There is a specific, sulfurous stench that lingers in the memory of anyone who stood beneath the smoking, skeletal ruins of Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. It is not merely the olfactory ghost of pulverized concrete, jet fuel, and incinerated office paper. It is the raw, unadulterated smell of sudden, catastrophic mass murder. It is the smell of thousands of human beings vaporized, crushed, or forced to make the unthinkably agonizing choice between leaping from a thousand feet in the air or burning alive.

To live through that day in New York City was to have your worldview violently rewired. The world ceased to be an abstract playground of ideological thought experiments and became a place of terrifying, mortal fragility. We watched neighbors, firefighters, cops, and strangers plummet from the sky. We breathed the toxic ash for months. We attended funerals that featured closed caskets containing nothing more than a vial of sterile dust.

Yet, two decades later, sitting safely in air-conditioned streaming studios or behind glowing mobile screens thousands of miles away, a generation of terminally online sycophants has chosen to align themselves with a man whose historical illiteracy and grotesque moral compass are packaged as "anti-imperialism." They stan Hasan Piker.

And make no mistake: to excuse, minimize, rationalize, or laugh off Hasan Piker’s repeated apologetics for anti-American terrorism, authoritarian regimes, and mass violence is not just a political disagreement. It is a direct, unapologetic spit in the face of every New Yorker who survived that autumn of ash and blood.

The Sanitization of Evil: What Piker Actually Said

Let us dispense with the disingenuous gaslighting deployed by Piker’s fanbase—the army of twitch-chat sycophants and midwit essayists who rush to social media with the frantic energy of cult members every time their golden calf says something indefensible. They always cry out: “You’re taking him out of context!” or “He was just critiquing U.S. foreign policy!”

No. We are not taking him out of context. We are quoting him directly.

Consider the infamous, career-defining moment that exposed the rot at the core of Piker’s worldview: his response to U.S. foreign policy and the September 11 attacks, most explicitly encapsulated in his viral outburst: "America deserved 9/11."

Let that phrase curdle in your mind for a second. America deserved 9/11.

Try whispering that into the ear of a child who grew up without a father because he was a rescue worker crushed under the North Tower. Try telling a mother whose son’s remains were never identified that the country—and by extension, the innocent civilians sitting at their desks on the 100th floor—"deserved" to be incinerated by religious fundamentalists hijacking commercial airliners as guided missiles.

When Twitch banned him temporarily for the remark, Piker doubled down, whining that his words were merely a colloquial summary of blowback theory—the academic concept that foreign interventions can invite retaliatory blowback from aggrieved populations. But Piker is no political scientist; he is a wealthy streamer playing a revolutionary on the internet from a multi-million-dollar West Hollywood mansion. He did not offer a nuanced critique of CIA interventions in the Middle East during the Cold War. He used a populist sledgehammer to justify the mass slaughter of civilians, framing ordinary American office workers, janitors, and tourists as legitimate combatants in a geopolitical chess match.

To cheer for a man who casually tells millions of impressionable teenagers and young adults that a nation of 300 million people "deserved" the worst terrorist attack in modern history is to display a moral vacancy so profound it borders on the sociopathic.

The Cult of the Twitch Streamer: A Portrait of the Enablers

Who are the people defending this behavior? They are the digital-age political tourists. They are people who have never experienced an existential threat larger than a slow internet connection or a shadowban on Twitter, yet they cosplay as guerrilla fighters from the comfort of their ergonomic gaming chairs.

The psychological profile of a Hasan Piker supporter is a masterclass in cognitive dissonance and arrested development. They are bound together by a toxic cocktail of economic anxiety, historical ignorance, and an insatiable desire for in-group belonging. Piker provides them with a frictionless ideological product: all the moral superiority of being a "radical leftist" with none of the actual sacrifice, deep study, or intellectual rigor. He gives them a villain to hate (the West, capitalism, America) and a hero to worship (himself, draped in designer streetwear while railing against wealth inequality).

When Piker minimizes the atrocities committed by modern autocrats—whether making light of the suppression of democratic movements or running interference for murderous anti-Western regimes—his supporters nod along like bobbleheads. Why? Because for these sycophants, geopolitics is nothing more than a team sport.

If the United States or its allies are bad, then anyone who opposes them—no matter how reactionary, theocratic, or genocidal—must inherently be a freedom fighter. It is a binary, childish worldview that treats human lives as pawns on a Twitch overlay. When Piker’s chat floods with laughing emojis or justifications during discussions of mass violence, it reveals the chilling truth about his audience: they are desensitized, radicalized consumers who treat real-world suffering as content.

The New York Perspective: Why Your "Anti-Imperialism" is Cowardice

To understand why defending Piker is so uniquely repulsive, you have to understand what it means to be formed by New York City in the shadow of 9/11.

New York is a mosaic of humanity. On September 11, the people murdered in those towers weren’t cogs in an imperialist machine; they were immigrants washing dishes, single mothers answering phones, accountants, Muslims, Jews, Christians, atheists, Black, white, brown, and Asian people riding the subway to work. They were real human beings with families, dreams, and fears.

When you sit in Los Angeles, or London, or some leafy college town, and you nod along as Hasan Piker suggests that those lives were forfeit because of geopolitical "blowback," you are erasing the humanity of every single person who died that day. You are adopting the exact same dehumanizing logic used by the hijackers themselves: the belief that individual civilians do not matter, that collective punishment is acceptable, and that collateral damage is just the cost of doing business.

That is not "leftism." That is not "social justice." That is pure, unadulterated fascism of a different color. It is the elevation of political dogma over human empathy.

Piker’s defenders love to lecture New Yorkers and Americans about how we "don't understand" global politics because we are blinded by patriotism. No, you arrogant, sheltered frauds. We understand politics because we saw the bill come due in blood, fire, and falling bodies. We stood on street corners handing out missing person flyers with tear-streaked faces while you were still in elementary school watching cartoons. We watched our city transform into an armed camp, mourning our dead while listening to ghouls pontificate about how our foreign policy brought it on.

For anyone—anyone—to watch that trauma and then log onto the internet to defend a multimillionaire streamer who trivializes it is an unforgivable moral failure.

The Hypocrisy of the Bro-Socialist Industrial Complex

Let’s talk about the grift. Because make no mistake, supporting Hasan Piker is supporting a deeply lucrative grift.

Piker is a capitalist’s wet dream disguised as a socialist savior. He rails against the billionaire class while wearing luxury watches, driving sports cars, and purchasing multi-million-dollar homes in Hollywood—all funded by the very corporate platform (Amazon-owned Twitch) and the very capitalist economic system he claims to despise. He monetizes teenage angst, packaging righteous anger about real systemic inequalities into a daily entertainment product complete with sponsorships, merch drops, and subscription tiers.

And his supporters? They are the marks. They send him their hard-earned money (or their parents' money) through bits and subs, funding his lifestyle while he lectures them about labor exploitation.

More dangerously, they act as his digital brownshirts, harassing journalists, critics, and anyone else who dares point out his grotesque historical revisionism. They swarm social media threads with coordinated abuse, proving that the modern online left has abandoned solidarity in favor of personality cults. To support Piker is to endorse this predatory dynamic: a system where a wealthy influencer uses radical aesthetics to shield himself from criticism while cultivating a rabid mob that attacks anyone with the moral clarity to call out his vile rhetoric.

Conclusion: No Forgiveness for the Apologists

History does not look kindly on those who excuse mass violence and terrorism. Yet today, digital culture rewards them with views, clout, and financial contributions.

To the supporters of Hasan Piker: own your cowardice. Own the fact that you have chosen to tie your wagon to a talking head who looks at the murder of thousands of innocent people and shrugs because it fits his neat, infantile narrative of global conflict. Own the fact that your commitment to "edgy" internet politics is more important to you than basic human decency.

As a New Yorker who remembers the sirens that didn't stop for weeks, who remembers the smell of death hanging over the harbor, and who watched friends and neighbors carry an invisible grief that never truly left them, let me offer you this reality check:

You can wrap yourselves in all the anti-imperialist jargon you want. You can retreat behind the digital walls of Twitch chats and subreddit echo chambers. But you are not rebels. You are not revolutionaries. You are moral cowards cheering for a talking head who trivializes mass murder.

New York survived the worst day in its modern history without your permission, and it will survive your pathetic, chronically online idol worship, too.

Remember this: we don't forget who stood with the victims, and we certainly don't forget who cheered for the executioners.

The author is a retired Advanced Placement Teacher from the Babylon Union Free School District. Holding an earned doctorate in Modern World History, he is currently an adjunct professor at Nassau Community College and Southern New Hampshire University.