Marxist Socialist Mao Zedong was responsible for somewhere between 40 and 70 million deaths in China. National Socialist Adolf Hitler engineered the Holocaust, killing upwards of six million Jews. Both men were murderous totalitarian leftists, but modern American “progressives” associate with only one of them.

Podcaster and Gen Z influencer Hasan Piker is a young communist with a big audience. Born in New Jersey but raised in Istanbul before returning to America, he gets favorable interviews with The New York Times and elsewhere. Maybe he owes his growing acceptance in mainstream media to his uncle Cenk Uygur, cofounder of “The Young Turks” and former MSNBC host. In any case, Piker is no piker — he’s an up-and-comer, and his opinions are fomenting the alarming popularity of socialism in this country.

A few days ago, he gave a speech at the 2026 College Democrats of America summer convention while dressed like Mao. Remember when the Left went insane over Elon Musk’s supposed “Nazi salute”? Piker as Mao? Crickets.

That’s because leftists have spent decades lying about Nazism being right-wing.

Piker effectively argues that Hitler was worse because he exterminated people based on ethnicity due to his racist and nationalist beliefs, whereas Mao killed indirectly through his horrific policies. Just yesterday, he posted, “Comparing famine due to mismanagement or even the violence born out of the cultural revolution to the holocaust (or claiming it’s worse) is holocaust revisionism.”

That quickly earned him a community note explaining the death-toll comparisons.

In his remarks to the students, he railed against Democrats “who compromise, who conciliate, and who betray” the socialist revolution, and who “collaborate and cooperate with the fascists, who will fund ICE, who will fund Israel, who will help poison the planet,” and so on. “We don’t need those Democrats anymore,” he thundered. “We are coming. We are unbossed. We’re unbought. We’re unbound. And we will become undeniable.”

Piker isn’t new to Mao appreciation. Last fall, he was giddy after receiving a copy of Mao’s “little red book,” which he called “incredible” and “really, really special.” One of his companions called it “more important than the Bible.”

Among other things, the “little red book” says, “Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

To Piker, that’s a feature, not a bug. “I never would and never will” criticize the dear leader, he recently said on his podcast, recounting his trip to China. “Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world.” He added, “There was [sic] a lot of f***in’ excesses, let’s be real, but…” (There’s always a “but.”) “But the People’s Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong.” Yeah, well, millions of Chinese people would have continued existing without Mao.

Communists always argue that, to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

Piker wants what Mao brought. “Kill those motherf***ers!” he shouted on another recent podcast. “Murder those motherf***ers in the street. Let the streets soak in their f***ing red, capitalist blood!”

Is Piker in line with the Democratic Socialists of America?

Last Friday, Fox News’s Martha MacCallum interviewed DSA leader Gustavo Gordillo to find out more about the Democratic Socialists’ aims. For one thing, they want to “abolish the Senate.” Why? “The United States Senate is an undemocratic institution,” Gordillo asserted. He’s unintentionally correct. The Founders did not want a democracy, which is why they gave us a Republic with proper separation of powers.

You know what else is undemocratic? Socialist grocery stores. “If one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down in the neighborhood is enough to put someone out of business,” Gordillo argued, “then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.”

It’s also undemocratic to arbitrarily limit income, but that’s what Gordillo wants: “We don’t think that anybody should have a constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment.”

As columnist David Harsanyi notes, “The other day, prominent DSA member and Islamist Linda Sarsour, for example, called for getting rid of the Declaration of Independence. Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of the new Democratic Party congressional nominees from New York City, was co-founder of a group that called for ‘nothing short of the total collapse’ of the ‘American empire’ with the goal to ‘eradicate America’ and ‘Western civilization.’”

Eventually, they’re going to need “the barrel of a gun.”

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Out the window. Except for migrants like Gordillo’s family.

“Your family came here from Peru,” noted MacCallum. “They were Maoist communist guerrillas in Peru. So, why did your family come to America?”

With a hilarious lack of self-awareness, he responded, “The economic situation in South America and in Peru was in a really bad place” because of “the imposition of capitalism and American imperialism.”

So they came here? Yes, to destroy the country from within.

Indeed, that is precisely the danger Gordillo, Piker, and their ilk present. They hate America, and they want to remake it in the image of Mao’s China. It’ll take a Cultural Revolution to do it, which is what they have endeavored to launch.

Yet the Leftmedia is focused on the Right’s reaction, fomenting fears of a “Red Scare” revival. Well, the Reds really are here, and we should be scared enough to do something about it.

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