actual reform of the present system. Obama’s win of the Democratic nomination was powered by broad popular support. That’s what got his foot in the door. What led to his takeover of the party machinery was the synthesizing of this broad support and his ability, in conversations with both the party apparatchik and members of the corporate media superstructure, was his convincing them he wasn’t the wild-eyed, leftist, socialist he was portrayed as or that some of his supporters believed that he secretly was. The pairing of El-Sayed to Piker will not melt away the way Obama was able to distance himself from Wright. If El-Sayed were to give a speech in the same vein as Obama’s “A More Perfect Union,” it likely wouldn’t matter to the centrist Democrats.
And so, we are now stuck in this tiring cycle that will continue on and on. Centrists will continue to claim they’re not trying to sink El-Sayed’s candidacy in Michigan and that they’d be fine with it if he just “moderated.” The threat is quite simple. Disavow Piker all you want, but you’ll be held hostage by this framing unless you show a willingness to get with the program and moderate the leftist ideology. He’s also disavowed the statements, distanced himself, and yet the deluge continues.
For anyone interested in El-Sayed’s success or even just compelled to give leftist change a try, it’s on them to ignore the noise and simply engage with the issues and the conversations that are trying to be distracted from.
No comments:
Post a Comment