John Mac Ghlionn is a commentator on culture and politics. He contributes regularly to the Globe.
Picture a conservative streamer with millions of young fans who joked about killing his enemies, praised an armed group that his own government lists as terrorists, and told his audience a mass-casualty attack was deserved. He would be demonetized by Tuesday and deplatformed by Thursday. The outrage would be deafening, and most of us would nod along.
Now move that streamer to the left and the career doesn’t just survive; it thrives. His name is Hasan Piker.
For the uninitiated, Piker is a Twitch streamer who has turned left-wing political commentary into a spectator sport. He talks current events into a webcam for hours at a stretch, often to a live audience that runs well into five figures, and has built one of the largest political audiences on the platform.
His record is not subtle. He has said the United States “deserved” the September 11 attacks. He has said he would vote for Hamas over Israel “every single time.” On a livestream he called Orthodox Jews “inbreds.” He has cooed over footage of left-wing militants, platformed guests drawn from those circles, and treated the execution of a health insurance executive as a morale booster. The murder of landlords and business leaders, the occasional political enemy he’d like to see come to a bad end — it all lands in the same distracted cadence of a guy half-watching a video game, which, more often than not, he is.
That packaging is the trick. Revolutionary talk, delivered like he’s reading a takeout menu and repeated until it fades into background noise, reaches a 16-year-old in a way a lecture never could. Piker too often frames his extreme rhetoric as comedy, and as a result, he never has to own it. He expresses contempt for conservatives long before he understands a single policy, and his contempt is the part that sticks. The rest writes itself: If the other side is vile, violence against them is essentially a public service.
The standard that would have buried a right-wing version of him plainly exists. It just gets applied selectively.
Which is what makes the comparison that his side least wants to hear so hard to avoid. Hasan Piker is the Nick Fuentes of the left. The symmetry is close to exact. Both have built young, devoted online congregations. Both speak a dialect of irony that lets them say the unsayable and file it under banter. And they are bound together by a shared loathing of Israel, of its government, and of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in particular.
The treatment he’s received from the online platforms, though, hasn’t matched. Fuentes was thrown off everything. YouTube removed him. X, formerly Twitter, banned him before Elon Musk reinstated him. PayPal, Stripe, and Venmo cut him off. His climb back has been slow and grinding, fought one viewer at a time, and kept afloat by crypto that no institution could shut off. True, he is more influential now than ever. But how is that a justification for differential treatment?
Piker, by contrast, skated. After years of footage that would have ended other careers, his platforms stayed up, his deals stayed intact, and his reach kept climbing.
Until now.
This is where the latest headlines come in. Few people manage to annoy both the US Treasury and the British Home Office in the space of a few days. Piker is an overachiever. Late last month, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control served the 34-year-old with an administrative subpoena regarding his March trip to Cuba, demanding financial and communications records as part of an investigation into whether he violated US sanctions. Then, on the first day of June, the Home Office canceled his electronic travel authorization, ruling, with typical British understatement, that his presence in the UK “may not be conducive to the public good.” And so the man scheduled to speak at SXSW London on June 4, on the panel “How the American Left Learned to Speak the Internet,” learned something else instead: By order of the British government, he wouldn’t be speaking at all.
These are real consequences, and they are also the first he has ever met. But hold them up against what Fuentes experienced and the gap is obvious. A subpoena and a denied travel pass aren’t the same as losing access to YouTube and to payment services.
The one is a bad week. The other is financial exile that takes years to crawl back from.
I dislike bans. When the state decides which opinions are allowed to clear passport control, it’s an ugly business, and the British government has a long history of handling it with all the grace of a drunk attempting to parallel park a double-decker bus. But the objection — that no government should be deciding which opinions are fit to cross a border — would carry more weight if the man being banned were easier to defend. Hasan Piker is not an easy man to defend.
As for his own response, it has been instructive. He has answered the subpoena and the British refusal by blaming Jewish advocacy groups for the United Kingdom’s decision. He may very well be right; the advocacy groups had publicly called for the government to bar him. But “powerful people wanted me gone” is not the same as “I did nothing to warrant it.”
I am not here to mourn Fuentes’s hardships, nor to pile on. His ideas speak for themselves, and I will let them. The point is narrower and impossible to ignore. Two men ran roughly the same play. One was exiled and left to rebuild from the rubble. The other kept his sponsors and his swagger until a foreign government finally said no — a reckoning roughly on the scale of a stern email from HR.
You can resolve that gap in either of two directions, and intellectual honesty demands you choose. Maybe we were too harsh on Fuentes. Maybe deplatforming is a crude tool that manufactures the martyrs it claims to stop, and the answer to bad ideas is daylight and better ideas. That is a defensible position, and I hold a lot of sympathy for it.
Or maybe incitement is incitement. Maybe dead bodies don’t care which flag the shooter waves, and a man who teaches teenagers that violence is acceptable should face the same reckoning whether his enemies are multimillionaires or migrants. Also defensible.
You cannot ostracize one man for his audience and his rhetoric while handing the other a megaphone and a round of applause for the identical act, the only difference being whose side it served.
Piker is articulate and witty, which is precisely the defense his fans reach for and precisely the defense Fuentes’s fans reach for. So pick a rule and apply it to everyone. If banning is wrong, then it was wrong for Fuentes. If banning is sometimes justified, then Piker deserves no exemption.