Hasan Piker Admits He Was Born to Be a Champagne Socialist
The streamer sits down for an uncomfortable and revealing interview.
Hasan Piker likes to strut around in a suit in the style of 20th-century dictator Mao Zedong. He likes to visit Cuba, but only the neighborhoods carefully manicured by the regime to win the admiration of tourists. By Piker’s own admission on talk show host Ziwe’s program, however, he’s comfortable with his lifestyle hypocrisy: He hasn’t always wanted to be a socialist — he’s always wanted to be a champagne socialist.
“Did you always want to be a champagne socialist?” Ziwe asked. “Umm . . . yes,” Piker replied, with discomfort. That is, a person who participates in decadence while publicly supporting egalitarian policies.
The cringy Chinese costume is part of the bit. Piker has often invoked Karl Marx and the idea that capitalism is the root of all evil. But he has no intention of applying that belief to his personal life.
Generally considered an equal-opportunity offender, Ziwe asked Piker some humbling questions meant to expose his hypocrisy. When she repeated his old assertion that we should “let the streets run with their red capitalist blood,” she followed with a devastating query: “How were the Oscar parties this year?”
Though the show is somewhat comical by design, Piker squirmed in his velvet pink chair, then deflected: “It was weird. Jeff Bezos was there.”
Ziwe went on to throw the book at Piker, quoting verbatim his hero, Marx, who wrote in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, “Each according to his needs.” This Marxian principle means that goods, services, and resources should be distributed to individuals based on what they require to live and flourish, rather than how much work they did or other factors. “You live in a $2.7 million house,” Ziwe noted. “Why are your needs more important than 90 percent of other Californians?”
Piker replied, “They’re not. I think housing should be free.”
The reality was evidently lost on Piker that if housing were free, there would be no incentive for developers to build any opulent properties that strivers like him could occupy. As evidenced by New York’s portfolio of government-run housing projects, which are in disrepair, if the state gets heavily involved, there won’t be so much as running water or rooms free of pests let alone a two-car garage and gated driveway.
Piker rebutted that he has a mortgage and didn’t pay for the home with “bags of cash,” lest people think he’s loaded and is spending like a baron while he’s preaching rugged minimalism. Nonetheless, he specifically sought out a lavish house that the market decided was worth $2.7 million. He could have bought a house in the Midwest for a moderate $300,000 or less. Instead, he chose to put down a payment for a mansion in West Hollywood, an affluent city where the median household income is six figures. Why didn’t he want to live how the other half lives?
When he joined a convoy to Cuba in May, he was dripping with Cartier and other expensive designer items as he traversed the streets that were themselves designed to obscure the poverty. Why didn’t Piker wear clothing from Walmart or, better yet, eat food rations and shop in the black market like most of Cuba’s population does?
Because Piker likes nice things, and he can’t be blamed for that. We all do. Human beings are born with innate self-interest and an internal impulse to secure better material circumstances. That is natural. The problem is that Piker is peddling an ideology that is unnatural and antithetical to the reality of the human condition, while enjoying the spoils of the status quo, which is mainly a free market albeit with many government distortions across commodities such as housing. Piker wants to gatekeep capitalism and the luxuries it produces, while he advocates for the masses a very different system.
This puts him in the good company of many communist leaders throughout history, who wrecked their nations and deprived their people of liberty under the pretense of ushering in utopia while they sat in towers watching the chaos unfold below.
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In his defense, as awful as that admittedly sounds, 2.7 million in West Hollywood doesn't exactly buy you a "mansion", a nice house yes, but not a palace. A quibble perhaps but our very modest WH condo sold easily for nearly a million. But he is a scalawag and quite a pompous dangerous one at that . Happy he had to endure that lashing all while bound to a pink velvet chair. Sounds like just the waiting room to the hell he is bound for.