Last Saturday, odious “Marxist” influencer Hasan Piker—nephew of Young Turk cofounder Cenk Uygur—was served a subpoena by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
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Piker visited Cuba in March as part of the “Nuestra América Convoy,” a delegation of “communist sympathizers, activists, and influencers” (Fox News) who took supplies to the island’s beleaguered, bedraggled Communist Party and provided a much-needed propaganda boost in the face of mounting U.S. pressure.
The investigation will consider whether Piker and others, perhaps as many as 40 people, violated U.S. sanctions and laws by visiting the island and, in particular, by supplying the regime with goods. U.S. law imposes a wide range of restrictions on financial transactions with Cuba, administered through the Cuban Asset Control Regulations.
Piker hasn’t taken the news well.
After a tough-talking response on X, in which he said, “the american govt would rather try to criminalize delivering aid to a country we’ve starved, than punish the Epstein class,” Piker seemed anything but tough in front of the camera.
“I’m not gonna lie to you guys,” he said, visibly shaking, his voice fraying.
“It’s not great. The news is not great, okay? I mean, it’s bullsh-t, but still not great that they’re after your boy. They’re up my ass.”
In the days since, Piker has sung like the proverbial little yellow songbird, in line with the imperatives of the extremely online influencer, for whom nothing, including self-incriminating statements, can be kept private. Indeed, Piker may already have put his foot in it long before the subpoena landed on his doorstep. In resurfaced footage, he talked about how the Cuban government reached out to his “middleman” with a special offer to bring him to the island, which included the promise of uninterrupted internet access so he could remain in contact with his retarded followers at all times.
In a six-hour stream on Monday, Piker identified the multimillionaire Neville Roy Singham as the main target of the investigation. Piker described Singham as the “funding vehicle” for “a lot of political movements,” adding that it’s “like totally f-cking ridiculous to try and stop the political advocacy of an American citizen.”
This is a crucial admission, because it’s the funding and logistics of the visit that the feds want to unravel. Piker’s claim he was part of a simple “humanitarian mission” to “deliver aid” won’t hold water now.
Singham, an American-born businessman who currently lives in Shanghai with his wife, Jodie Evans, cofounder of activist group CODEPINK, is one of the most important big-money backers of left-wing activism in the U.S.—a homegrown George Soros. Since 2017, it has been estimated that Singham has paid close to $300 million to various left-wing groups in the U.S., including the People’s Forum in New York City, CODEPINK, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the ANSWER coalition. After October 7, he threw the weight of his wallet behind the pro-Palestinian protests and encampments, and more recently, as the threat of U.S. military action in Latin America has loomed larger, he’s done his best to support the Venezuelan and Cuban regimes against American “imperialism.”
Like Soros, Singham uses a network of nonprofit organizations and “dark money” networks to funnel cash to activists. His ties to the Chinese Communist Party have come in for particular scrutiny from his critics. In his youth, Singham was a member of a black Maoist organization in Detroit, and his praise for Xi Jinping and his “new world order” has been fulsome and public. Of course, Singham and his supporters claim he’s just a philanthropist, a patron of noble causes. So far he’s escaped criminal investigation, but that may be about to change.
Even if Piker isn’t the main target of the federal investigation, he’s still immensely valuable. As much as any other public figure, Piker is responsible for making left-wing violence “cool” for younger generations of Americans and for normalizing the now widespread sentiment that right-wingers, from the president all the way down to the dude with the MAGA-themed house, are fair game for murder.
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Want political change? Don’t wait for the politicians. Pick up a gun and make it happen, one bullet at a time.
We can debate whether Piker actually believes anything he says. He doesn’t like to be reminded he was once a chubby “red pill” bro who dispensed nuggets of solid-gold dating advice like “Old enough to count, old enough to mount” and “Think with your d-ck.” But the performativity and the cynicism of his rebranding do nothing to detract from the force of his words and the nastiness they’ve helped inculcate, even if we can’t quantify the precise impact of his utterances.
Here’s just one example. In a rant about landlords choosing not to rent out empty houses, Piker screamed, “Yeah, kill them. Kill those mother-ckers. Murder those moth-rfuckers in the street. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude.”
He’s happy to tell his followers to “gut” and “shank” their opponents—“Slice ‘em and f-cking dice em”—and he was banned from X briefly for saying anybody who cares about Medicare and Medicaid fraud should “kill Rick Scott,” the senator and founder of America’s largest private health care company. He’s been an apologist for Luigi Mangione too, who he’s claimed Americans “understand” and sympathize with because the health care CEO he murdered engaged in a “tremendous amount of social murder” himself. And if in recent months, Piker had been a little more careful with his words, including condemning the murder of Charlie Kirk, his past pronouncements on sluicing America’s streets with the warm claret of his “capitalist” enemies leave us in no doubt of his “real” beliefs—or, rather, what he’d really like to say.
It’s been a long-time criticism of mine, and many others’, that American conservatives are too nice to leftists. That they fail to grasp the elementary distinction between friend and enemy that serves as the foundation of all politics: Reward your friends, punish your enemies. I can think of too many examples to count. There are even scientific studies, mainly from social and personality psychology, which show conservatives extend empathy and understanding to their political opponents that is seldom, if ever, reciprocated. Under normal circumstances, perhaps, conservatives can afford to be generous and enjoy the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from adhering to strict principles, but we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Apart from a few days after Charlie Kirk’s murder, when patriots like Rudy Giuliani coordinated a massive bonfire of leftist careers, the Left hasn’t really suffered reprisal for its growing reliance on intimidation and violence to achieve its political goals. As we approach the one-year anniversary of that fateful day, there now appears to be some determined movement from the federal government with regard to violent activist groups, especially Antifa. The successful conviction of nine members of an Antifa cell in Texas has established a strong precedent for further action against the group’s members as terrorists, which they are.
The prosecution of Piker, if indeed it does happen, won’t be for all the moronic, mean-spirited, downright nasty crap he’s said on stream. It will be because he went to Havana and ran afoul of U.S. sanctions. But really, who cares? If Hasan does go to prison or even jail, it will be a powerful demonstration of a simple truth, updated for the internet age.
F around and eventually, no matter how many followers you have on Twitch, you’re going to find out.
And in the meantime, as the screws tighten, he’s going to crash out in spectacular fashion, for the whole world to see—you can bet on that. I’ll get the popcorn.