It’s not every day that corporate media unintentionally displays the modern Democratic Party’s headlong descent into radicalism — but it’s exactly what happened Sunday.
That’s when The New York Times published, then silently revised, the headline of an opinion piece meant to sanitize far-left influencer and terrorist sympathizer Hasan Piker.
Its original title: “Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy.”
Hours later, possibly disturbed by having defended a pro-murder Mao Zedong wannabe in its pages, the paper changed the headline to the equally ill-advised “This Is Why There’s No Liberal Joe Rogan.”
You idiots, Joe Rogan is a liberal — a vocal supporter of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Rogan didn’t change: His party grew more extreme.
The far-ranging and conspicuous effort by both media and Democrats themselves to normalize someone as objectively radical as Piker proves the point.
And it compels us to ask: How far-left is too far for today’s Democrats?
From where I sit, there is no ceiling.
And it’s not a both-sides issue, either.
Ask a Republican what is too far-right to settle comfortably within the party’s tent, and he’ll give you names: Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson.
President Donald Trump has had no compunction about denouncing such loudmouths’ extremism.
Yet ask a Democrat the same question, and he’ll give you silence or evasion.
That’s because today’s Democrats would rather not discuss, let alone concede, that they’re dominated by an army of obedient far-left radicals across nearly every industry — supporters whose grotesque, bilious fanaticism the self-professed party of “decency” has zero intention of reining in or challenging.
Former President Joe Biden himself said of the deranged anti-Israel protesters who agitated outside the Democratic National Convention, “They have a point.”
In the musty world of bedroom streaming there is Piker, who recently called himself a “lesser-evil voter” who “would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.”
He has called ultra-Orthodox Jews “inbred.”
He dismissed the sexual assaults of Oct. 7 with the remark that “it doesn’t matter if effing rapes happened” — Israel’s response is still unjustified.
He has referred to his critics as “ultra-Zionist pigs” and “Israel-first monsters.”
Yet Piker, who is somehow a more cartoonish version of even the laziest caricature of champagne socialism, remains welcome in Democratic circles.
Democratic candidates court his endorsement.
We’re a long way from Bill Clinton’s performative appeal to the center with his famous Sister Souljah moment.
In industries where progressives enjoy a healthy majority, the pattern repeats.
Piker is invited to Oscar parties.
Media publish plush profiles and glossy fashion spreads on him.
This week he even spoke at Yale University, where he proclaimed, “The fall of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century.”
And Piker is merely a dot on a much longer trendline.
His style of progressive fanaticism is rampant among the Democratic elite, bubbling up in all directions.
In the news media, loons like Joy Reid claim the United States is only “marginally better” than Iran on women’s rights.
Mehdi Hasan avers that, in the war in Iran, the ayatollah is Ukraine and the US is Russia.
The hosts of “The View” extol extreme left-wing positions, from “defund the police” to abolishing the Electoral College.
In electoral politics Phillip Agnew, a former Sanders senior advisor, once used the anniversary of 9/11 to jeer at US foreign policy: “#neverforget what goes round comes round,” he posted.
Another Sanders surrogate, Amer Zahr, said he stands with “every resistance… whether it’s called Hamas, whether it’s called Hezbollah.”
Neither is unwelcome in Democratic circles.
In governance the list lengthens.
Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) are well known for their radicalism and antisemitic sentiments.
Then there’s front-running Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, who bore a Nazi “death’s head” tattoo on his chest until recently.
He has written that all police “are bastards,” declared himself a “communist,” and said on social media that “an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.”
And Platner, a US Marine veteran, blames the corps for making him this way.
Meanwhile, Republicans are engaged in a mini-civil war to limit the reach and influence of their wingnuts, producing increasingly hostile factions in an already unstable coalition.
Democrats must be laughing themselves silly: They have no such worries because they simply normalize their nutjobs.
They platform them.
They ask them to run for office.
The Times had it right the first time around — for modern Democrats, Piker is indeed “not the enemy,” but the new normal.
T. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington, DC.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
