There’s a lot going on right now: a war that threatens to plunge the entire globe off an economic cliff; a small group of the ultrarich hoarding ever more wealth as economic misery piles up for the rest of us; an unprecedented, multipronged assault on free speech and the press; and the president’s mounting efforts to take over and rig future elections; to name a few.But that’s not what’s on the Democratic establishment’s mind. If you’re a corporate Democrat, the most important matter in the world right now is a Twitch streamer.After bleating for more than a year that they desperately needed “a Joe Rogan of the Left,” centrist Democrats are now predictably melting down over the prospect that they might actually get one. For weeks now, the party and its various media arms have been screeching about the growing popularity of socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, and that his various public statements — that “America deserved 9/11,” that shoplifting and other types of theft are no big deal or even “cool,” that Americans “understand” why a rapacious health insurance CEO was murdered, as well as his being an apologist for authoritarianism and human rights abuses and supposedly holding bigoted views — are beyond the pale and disqualify him from being a prominent voice in Democratic politics.But it’s actually so much worse than that. Jacobin has identified at least fifteen other appalling, sometimes bigoted statements that seem to have escaped notice:“It is possible to kill children legally.”“This is war. It is combat. It is bloody. It is ugly, and it’s going to be messy. And innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward.”“Some of these people [killed] are entirely innocent non-combatants, including children. This is an unspeakable tragedy. It is also one of the unavoidable burdens of political power.”On assassinating a sixteen-year-old boy: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if…
