Hasan Piker Is Following in Candace Owens's Footsteps
Responsible liberals must curb him now, before he's uncontrollable—not exploit him to beat Trump
Liberals are in the middle of a bitter debate over whether the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker—who has claimed that “America deserved 9/11,” celebrated the Soviet Union, defended Hamas, and made clear in interviews that he considers liberalism itself passé, if not the enemy—belongs in their political coalition.
This is healthy; movements have a responsibility to police, or at the very least facilitate an ongoing negotiation of, their own ideological boundaries. In that spirit, consider the case of Candace Owens. Her rise captures the trajectory of the right over the past decade—specifically, how insurgent conspiracists trampled over whatever reasonable guardrails existed within conservatism’s information superstructure.
The point here is not that Piker is Owens. It is that the conditions that produced Owens—mainstream credentialing, establishment complicity, an attention economy that rewards escalation over everything else—do not belong to the right alone. Owens is among the most popular political podcasters in the United States, and her story shows exactly how that happens.
Merging the Establishment and the Fringe
Owens spent many years as a darling of the conservative mainstream in the Trump era. From 2017 to 2019, she was communications director for Charlie Kirk’s right-wing activist organization, Turning Point USA. She was a fixture on Fox News for years and became one of the stars of Ben Shapiro’s right-wing digital media empire, The Daily Wire—headlining her own show from 2021 to 2024.
Like the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, Owens used her mainstream platform as a springboard to build a massive independent brand. Both have found the alternative media space far more accommodating than the mainstream—but they needed mainstream approval to jumpstart their solo careers.
What did Owens claim to be? A truth-telling Black conservative with the courage to say what others wouldn’t; a dissident within elite institutions shot through with identity politics and liberal orthodoxy. She was effective at getting credulous mainstream voices to accept this carefully crafted image. As far back as 2018, Bari Weiss described her in The New York Times as a “sharp, young, black conservative” and a “telegenic speaker with killer instincts.” The British conservative intellectual Douglas Murray described her as a “seriously smart and sassy young American conservative whose campus and media appearances have seen her begin to gain the audience she deserves.”
But none could claim ignorance of the warning signs. As far back as 2018, Owens called for journalists and political opponents to be thrown in prison. She claimed that Democrats wanted to “exterminate blacks via Planned Parenthood.” At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was a superspreader of absurd conspiracy theories—like the idea that tech billionaire Bill Gates knew about the pandemic in advance and wanted to mandate a “Vaccine ID chip for all humans.” After all this, Shapiro still gave her a high-profile job and one of the most visible platforms in conservative media to launder her increasingly unhinged commentary.
Consider some of her lowlights:
In 2018, at a right-wing event in London, Owens said: “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine. The problem is that he had dreams outside of Germany.”
On her YouTube show, Owens told her audience: “Your quarrel is not with white men … Jewish people were the ones that were trading us. Jewish people were in control of the slave trade.” (She was subsequently named “Antisemite of the Year” by StopAntisemitism—which she publicly construed as an honor.)
When the rapper Ye announced he was “going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” Owens appeared alongside him in a “White Lives Matter” shirt and became his most prominent defender. “If you are an honest person,” she said of his remarks, “you did not find this tweet antisemitic.”
It Just Keeps Getting Worse
Now that she has shed the constraints that came with working in traditional media, Owens regularly publishes content that would never survive a production meeting, fact check, or legal review at a mainstream institution.
Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination last summer, Owens has advanced a series of insane conspiracies about his death. She has suggested that Kirk was killed by Israeli agents because he was questioning the United States’ support for Israel (Owens had previously claimed that Israeli agents were involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—an accusation with no basis in any credible historical account). She claimed that Kirk was “betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA.” She has a perverse obsession with the idea that Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, had her husband killed. In an eight-hour video series titled Bride of Charlie, Owens lays out the case for this crackpot theory. In the first episode, she shows a picture of Erika as a child in a bee costume “accidentally throwing up some Freemason hand-signs”—to give you some sense for the strength of the “evidence” she brings to bear for Erika’s alleged involvement in sinister and shadowy globalist plots.
While slandering and harassing Kirk’s widow, Owens has placed herself at the center of the story. She recently declared that the French government has “executed upon and paid for my assassination” (one of her favorite conspiracy theories is that French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife is actually a man—a claim the Macrons are currently suing her over in a French court). In the same post, she claimed, “Charlie Kirk’s assassin trained with the French legion 13th brigade with multi-state involvement.” She alleged that one of those states was, of course, Israel. After sharing a post accusing Israel of instigating the protests in Iran earlier this year, she claimed, “Charlie Kirk tried to save Trump from this!” and concluded: “You can never trust a Zionist.”
As Owens published one deranged conspiracy theory after another about Kirk—all the while promoting herself as a central figure in the drama—her massive audience (six million YouTube subscribers) continued to grow. Unsurprisingly, Carlson said he believed her claims were credible. Other MAGA podcasters scrambled to keep Owens onside because they know how much clout she has within their movement. Megyn Kelly, who is on her own journey to far-right crackpottery, organized a meeting between Erika Kirk and Owens. Owens emerged from it more fixated than ever. “I now hold the position that it is utterly immoral to defend Erika Kirk,” she said in March.
This is what happens when the establishment is compromised by insurgent voices who pursue clicks at all costs. Owens’s descent into paranoia, self-obsession, cruelty, and dishonesty is the logical terminus for commentators whose influence rests on shock and scandal. They can never be fired and they answer only to their audience. Once their platform is large enough, they can say whatever they want and get away with it.
The Enablers
Kelly’s role in the episode deserves particular scrutiny. Rather than condemning Owens’s harassment campaign, she framed her nearly-five-hour sitdown between Owens and Erika Kirk as an effort toward “reconciliation”—as if mercilessly slandering a grieving widow were an unfortunate misunderstanding rather than a sustained campaign of cruelty and shameless opportunism. Shapiro, Owens’s former employer, was unsparing: “You won’t even protect Charlie Kirk’s widow from the monster accusing her of murdering Charlie.” Kelly’s response was to insist that Owens was right to raise “questions about whether Charlie, before he was killed, was growing more skeptical of Israel (HE WAS).”
During a speech at a Turning Point USA conference in December, Shapiro condemned the “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle, but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” He attacked Carlson, Owens, and Kelly directly. He also acknowledged his role in advancing Owens’s career: “If we hire awful people, we’re responsible for that. I have some experience there, as you might suspect.”
He certainly does. He hired Owens when it should have been obvious that she was a demagogue and grifter who would say anything for attention. After signing on with The Daily Wire, Owens constantly defended Ye. In 2024, Weiss described Owens as “truly batshit” and observed: “That it took the Daily Wire this long to sever ties with Candace Owens is alarming.” Weiss is right to ask why Owens remained on the payroll for years afterward. But Shapiro shouldn’t just ask himself why he hired Owens and took so long to fire her—he should ask why the paranoid fringe of American conservatism has been so warmly welcomed by the mainstream.
Carlson recently hosted America’s most notorious neo-Nazi, Nick Fuentes, on his show for two hours of polite conversation. He handed Fuentes the mic on one of the country’s most popular political podcasts, who proceeded to tell millions of listeners that “Zionist Jews” are “controlling the media apparatus,” argue that Jews are “unassimilable,” and complain about the power of “organized Jewry in America.” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts announced that Carlson “always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” And after Shapiro challenged his movement to disown figures like Carlson and Owens, Vice President JD Vance took the stage and declared: “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests. I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or deplatform.”
Vance refuses to condemn extremists in his movement because he wants access to their audiences, and those extremists can maintain a veneer of legitimacy by sustaining their ties with the establishment. This is how the MAGA embrace of demagogues and conspiracists accelerated the mainstream right’s descent into illiberalism and authoritarianism.
What This Means for Democrats
None of this is to suggest that left- and right-wing listenerships are mirror images of each other. That said, the left is not immune to this dynamic. Yes, the right-wing media ecosystem has drifted into conspiracism and anti-establishment crankery on a scale that nothing in the left-of-center information space comes close to matching. But the problem is that those structural forces—algorithms that reward outrage, influencer economics that punish moderation of views, platform dynamics that have no interest in the ideological character of the content they amplify—operate across the political spectrum. The left-of-center information environment is susceptible to them, too.
This brings us back to Piker. On one side of the current debate are those who believe we’re in a political emergency that requires the construction of the largest possible political tent to oppose Trump. Others argue that embracing someone like Piker—an outspoken critic of liberalism who has a long record of despicable remarks—is morally obscene and politically counterproductive. The debate is genuine and the stakes are real. But the terms of the debate should be honest about what Piker actually represents.
In a recent New York Times column, Ezra Klein argued against what he called “cancellation as a political tactic,” urging liberals to engage hostile audiences rather than retreat to a “shrinking, sanitized corner of the public sphere.” It is good advice, but it doesn’t resolve the harder question: What do you do when the figure in question holds positions deeply at odds with a liberal sensibility, and builds a platform on saying the most inflammatory version of those views, every time, without moderation?
Piker’s claim that “America deserved 9/11” wasn’t a slip of the tongue—it was an expression of his deeply held belief that the United States is a brutal, marauding imperial power and American liberalism is a sham, and that therefore the slaughter of innocent Americans is defensible. His celebration of the Soviet Union, his defenses of the CCP, his violent rhetoric, and his insistence in interviews that “liberalism is demonstrably failing” aren’t gaffes or the occupational hazard of a streamer logging eight hours a day on camera. They are genuine expressions of his worldview, core to his political appeal, and integral to his business model.
His recent Pod Save America appearance—the same one in which he said he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time”—offers a case in point. Pressed on his views, Piker offered a confident account of Albert Einstein’s relationship to Zionism that, as The Atlantic subsequently documented, misrepresented Einstein’s decades-long support for the Zionist cause—getting the history wrong in service of the argument. During the same appearance, asked about reports of mass sexual violence on Oct. 7, Piker said it “doesn’t matter if rapes happened.” That is not a politically contrarian position—it is a moral disqualification, and it resulted in no apparent cost to his standing. Piker’s mission differs from that of right-wing influencers in content but shares the same underlying logic: outrage is the product, the worldview is the brand, and the business model depends on never moderating either. He is, by his own account, someone who considers liberalism a failed project and says so without apology.
The attention economy incentivizes conspiracism, sensationalism, and spirals of increasingly outrageous rhetoric. Media personalities known for their radicalism and willingness to shatter taboos don’t typically become more measured and civil over time—they ratchet up the outrage, offer wilder theories, keep eyeballs glued to the screen. Owens is the proof of concept. While it would be unfair to compare Piker to Owens in terms of their substance, the same set of bad incentives that lead him to regularly make egregious comments will continue to exert their pressure. He is not in Owens’s league of noxiousness, but absent any resistance from more responsible outside forces, he may get there.
Liberals don’t need to run their coalition through purity tests, but they do need to reckon with what the twisted incentives of modern mass media can produce. The goal is a discourse that looks less like Candace Owens’s, not more.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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thank you for helping me remove a newsletter from my reading list 💚
The difference here is that Piker has already sailed over that line several times. He’s basically a left wing Trump.