Whether it’s Macklemore, Hasan Piker, or your neighborhood activist, this is a fight to make sure billionaires and politicians cannot stop free speech and will have to hear the calls to “Free Palestine” whether they like it or not.
America loves free speech,
Lol! Since when?
America love free speach. Well, no, not that. No. Not that. Nah. You can’t say that. No, not that either.
The thing about this is that literally every single other country is worse.
Disagree America doesn’t “love free speech” when it challenges empire at all not just over Palestine.
Isn’t the issue with Hasan Piker really about his association with some political candidates rather than his right to say those things? It comes down to opponents tying candidates to his rhetoric in guilt-by-association campaign ads, which outside groups can flood the airwaves with thanks to the atrocious Supreme Court rulings that protects unlimited campaign spending as free speech.
The Macklemore issue is more in the traditional Free speech realm. The more interesting angle there is how many of those mega-venues were funded through public-private partnerships. If taxpayers foot the bill for the construction and infrastructure, it raises the question of whether private operators should still have unilateral power to shut out artists over political speech.
Hasan Piker’s rhetoric is in line with how most American’s feel, if you don’t take him out of context I don’t think any of his views are actually that extremist or hyper lefty, Hasan Piker is this generation’s Bernie Sanders in many ways and it is endlessly hilarious to me THIS is who the establishment picked to pile on fearmongering about in order to police the left back into line with the center.
It ain’t gonna work, I know everyone likes to derisively call Hasan Piker “just” a streamer, but he is extremely thoughtful, careful and nuanced in his points and nothing he has said that people can quote/clip out of context to look unacceptable is anything he hasn’t apologized for and explained further.
One of the easiest defenses of Hasan Piker is simply that for all the benefit, power and increased access to the elite that he would get by “reaching across the isle” to join forces with rightwing anti-Israel figures like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, Hasan refuses to do so out of principle because he recognizes their opposition to Israel comes out of dumb hateful antisemitism not an actual genuine critique of the things driving the genocide in Israel that we are complicit in as well.
If Hasan Piker didn’t give a shit he would see any enemy of Israel as a friend but that is not how he behaves at all.
If the center and establishment keep fearmongering about Hasan Piker it is going to keep spectacularly backfiring on them…
