Hasan Piker has no filter.
Or at least that’s the sympathetic way to describe his marathon Twitch broadcasts, which cover everything from the war in Gaza to his workout regimen.
He’s a self-proclaimed anti-imperialist Marxist who’s been called a Joe Rogan of the left, and who’s compared himself to Rush Limbaugh. And he keeps getting suspended from his platform, Twitch, for language that he calls hyperbole and other people call incitement.
Is he the future of the American left? Part of our cycle of radicalization? Or just another example of how the internet drives everyone insane?
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Hasan Piker, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Hasan Piker: We are living in some interesting times, considering that it is you, Ross Douthat, who is interviewing me for The New York Times. I feel like that’s very interesting.
Douthat: Who else would it be, man? This is a place for the interesting perspectives of our moment. I think that’s what you represent. And we’re going to get into that: We’re going to talk about the Hasan Piker worldview. We’re going to talk about debates about political violence. But I thought we should start, because I know what you do — I’m very tech savvy, obviously; I’m very online, I understand the internet — but there may be some listeners and viewers who don’t know what a Twitch streamer is. So I want you to tell me what a Twitch streamer is.
Piker: Yeah, Twitch streamers, broadly, for the most part, play video games. I’m a little bit unique to the space because I cover politics — I do news and political commentary, for the most part.
Twitch is basically a livestreaming platform. So for the boomers that read The New York Times, I would say it’s like YouTube, but it’s always live. It’s like livestreaming YouTube. That’s it.
Douthat: So when I make a podcast, I come into this beautiful, wonderful studio and I sit down and it’s a self-contained thing, but then it’s edited and cut up and turned into the product.
But when you sit down and you’re talking, you go for seven hours?
Piker: If you ask my audience now, they’ll say half-day Hasi, and they’ll say seven hours, which is a joke. But yeah, I used to do it for eight to 10 hours every day, but I’m 34 now ——
Douthat: You’ve cut back.
Piker: So I lowered it to seven.
Douthat: OK. And you’re doing it after we record this?
Piker: Yeah, I go seven days a week as well. Every single day. Monday through Sunday.
Douthat: OK. And someone could see you right now with the mic and the background, but if someone who wasn’t familiar with this dropped into the stream, they’d see other stuff onscreen.
Piker: Yeah.
Douthat: So what would they see? What do you share the screen with?
Piker: Normally, at any given moment, if you tune in, you can either see me full screen like this, just doing direct-to-camera commentary, or most likely reading an article, criticizing it piece by piece. I also sometimes offer commentary over media from TV channels as well. It’s a broad spectrum of political ideology.
Douthat: You’re also talking to people who are talking to you.
Piker: So there are tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of concurrent live viewers that are in my chat. So we broadly call it “chat.” There on the side of the screen, you can see it as well — it’s just constantly going up and down like it’s “The Matrix,” because it’s a constant flow of thoughts.
I don’t know exactly how I figured this out — maybe it’s my ADHD — but I have been able to somehow offer commentary that people consider compelling while simultaneously browsing through.
Douthat: And you’re responding. Somebody writes a sentence and says: That’s stupid, Hasan, because of this. And you’re like: No, gremlinuser47, I’m brilliant.
Piker: I don’t know if I would say that. But sometimes it’s complementary information that’s coming in, so it’s almost like a hive mind that can quickly extract and find information all around the internet. And sometimes it’s contentious, where people come in and they’re right-wingers, or they come in and they’re liberals who disagree with me on something, and they’ll be like: This is wrong. Here is why you’re wrong. And then there’s a very quick, spirited debate, and sometimes it can even get a little heated.
So the way I’ve always described what I do is that I’m basically like Rush Limbaugh, but for Zoomers. It’s almost like AM radio in the spirit of conservative commentary, but obviously, I think I have a higher standard for the veracity of the information that I’m looking at.
A big part of what I do, especially in this age on the internet, is sift through the misinformation. So I go through all of that in real time and try to instill some sense of media literacy in the audience, and I explain it as I’m holding your hand through the journey of reading the news.
Douthat: Do you take a bathroom break?
Piker: I do. I get up.
Douthat: How many bathroom breaks do you take?
Piker: I don’t know, but there are some people in the community that time my bathroom breaks, so it can range anywhere from ——
Douthat: What about food? I don’t need to know how long the bathroom breaks are, actually.
Piker: The bathroom breaks range from 22 seconds to sometimes a minute and 10, but I’m away from the screen for a brief moment. And oftentimes I’ll just have the live video feed running, and I’ll stay tuned to it so I’m not like missing anything.
And I’ll have my father, who comes and stays with me over extended periods of time, make me a meal, and I’ll eat that on camera as well. Because I’m live for seven hours a day, I eat at the same time every single day. I have a very strict regimen.
Douthat: So regimen — how does your body feel? After I podcast — this is too much confession — but I’m exhausted in a way that is not the case if you sit down and write a column, I assure you. It’s a physical experience to talk to someone or interview them in a way that I didn’t expect before I got into this business. And you do have guests, but most of the time, you’re not doing interviews. But you are arguing with people in real time.
Are you just spent at the end of the seven hours? Or do you need to go off and exercise? What is the lifestyle?
Piker: Well, the lifestyle that your paper’s style section actually documented was ——
Douthat: Yeah, I read that piece.
Piker: It was quite the controversial title for that piece that everyone seemingly got mad at. It was “A progressive mind in a MAGA body” or something.
Douthat: Yeah, I think that’s right.
Piker: So it depletes my social battery unlike anything else that I’ve ever done. After the end of a seven-, eight-, 10-hour broadcast, I do oftentimes feel the need to just kind of unwind. And I have a hard time talking to people in the immediate aftermath of that.
Douthat: I can imagine.
Piker: Because the way I see it, you’re constantly on — you have to be entertaining every single second of the eight-hour broadcast. You can’t have dead air. You have to be constantly entertaining people or constantly trying to educate people. So there are some difficulties in that.
You’re also constantly online. And in order not to feel super isolated and super sheltered from how regular people operate and how they feel, I ground myself basically by being around what I like to call “normies” or “civilians.” I spend most of my time offline directly outside: going to public parks, hanging out with my friends. And, also, working out is a big part of this as well, obviously.
Douthat: Well, you can’t have the MAGA body if you aren’t working out, right?
Piker: [Chuckles.]
Douthat: That’s what they tell me. I haven’t put it to the test yet, but you know.
So you mentioned you’re 34. So you’re too old to go for nine or 10 hours — you have to go for seven hours.
Piker: [Chuckles.]
Douthat: You don’t have a family. You’re not married. Are you going to be doing this at 50? At my age of 45, the ancient years?
Piker: I think so, yeah.
Douthat: OK.
Piker: The reason I said that is because I’ve designed everything in my life so that I can continue doing this. This is what I’m good at. This is the only thing I’m good at, as a matter of fact.
Douthat: Well, you’ve designed it — and not to play the social conservative advice giver — but do you want to have kids?
Piker: I do, yeah.
Douthat: OK. But you might have to redesign your life someday.
Piker: Yeah. There is no issue with that.
Douthat: Fit the kids in — well, there might be an issue, but yeah. All right. Let’s ——
Piker: No, I meant there is no issue with scaling back on certain aspects of my life. That’s what I mean.
Douthat: So the weekends could free up someday.
Piker: Yeah, for sure.
Douthat: OK, good.
All right. Let’s talk about the cause then. What you’re fighting for. Give me the Hasan Piker worldview. What do you believe?
Piker: I believe that the United States of America is a profoundly wealthy nation. It’s the wealthiest nation on earth right now. And therefore, it could be doing right by all of the people that are in the United States of America, and yet it refuses to do so. And I want to through a system of, at first, modest social democratic reforms, basically claw back autonomy for the everyday person and hopefully give them more of a voice in their workplace and in the political process as well, and slowly but surely, yield more egalitarian outcomes.
On the global dominance side, I think that we should significantly scale back imperialism and the endless wars that we engage in, and focus on helping people in this country, and even focus on helping people in other countries, but in a meaningful way — not in a way where we change their own internal governance structures aggressively, and sometimes directly, through intervention and by force.
Douthat: OK. So situate that narrative relative to actual democratic politicians and activists. Are you where Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are? Or are you someone who’s saying: That’s a good start, but fundamentally, we want to be democratic socialists, but with an emphasis on the socialism? How far do you want to take the transformation of America?
Piker: OK. So it’s not just the transformation of America — it’s the transformation of global politics in its entirety. I think that capitalism was an evolution away from feudalism and monarchies, and it was a fantastic evolution away from that structure. And liberal capitalist democracies, I think, for a very long time presented this wonderful new evolution, but I think it’s time for an alternative vision to take place, considering that the tremendous amount of bloodshed that keeps propping up the system continues.
I feel like we have an opportunity to move away from this, especially at a time when liberalism is demonstrably failing. We are seeing, even as Cass Sunstein recognizes, illiberals that are taking advantage of this situation.
Now, of course, he would probably consider me to be illiberal in some respects as well.
Douthat: Well, we don’t have to say illiberal — let’s say post-liberal. So you’ve got people on the right who would call themselves post-liberal. You’ve got religious post-liberals. You’ve got the Curtis Yarvin “we’re going to have a Silicon Valley king” post-liberal.
So you’re a left post-liberal. I think that’s fair.
Piker: Yes, I wouldn’t say I’m a liberal. Yeah.
Douthat: You’re post.
Piker: Yeah.
Douthat: You want something after. Liberalism was good for a while, but it’s generated too many inequalities. It’s too harsh on the world. But what is the alternative? Is it Marxist? Is it essentially deeper and more profound government management of the economy? What are we talking about?
Piker: I don’t have the perfect solution for this — this is something that I readily admit. But I think moving in the direction of socialism would be a wonderful start. And the reason I say that is that, as you mentioned, a lot of the post-liberal conversations almost always revolve around unifying strength in the hands of one singular figure or one person going back to a neofeudalist or ——
Douthat: Aristocratic.
Piker: Or crypto-monarchic structure that Curtis Yarvin advocates. What I’m advocating is more democracy, principled democracy — not even in the anarchist sense, where all unjustifiable hierarchies must be abolished through direct participation — but at least having more democratic process and getting people more involved, starting at the point of commodity production, and then moving all the way to political participation.
Douthat: I want to talk in a minute about how you developed this worldview and your background, but I want to pause on that idea of democratic change. Is all effective change democratic? Or the thing that the original post-liberal Marxists tended to believe was that there are certain things you can accomplish through a democratic system, but there’s also revolutionary moments.
To be clear, this isn’t just a Marxist idea, obviously. This is the United States of America — we’re founded on a revolution. But what is your view of revolution as a potential transformative force in the world?
Piker: All politics, in my worldview, revolves around the distribution of resources and the distribution of power. And a big part of that component is, of course, violence as well — revolutionary violence, for example. It simply means: who gets to do the violence, and who gets to be on the receiving end of that violence that we have normalized.
The systems that we exist under are inherently violent — all political systems are. It’s more so about redirecting that. And I know violence is such a scary concept when we’re discussing it in this way, but we’re talking about it in an academic context.
Basically, the idea is that instead of having a system that currently benefits the very few, I want a system that benefits as many people as possible, that has more, like I said, egalitarian outcomes.
Douthat: And the current system, as you said, uses violence. And yeah, all political systems are about the monopoly of force in the end. But you use the phrase “redirect violence.” What does it mean to say we need to redirect violence?
Piker: First of all, I abhor violence — let’s just start there. Violence, in this abstract concept, would be equivalent to the structural violence of poverty, for example. So when I’m talking about violence, I want to make it very clear, I’m not saying: Go out, take up arms, and start shooting people. I’m talking about the structural violence of poverty.
Douthat: So when — and redirecting that ——
Piker: And redirecting that in the same way would be the, I guess, structural violence of equity, because in the—
Douthat: Well, the structural eradication of unjust wealth — would that be fair?
Piker: Yes. That would be a better way to ——
Douthat: So the socialist society does not go out and shoot people.
Piker: No. Yeah.
Douthat: Though this has happened in some socialist societies in the past, I should note.
Piker: Of course.
Douthat: You live in L.A., right?
Piker: Yeah.
Douthat: So it goes into Beverly Hills or something, and it says: Today, the City Council — we’ve renamed it as the Peoples’ Collective or something — has voted to expropriate your lavish, undeserved wealth and return your homes to the people. And that’s backed up by police power, so it’s violent, but it’s not shooting people against the wall.
Is that what you mean? That kind of redirection?
Piker: A similar structure I think has been attempted or was exhibited in Cuba. I think it was Fidel Castro himself who personally took back any farmland from his own family members that went above and beyond what the state had designed.
Now, obviously this is a terrifying concept for a lot of people.
Douthat: People in Beverly Hills. Yep.
Piker: This is so far out in the future, for even someone like myself, that I don’t even see the necessity of arguing on how this would work, because I’m more invested — especially in the short term — in getting socialized medicine; getting universal health care; getting free schooling all the way up to college education, especially for public universities; ensuring that we have some semblance of government competition, if you want to call it, that interferes with the regular market to claw back housing prices, for example, by creating public housing. Things that exist in other fairly robust social democracies and things that actually a lot poorer nations have been able to develop — just good governance.
Douthat: OK. So we’re having a debate right now about political violence in the U.S. Yes, I agree, the expropriation of the property of wealthy Angelenos is abstract and far in the future. But debates about political violence in this moment aren’t.
Your platform, Twitch, right now looks like it might be one of the Trump administration’s targets in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting. There’s been a lot of talk about going after institutions and organizations that support political radicalism or incite violence. I think Congress is calling C.E.O.s from Discord and Steam and Twitch and Reddit to testify next month.
Piker: Yeah.
Douthat: Why are they doing this? Why is Twitch a target?
Piker: I suspect a big part of the reason Twitch is a target here, even though it was not mentioned in the investigation at all — there’s no evidence that Tyler Robinson, the alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk, was ever on Twitch. He might have been, but there’s no evidence for it whatsoever. But the reason they’re being called in, I think, is specifically that the administration currently is, in my opinion, perhaps in a very cynical manner, utilizing Charlie Kirk’s death as a way to bring about significant clawbacks of the First Amendment, free expression, and free organizing of the political left.
They haven’t necessarily made this a secret either. They’ve gone after Jimmy Kimmel and numerous other cultural figures that conservatives have petty grievances around. And they’ve done so in a way where even the most vanilla, the most timid assessment of events is enough for the administration to pull the F.C.C. in to demand taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air.
This has created tremendous backlash from even Republicans, as a matter of fact, because a lot of people do love free speech. I love free speech. I come from a country that does not have free speech. I came to the United States of America from Turkey originally, a country that actually does jail political dissidents and journalists quite frequently, and I don’t want that to happen here in the United States of America. But that is what they are going toward.
Douthat: So you have the Jimmy Kimmel controversy. As of this conversation, he’s back on the air, but what they’re doing with calling in Twitch — that’s kind of about you.
Piker: Yeah.
Douthat: You are a target.
Piker: For sure.
Douthat: And are you a target just because you say you’re some kind of Marxist who wants to be post-liberal? Or is it something else?
Piker: I think conservatives have a really great way of designing a narrative that makes sense to as broad of an audience as possible, even though their own setback is oftentimes how hard they go after certain people. But in the grand design of things, if you look at the antifa designation as a domestic terror group, for example — if you read the executive order, it makes sense: They’re presenting this as a violent leftist organized unit that is responsible for so much political violence that’s taking place.
It’s, of course, built up around this hysteria that they expertly craft as a media narrative, first and foremost, but then they want to tackle it.
Douthat: Everyone is in the business of crafting media narratives.
Piker: Yes. I wish Democrats were a little better at it, to be fair.
Douthat: The media narrative around antifa exists at some level of hype, but also some level of reality, because if you lived in Portland, Ore., in the year of our lord 2020, you had a lot of experiences of political protest and violence that involved people who called themselves antifa — that was not fake.
It’s also not fake that you are a provocateur. There are plenty of people on Twitch who are not highlighted by conservatives. I just want to give you one more chance to describe the things about you — in your own words — that people are going after, before I describe them for you.
Piker: Yeah. No, I’m sure that we’ll get to that point as well.
Douthat: In just a second we will.
Piker: Like I said, the things that I advocate are pretty clear. But of course, this is something that conservatives have experienced and have considered cancel culture or “wokeness” in particular for quite a bit, where you can just reframe someone and smear them, especially in the format that I exist in. It’s quite simple to take people completely out of context or make it seem as though they are incapable of using metaphor or incapable of being insincere or hyperbolic in moments.
So it kind of goes back to the same thing of antifa being a serious threat to American stability and order, and it’s an organized unit that must be tackled because they’re justifying violence against police officers and things of that nature.
Douthat: And what do they think you are? If antifa is a threat to public order, the equivalent of that would be conservatives saying that you’re inciting violence.
Piker: Yes, I think that is precisely what they’re going to try to do. And not just inciting violence, necessarily, but inciting terror.
Douthat: Revolutionary terror, you might say.
Piker: Yes, exactly. And I think that is the grand design and the ways in which the conservative apparatus is going to try and stamp out any sort of political discontent — any sort of political dissent, really. That much has been clear to me: It’s not just about people like myself, whom they can single out and target and say are very scary individuals, but it’s also Gavin Newsom.
Gavin Newsom will come out and make this symbolic gesture where he has no power over federal agents, but he’ll say that in the next year, ICE agents that are conducting ICE operations in the state of California have to be unmasked when they’re doing this. I think it’s a fairly reasonable provision, even though it’s ultimately symbolic. Having said that, however, the conservative apparatus will point to that as: Gavin Newsom wants to kill ICE agents and dox them — but that’s not the case. That’s ridiculous.
Douthat: All right, so let’s make this a little more concrete. You are telling a story where it’s you and Jimmy Kimmel and Gavin Newsom, and you’re all targets of the conservative apparatus. But you’re pretty different from Jimmy Kimmel and Gavin Newsom, in part, for a lot of reasons we were just discussing: They’re liberals. They’re good, milquetoast liberals, whatever they may say.
And you are more radical. You’re post-liberal in some way — you want a different horizon, a different future. But beyond that, you are also willing to push your rhetoric further than they do — certainly further than Jimmy Kimmel does.
And I say this, I want to be clear — I have a pretty high tolerance for, let’s say, vivid political rhetoric. I came of age as a newspaper columnist in the 2010s when my liberal friends were all saying: Every time the Tea Party talks about revolution and taking our country back, they’re inciting violence.
Now I live in a world where my conservative friends say: Gavin Newsom’s inciting violence; anyone who calls Trump a fascist is inciting violence.
I think this is a free country. I think if you want to call Donald Trump a fascist, you’re free to do so. If I want to call you a Commie, I’m free to do so.
Piker: People do it all the time.
Douthat: People do it all the time.
But this is my reading, and I’ll let you tell me why I’m wrong in a minute. I think you push further. And I think you like to play with the rhetoric of violence.
So you were suspended from Twitch, I think, for a day. There was an argument you were having about Medicare fraud, and the G.O.P. was going to crack down on Medicare fraud.
You said: Well, if they really cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott.
This is the Florida senator, and it’s a reference to the fact that Scott’s company paid some huge fines. They were engaged in some kind of Medicare fraud. But you didn’t say: We should put Rick Scott in jail for Medicare fraud.
Piker: Yeah.
Douthat: You said you should kill Rick Scott — right?
Piker: Well, for the record, this was in response directly to Mike Johnson. And it is something that I take ownership over — I did apologize for the language that I used. Instead of saying, “you should jail Rick Scott,” which would have been the most inoffensive, it was a hyperbolic statement that I made, not with any significant death threat issued to a sitting elected representative, obviously.
Douthat: I agree. I don’t think you were issuing a death threat. I agree.
Piker: Yeah, but you’re right. That is hyperbolic language for sure. And it’s one statement in a grand sea of others that, of course, gets highlighted through the same outrage machine. And then people demand punishments, and then those punishments do come down, and it causes me to be even more careful with my language.
Having said that, given the 10-hour format that I have, there are definitely going to be weak moments where I say something without even thinking about what that might come across as.
Douthat: Yeah. I mean, you have a lot of content. So I’m not going to tell you that I have read through every hour, every transcript. But I feel like I read enough to get a sense of what you mean by hyperbole. And it means different things. It means you’re talking about landlords and why they’re bad. I think you were talking to a landlord friend at the time. But you said: lLet the streets soak in their bleeping red capitalist blood, dude.
So yeah ——
Piker: Yeah. And then I also said “in a video game” but to showcase the silliness of the statement in and of itself ——
Douthat: So it’s ironic? Or is it Marxist revolutionary rhetoric?
And I just want to bring this to a fine point. There’s the great case of Luigi Mangione, who is charged with murdering the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare in broad daylight in New York City. And you’re going to tell me that you’ve always said that murder is wrong, and that Luigi Mangione should not have committed murder, but you’ve talked a lot about Luigi.
Piker: Of course. I think it’s one of the most consequential instances of adventurism, which I always will say is wrong, because I think it invokes social instability, which I think is bad, in general, to exist under.
But what I try to always do, especially with the Luigi Mangione case, is to talk about the concept, for example, of social murder: the notion of our systems that already exist, like the privatization of health care and the denial of care, that make people infinitely less tolerant than we normally would in a civilized society to an adventurous act of violence, such as the case with Luigi Mangione ——
Douthat: Who is “we”?
Piker: I’m much more interested in talking about ——
Douthat: Wait, wait, just pause there. This is something you’ve done a bunch. You don’t say, “I love Luigi.” You’re like: “we,” “people.”
“He’s seen as a positive figure for most of America”; “He says, ‘I’m going to dish out what many Americans have experienced to the figurehead of that pain.’”
Piker: Mm-hmm.
Douthat: Do you think most Americans sympathize? Who is the “we” who looks at shooting the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. and says: That’s understandable?
Piker: I think it’s the people online that are not necessarily card carrying DSA members or whatnot, but like your aunts ——
Douthat: That’s Democratic Socialists of America.
Piker: Yeah. Not the D.S.A. guys or the Party for Socialism and Liberation, but it’s the Barbaras and the Deborahs, as I like to call it, who live in the Midwest and are truly repulsed by the way that private health care operates in this country.
For them, I think the Luigi Mangione case is really unique, because Americans do not like political violence. Nobody likes it. It is poll after poll that has shown everyone thinks that, obviously, murder is wrong. I think murder is wrong. Everyone thinks political violence is wrong. And yet, in the case of Luigi Mangione, a lot of people had such a deep personal experience with the way that the health care system has harmed them in some way, that the reaction ultimately was very different than one I had expected.
So it was more so me walking through the process of being shocked by the reception that wasn’t instantly, “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened — this is a person with a family whose life was taken from him.” Instead, it was received in a very different way before they even found out who the alleged shooter was.
From the moment that people recognized that the victim was the faceless C.E.O. of a health care company, everyone immediately understood what the motive was.
Douthat: I mean, not faceless, right?
Piker: No, I’m saying ——
Douthat: For most people, the health care company had previously been faceless, and now there was a dead man who had a face.
Piker: Yes. Exactly. And I think that was a unique case that needed to be examined. That’s precisely the reason the media was covering it in the same way as well. The only difference is that, tonally speaking, they were just more so outraged by the reaction in and of itself, rather than trying to examine why people felt this way.
What I try to do in this situation and many others is to explain why people feel this way, because for them, when their grandparent has cancer and then that treatment is denied or the coverage is denied, even though they’re paying these incredibly costly premiums to this health care company, they view that as murder. They view that as a tremendous wrong that was done to them.
And I seek to address these problems so that there aren’t decentralized forms of violence, where people make up their own minds and assume that they have the righteous vindication and they’re going to go out and do things like this.
Douthat: I don’t know, man. I think you’re kind of a hype man for it, though. Like, yes, I agree: You’re doing analysis. And people would have celebrated Luigi Mangione, obviously, without you, Hasan Piker, talking about him all the time.
Piker: Of course.
Douthat: But I listen to the way you talk about him. You’re fascinated by him, too. You’re participating in the fascination, and you’re doing a thing where you’re like: Well, I’m not saying violence is good, but you’ve got to understand that there’s other forms of violence in society besides this one. And people who like Mangione, they’re saying: This violence maybe isn’t as bad as that kind of violence.
This just seems to me like you’re not the guy who starts the revolution, but you’re the violence appreciator. That’s how I feel about your Mangione coverage. You’re out there, you’re appreciating ——
Piker: I wouldn’t say that that’s fair.
Douthat: OK, tell me why it’s not fair.
Piker: The reason I’m saying, “I wouldn’t say that that’s fair,” is that I do make it obviously very clear — and I refer to this over and over again — that adventurism and people taking matters into their own hands is a mere reaction to the social contract unwinding in real time in front of us. I don’t think this is a good thing. I want to make sure that we have a system that helps everyone. And a part of that is creating the same social stability that existed.
Now, you can do that by force — by stamping out dissent and moving in the direction of the Trump administration — or you can try and do that by addressing some of these inequities that exist that do actually harm a lot of people. Because I don’t think you disagree with my assessment that systems are inherently violent, no matter which way they go, and I assume you understand what I mean when I say the social murder of tens of thousands of Americans in the process of having their health care coverage denied.
It must interest you as well. Because it certainly interests people at CNN and many other mainstream outlets — why people are doing this — but their reflection on it is ——
Douthat: No, I think it’s 100 percent the case that certain people who had terrible experiences with the health insurance bureaucracy had a reaction to the assassination that is like what you describe. I think that’s absolutely real, and it says something about the way the system works in America.
On the other hand, I also think — and again, because I’m not a socialist utopian — there is not this magical alternative where, if only we didn’t have nasty politicians who love the rich imposing austerity, everyone would get all the care that they want. I don’t think that world exists.
I have a lot of personally negative experiences with the American health care system. I had — technically still have — chronic Lyme disease, which is a disease that officially doesn’t exist. It definitely exists. And I’ve known a lot of people in that world who have a very specific version of the kind of anger you’re describing, that’s directed toward the medical establishment and how it interacts with insurance companies. And these are people who have had their lives ruined by this illness that the system does not effectively cover or treat.
But it’s really important, as a society, that if one of my friends who had chronic Lyme disease went out and killed someone who they felt was involved in denying them treatment — and maybe was —
Piker: Mm-hmm.
Douthat: That it would be irresponsible for me to do a podcast and be like: Man, that person looks badass. I think that would be irresponsible, even if I was appreciating something real.
It’s not you saying, “It’s really interesting how people have this reaction to it,” that I’m challenging or questioning. It’s the extent to which, again, you’re like: He’s an adventurer. It’s the propaganda of the deed, man — Well, OK, yeah. But a society that has those adventurers is going to be in a lot of trouble pretty quick.
Piker: I agree. I don’t disagree with you on this. I think it’s a reflection of the very social fabric that keeps us together and keeps us stable, unwinding in real time.
America is a very violent country. But we have systematized this violence and we have normalized it. And inevitably that violence has also come back to the domestic front where there is unlimited bloodshed happening in schools. I mean, Charlie Kirk’s assassination was the 46th school shooting — technically, a shooting that happened at a school — and then the 47th happened less than an hour later in Colorado.
Our reflection on these sorts of events is that, because it’s so normalized, because the system must continue, because there are numerous different interests at play here — specifically gun manufacturers, for example, a very important part of our domestic manufacturing industry, and a big part of American culture —
Douthat: And America is an extremely libertarian, personal-liberties-devoted society in ways that have right-wing connotations, like lots of gun ownership, and left-wing connotations too. But yes, go on.
Piker: Certainly. And what I’m trying to say is that in the absence of any sort of significant initiative to claw back some of that, to have some kind of reasonable policy that will say: all right, guys, we all like guns. I like guns. I like shooting guns. I do not have any sort of gun culture in my development. I began my journey of understanding guns because I was writing about gun control and I was like: I need to learn about this stuff. But having said that, I still believe that there needs to be reasonable gun safety, reasonable gun control.
This is not a call to action to say, it’s awesome that school shootings are happening, or it’s awesome that political assassinations are taking place left and right. But it’s to simply say that it’s no longer just random schoolchildren that are being killed. The only reason this is becoming a more significant, more consequential problem in the eyes of many people in the media is that it’s no longer people that we can just kind of see as collateral damage and consider to be invisible.
Douthat: I don’t think that’s right. First of all, I think that the media has given a lot of coverage to school shootings. I think it would be strange to say that the media has ignored that issue in any way, shape, or form.
Piker: No, I wasn’t saying that they ignore it.
Douthat: But I think the reason people are upset in this particular case is that when school shootings happen, there is not — except in very online communities — valorization of the school shooters. Nobody calls a school shooter an adventurer. And obviously we don’t want to live in a world with school shootings, but we especially don’t want to live in a world where it seems like people who are in the public scrum, like you, are sort of appreciating violence.
I’m pro-life. I think abortion is a form of murder. I think if somebody killed an abortionist and I went in The New York Times the next day and tried to write something that was in the vein of what you’ve said about Mangione — and I concede writing and talking are different — but if I’d done that, it wouldn’t be published, and I might be fired. Not as a violation of my free speech rights, but because I would be crossing a line of, again, not endorsement, but even just appreciation.
The appreciation of the violent act — I think there’s a taboo around that for a reason, and you like pushing at that taboo. I just think that’s what you like to do.
Piker: It’s not something that I like to do necessarily, but I want to examine the contradictions of even what you just said: you say abortion is murder. I obviously don’t agree with that — I’m pro-choice. I think it’s a matter of bodily autonomy, and the government shouldn’t interfere in this between a medical professional and a woman.
Having said that, you get to argue about women’s bodily autonomy being potentially removed by making the argument through the systematized version of violence, because, as you would probably also recognize, abortion restrictions have come down in numerous states since the decision of Roe v. Wade was overturned. And in the process, women have found themselves in this unique predicament where they can’t even get their ectopic pregnancies dealt with because their medical professionals are worried about potential prosecution. This has led to a lot of pain and a lot of torment and maybe even, in some instances, death.
When you argue on behalf of the pro-life position, you don’t have to say, like Bill O’Reilly did: Tiller, Tiller, the baby killer — and then someone goes out and actually shoots a doctor. You can simply say — I’m not putting words in your mouth. I don’t know what your position is on, or your advocacy around, abortion, but someone of this mind-set can easily just advocate the harm that is done to millions of Americans, potentially, without uttering a single word that could be considered remotely violent by the broadest sub-sects of American society.
Douthat: Right. You’re right.
Piker: This is the uneven dynamic that I’m trying to explain.
Douthat: I understand your argument, but your strategy for your argument is that, effectively, advocacy for policies that cause harm — economic harm or physical harm ——
Piker: Physical harm, in the case of abortion.
Douthat: In this case. But we were talking about economic harm earlier, so both apply.
Piker: Yeah, but economic harm also leads to physical harm as well.
Douthat: And that could be argued to constitute a form of incitement. That’s what you’re saying.
Piker: Yes, that’s precisely what I’m saying. And that’s actually the argument with policing. Policing is a necessary institution, but people can just point to it and demand more of it, but in that demand, they’re technically demanding more of the unreasonable outcomes and the unjustifiable outcomes of policing that lead to, for example, the death of George Floyd, or numerous other cases.
Douthat: But this analogy is itself part of why people think you are normalizing the things that are taboo, which would include right-wing forms of violence. But if your theory is that all of these things are incitement — that if you support putting more people in jail, that’s incitement; if you support border security, that’s incitement; it’s incitement all the way down — you’re basically saying: The person who incites violence against a politician is in the same position as the person who supports border security. And that seems like an argument that lends itself to encouraging people to commit political violence, because you’re saying: It’s all normal already. What’s a little more? What’s one more act of incitement in a world of incitement? You’re just normalizing it when you make that argument.
Piker: Yeah, my argument is that I’m not normalizing it — it’s already normal. I don’t want it to be normal. I want it to be abnormal. I want people to actually take a serious look at the violent structures that already exist that, from the point of the recipient, is already experienced as a direct form of violence.
But do you understand the broader point that I tried to arrive at in these conversations, for the record? Which of course lend themselves so perfectly to quippy clips to just make it seem as though this is a person who is very clearly inciting a certain thing. Or do you think I’m just dancing around the issue? You can be honest.
Douthat: I’ll be honest. I think there’s a reason that certain kinds of Marxism and socialist radicalism, when they take power or try to come to power, tend to resort to violence. And it is inherent in the argument that you’ve made. I’m not saying it’s an argument that doesn’t have a certain power. If it didn’t have a certain power, lots of people wouldn’t have believed in it.
There is an inherent violence in the use of state power. There is an inherent coercion in all kinds of policies, including policies that I support. I support restrictions on drugs that probably you do not, that absolutely involve coercion. I believe in restrictions on bodily autonomy enforced by state power that uses violence — I believe in that.
I understand that someone can say, as a radical on the left: This violence exists and we want to redirect the violence. And do I think that you, Hasan Piker, prosperous media personality in Los Angeles, are enthusiastic about the expropriation of wealth and punitive violence by Communist death squads? I don’t think you are. But I think that the reason you have strong taboos is to prevent that slope from slipping in that way.
Piker: I will say what I’m enthusiastic about. I am enthusiastic about the expropriation of wealth for people, such as myself as well, in the form of taxation, though. And that’s basically the grand design that I have.
Douthat: Right now, though, no one’s going to deplatform you. Twitch is not going to suspend you for saying that you want to raise taxes on the rich and use the force of the state. Do you think it was reasonable for Twitch to suspend you for a day for talking about killing Rick Scott?
I guess I’m asking: What are the obligations of platforms with this stuff?
Piker: I think it’s understandable that Twitch did that, which is why I apologized for the use of my language as well. Like I said, there are certainly instances where it’s an emotionally charged conversation, or I’m being careless, and it comes across — it reaches an unintended audience that sees it, in this super short format, in a very negative way. It’s unfortunately a byproduct of the medium that I’m in — real-time discourse happening with random anonymous accounts—
Douthat: But you’re OK with some kind of taboo maintenance here.
Piker: Oh, for sure. In order for normal discourse to flourish, obviously, some kind of terms of service need to be implemented. A direct call to violence is of course going to be considered unacceptable — I totally understand that. Even if it’s being made in jest or even if it’s being misunderstood in that moment without the appropriate context.
Having said that, however, if we’re talking about broader things, and we didn’t really get to talk about this a lot, but a deplatforming initiative has taken place on Twitch and on numerous other platforms, mostly championed by the ADL and some other actors as well, because of my consistent anti-Zionist advocacy.
I am an avowed anti-Zionist — I openly say it. I have also spent all of my professional career combating antisemitism, which has grown in this country as well. And yet, a lot of these organizations, I think, and a lot of people have falsely maligned and smeared me as an antisemite despite my advocacy against antisemitism.
Douthat: So this brings us to the last area I want to talk about. You’ve mentioned a few times growing up in Turkey. Just talk about for a minute your background in the Middle East and how it shaped your politics. Even how it radicalized you, might be a good way of putting it.
Piker: Yeah, I mean, I have a very different opinion about American foreign policy than the average American has, due to the fact that I didn’t grow up in America. I had more proximity, or a closeness to, I guess, the recipient of American violence and American intervention being someone who grew up in Turkey. Therefore, my starting position is very different to the way that the American world police narrative was designed in the United States of America.
Admonishing its enemies, making them seem as though they’re barbaric and deserving of some kind of direct military intervention — these are things that I obviously considered to be not only wrong, but also, incredibly consequential. This kind of sentiment was incredibly consequential for people who had to live in these countries and had to be victims to boots-on-the-ground military warfare and even the drone wars that greatly escalated under Obama.
Douthat: What do you think about the government of Turkey?
Piker: I — [chuckles] I am not a fan of the government of Turkey, and I’ve written extensively about my criticism of the government of Turkey. It’s part of the reason I can’t really go back to Turkey, even though my whole family lives there, out of fear that I might be jailed. And I don’t think the Trump administration would demand my return as an American citizen.
Douthat: I’m curious how you think about how left-wing politics and Middle Eastern culture and Islamic politics fit together. And I understand you’re not a Muslim — you don’t consider yourself a Muslim — but you’re culturally Muslim, right?
Piker: I mean, I say I’m a Muslim because I’m culturally Muslim in the same way that many secular Jews are Jewish, or many American Protestants say that they’re Christian, but they’re not really.
Douthat: So I’m going to ask you for a take, based on that background, because I’m really interested in the ways that conservative forms of Islam and the culture of the progressive left right now fit together, both in Europe and the United States. In a way, these are some of the most different groups you can imagine — forms of Islamic cultural traditionalism are pretty distant from the norms and mores of the secular Western left.
At the same time, including on some of the issues that you’ve been talking about — opposition to U.S. foreign policy, Israel-Palestine — there’s a very strong alliance often between Muslims who feel the U.S. is too imperialist or too pro-Israel, and these groups.
It’s a pretty important force in European politics. And I think you see it more in progressive politics in the U.S. right now as opposition to Israeli military operations in Gaza has become more and more of a litmus test.
I’m just curious if you have thoughts on how that fits together, these two very different, very culturally different groups having a kind of alliance — is it an alliance of convenience? Is it something more? What do you think about that?
Piker: Super easy to explain. I disagree vehemently with the Klan. I don’t want Arkansas to be fire bombed into oblivion. I don’t want the children of Klan members to be killed at their schools. I don’t want the hospitals that Klan members go to be bombed as well. And I’m not even making an equivocation between the Klan and, for example, Hamas, which I consider to be a resistance group. They have an emancipatory movement, ultimately. I don’t agree with their internal politics, their domestic affairs. I don’t agree with a lot of the things that they represent or a lot of the things that they say.
But these are utterly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, in the overarching hierarchy, where the No. 1 most consequential wrong that’s taken place is not only 78-plus years of brutal occupation and apartheid, but then also the ongoing genocide for the past two years. I feel like that is far more important to address than any number of different civil liberty initiatives that Muslim countries could engage in.
And I think a lot of people see it that way as well, where they’re like: I don’t think this should be happening. I don’t think that this violence should be happening. And we need to solve that first and foremost.
It’s not necessarily that leftists in the West are firm and committed believers in whatever stereotyped version of Islamic fundamentalism that people present.
Douthat: No, I don’t think they are at all. I completely agree. That’s a big part of why it’s an interesting political formation.
I’m going to run with the Klan analogy, just because you offered it to me. If there was a war against a small political state controlled by the K.K.K., that followed in the aftermath of the K.K.K. going out and killing a lot of African Americans, Black women and children, and the larger region consisted of a bunch of regimes that, even if they weren’t fully K.K.K., had some sort of white supremacist elements, were authoritarian and so on, I feel like a lot of people would see a little more complexity in that drama than you do in the way you talk about Israel and Zionism.
Piker: Yeah.
Douthat: And I should say, I think opposition to and skepticism of the Israeli strategy in Gaza is totally understandable, and I’ve expressed it myself.
But you’re something more. Again, you’re an anti-Zionist. In fact — as long as we’re doing K.K.K. things — in one of your arguments, you said that a certain kind of Zionist tendency should be treated the same way we treat neo-Nazi tendencies. And then that kind of rhetoric shows up around on the left.
Piker: Yeah.
Douthat: Isn’t there something a little bit strange, from a left-wing perspective, about that kind of focus on the crimes of one country, in an environment that you’ve, yourself, analogized to the KKK?
Piker: Great question. The reason I made certain to mention that I find the Klan’s political opinions to be repugnant but I still would not advocate to firebomb them, and then also made a distinction between Hamas as an emancipatory movement that has evolved over the years to fight back in ways that I might even personally find to be inappropriate or morally repugnant, ultimately ——
Douthat: One or the other? More inappropriate or more morally repugnant?
Piker: I think that, as someone who believes in human rights, targeting civilians is the major reason I criticize Israel. It would be very hypocritical if I considered targeting civilians to be appropriate if it was done during an emancipatory struggle.
Having said that, I do have the same understanding or the same conceptualization of that kind of resistance as I do with the A.N.C. or as I do with the I.R.A. or even with the abolition of slavery in this country. The reason I don’t think it’s an apt analogy to compare the K.K.K. to Hamas beyond disagreements and enforcement is that the Klan has not been dominated or the Klan itself has not existed under a brutal structure of Black supremacy that wiped them out. This is the reason I don’t think the comparison is apt in that regard, because I do agree with Palestinian liberation as a concept, whereas I would liken the Klan’s operations or their worldview to the same kind of ethno-religious supremacy that is baked into Zionism and the exterminationist policies that exists within Zionism as well. So the Klan is the closer analogy, when it formalized and it turned into a system of violence, to what Israel is doing.
This is why I’m also not shy about making comparisons to even Nazi Germany, which a lot of people maybe a couple years ago, even myself, would shy away from doing.
Douthat: Yeah. I think those comparisons are not really persuasive at all if you actually read about the things that the Nazis did on the Eastern Front and compare them to whatever war crimes you accuse Israel of. Those comparisons seem pretty faulty to me, and they seem faulty in a way that, again, yields a kind of unique scapegoating of the Zionist state within the wider range of Middle Eastern states especially.
If you look at the history of the Middle East over the last 80 years, most of the crimes that you’re accusing the Israeli government of committing — I mean, if you look at the history of Iraq; if you look at what happened to the Jews in Arab countries after 1947 and 1948; if you’re looking for ruthless oppression, you can look next door to Egypt. It seems like there are many, many potential targets of a leftist, utopian form of moral outrage.
And again, I’m not … right now, Israel is conducting a brutal war.
Piker: So you still don’t consider what Israel’s doing a genocide?
Douthat: I agree with you that right now, it would be weird for you to go on your stream and say: Let’s not talk about Gaza. Let’s talk about the corruption of the Saudi monarchy — I agree with that.
Piker: Which by the way, I do talk about the Saudi monarchy quite a bit, or numerous other collaborative states, far before even the Abraham Accords were implemented. I’ve even ——
Douthat: But you wouldn’t describe yourself as — I don’t know what the right term is — but you wouldn’t say it’s wrong for Saudi Arabia to exist because it was founded in some acts of violence.
Piker: Can I elaborate on that?
Douthat: Yeah.
Piker: I would say that it is utterly inappropriate and wrong if there were exclusionary practices — and some of this does exist in the Muslim states that we’re talking about — where there was no allowance, for example, for Jews to come and live in these countries. And as a matter of fact, some of the things that you just mentioned ——
Douthat: I’m pretty sure, speaking as a Christian, that there are some pretty exclusivist rules in more than a few Middle Eastern countries.
Piker: Absolutely, and I see that as a byproduct of the rampant destabilization that has existed in this resource-rich region. My criticism against these countries not having the allowance or not having any moment of respite to be able to evolve, I see that as a byproduct of American imperialism and Western imperialism as well, because it makes it a lot more difficult for people to have any sort civil rights struggle when they’re so predisposed with being bombed or being destabilized in one way, shape or form — either in the hands of Israel as a destabilizing factor in the region, or directly through American intervention, British intervention, and the like. For coups and whatnot to take place in these countries, it makes it quite difficult for the regime change to take place in a revolutionary manner.
The Iranian revolution is a great example of this as well. When you put a puppet state in charge that is Western aligned, and that puppet state must enforce its dominance over and over again through brutal practices of torture and mass incarceration, people are inevitably going to revolt against that.
What I have seen in my experience as someone growing up in Turkey, more often than not, is that the people that actually find themselves the most earnest anti-Western figures, the people that these resentful populations can unite behind, oftentimes actually wear fundamentalism as a way to show how anti-Western they are. This is the reason some of these despotic regimes actually end up taking power.
Douthat: But it seems to me like you wouldn’t extend that kind of structural argument and narrative to the Israelis. You’re like: Well, there’s Western imperialism, there’s war, there’s violence. This is how the Middle East ends up with dictators and theocrats — OK. The state of Israel has been surrounded by countries that deny its right to exist, have invaded it repeatedly, and yet, that narrative to you does not inspire any sympathy for the Israelis.
Piker: Yes and no.
Douthat: Because they’re currently winning.
Piker: It’s incorrect to say that my analysis does not factor in externalities or resistance against Israel’s incursions, for example. Ultimately it goes back to: Did the Palestinians have good reason to say, we oppose this, we oppose the Israeli state? Was it born out of ancient antisemitism? Or was it born out of an emancipatory need that all indigenous people have — all peoples of the world have — in terms of developing autonomy …
[Cross talk]
Douthat: But it could have been ——
Piker: An argument that Israel makes for its own Jewish determination — a Jewish state’s self-determination,
Douthat: But ——
Piker: Which, once again ——
Douthat: But surely it could be both. You could say: of course, there’s an admirable, understandable desire for emancipation, a desire to have your own homeland. But at the same time, at a certain point, when it hits a certain level of K.K.K.-style hatred, you would say: Even if the original motivation is correct, even if there are understandable motivations here, something has gone wrong.
Piker: The K.K.K.-style hatred is correct. That’s precisely the reason it invokes a violent reaction. But ultimately, that is what Zionism ends up becoming. And if left unaddressed, this inherent contradiction, this notion of Jewish self-determination, is presented as a totally normal thing.
Everybody has self-determination. People have a right to develop their own nation state, but this one specifically has demographic concerns that require the eradication or the mass displacement of the indigenous population that do not fit the demographic in-group.
And that is at the heart of this problem of how certain societies get more and more comfortable with fascist violence. And I see this as a dual problem in America, as well as Israel.
Douthat: So let’s just take that, because I know you have to go stream.
Piker: I could talk about this all day, by the way, especially on The New York Times.
Douthat: Well, I’m sure you will be talking about it all day. Some of us, though, don’t have the same stamina, so I’m just going to ask a last question off that point.
You’re talking about parallels between the Israeli situation and the U.S. situation. You’re talking about the idea that the Israeli situation represents fascism facing resistance. The U.S. situation, obviously, lots of people on the left consider Trump a fascist. This is a very dark narrative. And one of my recurring themes over the last month has been watching the left as an outsider and seeing it go dark, in effect, and get really, really pessimistic.
So I want to ask you about nihilism and despair. You have a worldview that has a very bleak vision of the U.S. empire as a global force.
Piker: I wouldn’t say that, because I ——
Douthat: So tell me why you’re optimistic. Let’s end there.
Piker: Yes. So I see this as well. I think nihilism is a major problem in the increasingly alienated, increasingly isolated, permanently online generations that are born into a universe where they just have an iPad in front of them from the start. And that nihilism is born out of our inability to make changes — meaningful changes — in the system.
One example I will use is the Black Lives Matter protests that took place. A lot of people in the aftermath of these lockdowns were very frustrated. They saw something that was so patently unjust, and they wanted to make demands. They did all of the right things. They protested. Some of those protests, actually, with police intervention in some instances, turned even violent. Many people were arrested as a consequence of this. But the broad majority of the protests started off peacefully, and the argument was perfectly reasonable: We have to do something about the unfair practice of policing in Black and brown neighborhoods and the systemic racism that exists within the criminal justice system. It’s an argument that I also, of course, agree with.
After that, they also then turned around and voted. They voted for the Democratic Party. Joe Biden won over Donald Trump. There was a period of celebration, but no change actually came. The same structures of oppression existed, and the Democrats actually presented an alternative: They spent most of their time criticizing the activist-born Defund the Police movement without trying to understand exactly what that meant.
Basically for the political normie, they did everything by the book: They protested. They engaged in civil disobedience. They showcased their discontent. They did their civic duty of voting — and no change came. What do you expect in the aftermath of that but nihilism?
My solution to that has always been to maintain revolutionary optimism. I tell people not to succumb to nihilism all the time. I tell people to maintain revolutionary optimism. And the reason I say that is that I understand how change takes place, how long it takes for actual systemic change — seismic shifts — to take place in society, even in a democratic one that maybe is a theoretical democracy but doesn’t actually abide by the democratic wishes of the majority.
I know that these things take time. And one thing that I have seen that has given me tremendous confidence has been the societal attitude on the issue of Israel. I think the sheer brutality of Israel’s conquest over the Palestinians — what I and the international community now recognize as a genocide — has made people, in spite of the media sanitation, reflect on that and made people recognize the truth. That actually gives me a little bit of hope, that I think people do have the capacity to see exactly what’s going on and have the capacity to recognize right from wrong and to demand change, no matter how impossible said change feels.
Douthat: Hasan Piker, thanks so much for joining me.
Piker: Thank you for having me.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, Andrea Betanzos, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Raina Raskin. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Sophia Lanman and Pat McCusker. Cinematography by Marina King and Bets Wilkins. Video editing by Arpita Aneja and Steph Khoury. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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