"The Axios Show": Hasan Piker wants to campaign for AOC in 2028
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Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker said he "absolutely" wants to campaign for New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if she runs for president in 2028 and said he has talked with AOC and her team, he said in the new episode of "The Axios Show."
Why it matters: Piker, who has millions of followers online, has been a high-profile campaign surrogate this year for a new generation of left-wing candidates, and wants to do the same in 2028.
Driving the news: Despite Piker's ambitions, some Democratic politicians have begun distancing themselves from him because of his controversial commentary.
- Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan's Democratic nominee for the Senate, campaigned with Piker during the Senate primary.
- But after Piker told Axios that he believed America's long history of attacks in the Middle East that have killed civilians made it worse than al-Qaeda "pound for pound," El-Sayed said he disagreed and that Piker didn't speak for his campaign.
- El-Sayed has said Piker won't appear with him in the final weeks of the race before the Nov. 3 election.
In an hour-long interview with Axios, Piker explained his worldview and defended his stances that some Democrats are distancing themselves from:
China: Piker traveled to China last year and has said that the country is the closest government model he would like to see adopted in the U.S.
- He also thinks that "trajectory-wise, I worry that a Chinese child might have better conditions in the next decade or next two decades than an American one. And I think that should worry every American citizen."
Asked about his past praise of Mao Zedong, Piker said "he's a great man of history. Of course, there were a lot of excesses."
- When asked to clarify what he meant as "excesses," Piker said: "Deaths born out of mismanagement and famine."
Political violence: Axios asked Piker about several of his past statements about killing or harming political opponents, and he said they amounted to "three or four choice quotes."
- He said he consistently says that the "appropriate way to deal with political problems, even violent ones, is to advocate, organize, and create a response that is born out of labor militancy, work stoppages and the like, to apply political pressure that way."
- Talking with a friend on his stream, Piker once said of landlords who don't rent their properties: "Kill those motherf*ckers and murder those motherf*ckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their f*cking red capitalist blood, dude."
- He told Axios that "we were messing around. It wasn't a serious call to violence."
Piker — a frequent and aggressive critic of Israel's government — said he believes "Zionism is fascism" and that it was equivalent to neo-Nazism.
- Asked about the potential danger of his rhetoric, Piker said: "I'm not worried that [my followers are] going to be violent against Zionists. No, I'm not."
