A socialist buys a $2.7 million house in West Hollywood. The media doesn t care. They care less about hypocrisy than they do about the fact that he's a rich guy who happens to be a streamer on Twitch and has a lake house in Lake Tahoe. And they don't even care that he bought it for over $2 million. They don't care that it's in Los Angeles, California, and that he doesn't live in a modest house like the rest of us. They only care about how much he's getting paid for it, and why he should keep the proceeds of his purchase in his lake house. And why he shouldn't have to pay for it with his own money, since he's got a lot more than that. And he's not the only one who can buy a house for a lot of money, but it's a socialist who does so because he's rich. And that's a good thing, because socialism is a socialist thing. And it's good for him because he gets to be rich because it means he can do what he wants with his money, and he doesn t have to compromise his values to pay his fair share of the proceeds from his hard earned money. And he does it because it makes him a better person than most other people who don't have as much as he does, and they're not getting paid the same amount of money for the same things they have in their day-to-day lives they're getting paid by the same thing they're paying for through their wages and benefits they get through their education and their day to day, and their taxes. And that they get paid for their education, and health care and their health care, they get to keep the same stuff they're supposed to do, but they're just as much, but instead they get a house that they can't afford to buy and they get it in the same way that he does in the first place. That's not even close to the real world, right there in LA? it's not a good enough house in LA, it's $3 million in LA and he's just like everyone else in the real life, right in the middle of Los Angeles? And he thinks he's better than most people in America, right? . right? He doesn't even need to pay their fair share in order to buy a home in LA or in New York City, he's in LA and he thinks so?
00:00:23.000And that, of course, is if you are a socialist who's extremely wealthy and gives very little charity.
00:00:27.000If you are that person, then Hypocrisy just doesn't play a part.
00:00:33.000Hypocrisy is never a problem because, after all, you're calling for societal change.
00:00:37.000You yourself don't have to abide by any of those rules because some animals are more equal than other animals.
00:00:43.000But the socialist has the benefit of the bargain because you get to be a socialist as you want to, like Bernie Sanders, and then you get to have a lake house.
00:00:51.000You get to be a millionaire while proclaiming that, Okay, so this issue has become relevant over the course of the past couple of days because a guy named Hasan Piker, who I believe used to be a Young Turks guy, I don't really know that much about him, he apparently is a socialist Twitch streamer.
00:01:11.000There's a big article, big glowing profile about him in New York Magazine titled, Streaming with Hasan Piker, the AOC of Twitch.
00:01:19.000I'm a political commentator with, like, stans.
00:01:21.000Okay, well, in the past few months, Hasan Piker, it turns out, has been revealed to be a very wealthy person, which is good for him.
00:01:29.000He has a lot of folks who are following him over at Twitch.
00:01:31.000That is his prerogative, and I'm glad for him that he's been able to build a following.
00:01:37.000But a couple of times in the last month, it's been revealed that this out-and-out socialist, I mean, this is what he calls himself, that he is a very wealthy man.
00:01:50.000A million tabs were pinched together like sardines at the top of his browser.
00:01:53.000His jittery cursor bounced between them, summoning network news, Chiron's YouTube brands, viral tweets, and TikTok memes.
00:01:59.000Today's trending topic, Piker, who is 30, had purchased a $2.7 million house in West Hollywood.
00:02:04.000An ordinary Twitch streamer's housing wouldn't make headlines, but over the past five years, Piker has become one of the most prominent socialist pundits in America.
00:02:11.000The controversy about the purchase had made it to Fox News and Breitbart, and Piker was prepared to take on the interlopers who logged on to see the fireworks.
00:02:18.000Quote, The only reason my house is expensive is because of the area I live in, he growled.
00:02:57.000And his response is, well, of course it's expensive around here.
00:02:59.000This is West Hollywood, which of course is not a response.
00:03:03.000Piker said three weeks later, quote, as long as you don't defang your core values, as long as you're still speaking truth to power, then F them.
00:03:09.000Yeah, speaking truth to power is being the guy who buys the $3 million house and does interviews with New York Magazine and then jabbers about how the rich don't pay their fair share.
00:03:54.000What makes that service significantly more important, socially speaking, from a Marxist perspective, than the guy who picks up the garbage?
00:04:00.000Why doesn't he own a $2.7 million home in West Hollywood?
00:04:04.000According to New York Magazine, Piker is a Twitch streamer who spends every day in front of a camera speaking to his 1.5 million followers.
00:04:11.000But unlike most of the platform's top users, Piker mostly talks politics.
00:04:15.000He trawls through Twitter and roasts bad takes from career right-wing correspondents like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson.
00:04:20.000He breaks down hawkish New York Times op-eds line by line, steadily working himself into a frothy fury.
00:04:56.000He looms over his streaming rig at six-foot-four, broad-shouldered, in a silver bracelet and paint-speckled cowboy bebop shirt, gnashing a cut of nicotine gum against his molars.
00:05:03.000On election night, from the same room, he hosted nearly 230,000 concurrent viewers, making him the sixth most-watched election livestream across the internet.
00:05:10.000A month prior, he broadcast playing the video game Among Us with representatives AOC and Ilhan Omar.
00:05:15.000Okay, and then later in this little SOP piece, he talks about the tax-the-rich dress that AOC wore.
00:05:25.000And here's what he said, quote, I think the Met Gala is a disgusting gluttonous exercise.
00:05:29.000And if given the opportunity to go, I do it in an effing heartbeat.
00:06:01.000Here's how it was reported from the New York Times.
00:06:03.000Twitch, the live video site popular with gamers, said on Wednesday it had endured a data breach that security researchers believe may have provided sweeping insight into the platform's computer code security vulnerabilities and payments to its content creators.
00:06:15.000Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, confirmed it had been breached hours after a user posted what the user claimed was an enormous trove of Twitch data onto the anonymous message board website 4chan.
00:06:24.000The user said the file contained, among other items, the history of Twitch's source code, proprietary software development kits, an unreleased competitor to Steam, an online game store, and programs, and a list of the amount of money that each of the site's streamers has earned since 2019.
00:06:38.000Find out how much our favorite streamer is really making, the user posted.
00:06:40.000Jeff Bezos paid 970 million bucks for this.
00:06:53.000Is this little revelation, quote, according to the list of earnings, which could not be independently verified, some notable personalities had made millions of dollars since 2019.
00:07:00.000One streamer, Hassan Piker, anticipated people getting angry about the amount of money the list said he had made.
00:07:07.000Just woke up to some fun news, he tweeted.
00:07:10.000Can't wait for people to be mad at me about my publicly available sub count again.
00:08:20.000The reason that isn't the headline is because socialists are never held to their own standards.
00:08:24.000They are never held to their own standards.
00:08:26.000See, here's the thing about socialism.
00:08:27.000If you actually held to your standard, then you would presumably be very concerned with giving away a lot of your money to charity or ensuring that the amount of money that you made for your socially useless service, according to Marx's theory, because of course your labor should be judged by some outside metric that is not the market.
00:08:43.000So somebody's gonna have to explain, by Marxist theory, why exactly it is more valuable for a guy to sit around and stream video games than it is for somebody to clean toilets.
00:08:53.000I can explain it because market says that's what it's worth.
00:08:56.000Things are worth what people say they are worth.
00:08:58.000But I'm not sure how, from a Marxist perspective, you can make that case.
00:09:01.000I also am not sure how you defend a $2.7 million home or a $3 million income for doing those things, and then say, it's my labor.
00:09:08.000No, no, no, that's my perspective, dude.
00:09:10.000If you're gonna do the it's my labor routine, Welcome to capitalism, Madude.
00:09:17.000So it is amusing to watch the media play this game.
00:09:19.000You're a hypocrite if you're a right-winger who abrogates your own principles.
00:09:23.000If you're a left-wing socialist who earns millions of dollars for talking online, Then you are not a hypocrite in any way.
00:09:29.000By the way, if you're a, if you're a left-wing outlet that rails against the evils of capitalism while taking millions of dollars from hedge funds and YouTube, you're not a hypocrite either.
00:09:39.000Nobody has to hold you to account or point out that you need to, if you are, if you are Young Turks, for example, and you attempt to crush your own unionization efforts, right?
00:09:47.000If you're, if you are the, the outlet for unionization, unionization is the only thing that matters.
00:09:52.000And then like a couple of years ago, it turns out that people at your place are trying to unionize and you yell at them not to unionize.
00:09:58.000Nobody seems to care very much about that.
00:10:02.000And now here's my belief about hypocrisy.
00:10:04.000You can make the case for Hassan or TYT or who I believe Hassan used to be at TYT.
00:10:10.000You can make the case for all of these people that personal activity doesn't abrogate the principle.
00:10:16.000You can make the case that the Marxist principles are correct and you are living in opposition to those Marxist principles because everybody is a sinner, right?
00:10:26.000This is sort of the religious perspective.
00:10:27.000There are religious principles about morals.
00:10:29.000You don't always live up to those because everybody is a sinner.
00:10:31.000That doesn't mean the morals are wrong.
00:10:35.000You can't say, everything I'm doing is entirely justified and I'm a Marxist stalwart while simultaneously living high on the hog the way that a capitalist would.
00:10:44.000Here's my capitalist view of all this.
00:10:45.000Congratulations to Hassan on earning his business success.
00:10:49.000I hope he enjoys his $2.7 million house and his $200,000 of earned income every month.
00:10:53.000I hope he enjoys it to the fullest of his ability and lives a happy, fulfilling capitalist life.
00:10:59.000Same for all of the people over at places like TYT.
00:11:02.000But please, stop pretending that you are a good Marxist if you don't live like a Marxist and justify yourself in capitalist terms.
00:11:08.000Because that ain't the way this works.
00:11:10.000At least acknowledge your sins against the great gods of socialist redistribution.