Ziwe destroys Hasan Piker in amazing interview: bravo!

Ziwe is a comedian and YouTuber who does funny interviews with notable people in which she knocks them down a peg by pointing out their hypocrisies and inconsistencies. And she did this extremely well with her latest guest, Hasan Piker . In fact, she did a better job than many people in the mainstream media, who have asked Piker about his controversial statements but not really gotten to the bottom of why he is a ridiculous attention-seeking fool and also a loathsome political extremist.

Indeed, what Ziwe did so successfully is point out the absurdity of Piker looking and acting and even dressing like a communist, while he lives richly and is in fact a privileged nepo baby who got his start in media career because of his uncle, Cenk Uygur.

And while I’ve pointed this out before, I feel compelled to do so again: Wearing the suit of Chairman Mao, a brutal dictator whose economic policies caused widespread famine that killed millions, is really not super different, in my opinion, from wearing a Nazi suit. People would not think fondly of somebody who did the latter, and so we should not give Piker a pass for doing the former.

Unfortunately, while we all accept that fascists were evil, brutal killers, sometimes the media fails to call attention to the significant number of atrocities committed by communists. Piker is either unaware of communist evils or doesn’t care, or even supports them.

In a detailed takedown of Piker, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait delves deeply into the supportive things he has said about communist regimes over the years.

Piker has even praised North Korea! He said, “it’s certainly not as bad as the way that Western media presents it,” and that the country’s meager economic progress over the years “shows you that a better future is possible for all of us.” He thinks the U.S. should aspire to have North Korean levels of success. This would of course necessitate going massively backward as a nation and as a people, and enshrining an appalling autocracy. Because, make no mistake, North Korea is one of the most oppressive places on earth.

Chait writes in summary that Piker is correct to complain he is often quoted out of context — but that’s because the context makes his quotes much worse.

But back to the Ziwe interview. She calls out Piker for mocking a Vietnamese refugee who had been warning about the dangers of communism. Here is how Piker answered that accusation : He said, yeah, I mocked her, and I was right do so.

I think that really gets to the heart of why he is such an utterly repellant figure. Piker has contempt for everyone who is not as far left as he is, and that includes pretty much everybody. And he’s just utterly indifferent to the actual existing suffering under communist regimes, historically and at present, which was and is several orders of magnitude worse than anything the Trump administration has done.

Now, maybe you think I’m wasting my time spending so much oxygen on a Twitch streamer. Certainly conservative media has gone overboard in airing their grievances with him. What I’m worried about is not so much Piker himself, but what he represents and where independent left media is headed.

Is this the future? Someone who cosplays as Mao and thinks it’s cool to shout down anti-communist dissidents? Who blasts the billionaires from the comforts of first class or his million-dollar mansion or the Oscars after parties? Who wants to take over the Democratic Party and staff it with people who admire foreign extremists and passionately hate moderation, decency, and essentially all the things that make American great?

So again, kudos to Ziwe for making Piker look ridiculous, because he is ridiculous.

Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary.