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Oct. 8, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

11:23

HYPOCRISY: Socialist Twitch Streamer Buys $2.7 MILLION House

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	That is a truism of politics that hypocrisy is always newsworthy.
	Hypocrisy is always newsworthy.
	If somebody is a religious Christian and then they have an affair, this is a newsworthy event, according to the media.
	If there's a politician who's right-wing, that politician turns out to be gay.
	Really, really newsworthy, according to the media.
	But there's one area of hypocrisy that is just not newsworthy to the media.
	Like, truly not newsworthy.
	And that, of course, is if you are a socialist who's extremely wealthy and gives very little charity.
	If you are that person, then Hypocrisy just doesn't play a part.
	Hypocrisy is never a problem because, after all, you're calling for societal change.
	You yourself don't have to abide by any of those rules because some animals are more equal than other animals.
	But 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.
	You 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.
	There's a big article, big glowing profile about him in New York Magazine titled, Streaming with Hasan Piker, the AOC of Twitch.
	I'm a political commentator with, like, stans.
	Okay, 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.
	He has a lot of folks who are following him over at Twitch.
	That is his prerogative, and I'm glad for him that he's been able to build a following.
	But 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.
	Quote, Hassan Piker was in a rage.
	A million tabs were pinched together like sardines at the top of his browser.
	His jittery cursor bounced between them, summoning network news, Chiron's YouTube brands, viral tweets, and TikTok memes.
	Today's trending topic, Piker, who is 30, had purchased a $2.7 million house in West Hollywood.
	An 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.
	The 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.
	Quote, The only reason my house is expensive is because of the area I live in, he growled.
	Are you guys really that stupid?
	Um, that doesn't, that's not even a response to the charge.
	The charge is that for a socialist, you seem to be spending large, my friend.
	There are a lot of places that are not in West Hollywood that don't cost $2.7 million.
	They're all over the United States.
	You can get yourself a tiny little shack and live yourself the Henry David Thoreau lifestyle for probably 30 grand somewhere.
	2.7 million bucks, a lot of money.
	I don't see you handing that out to all of the immiserated workers in the Marxist social construct.
	Right, that's the charge.
	And his response is, well, of course it's expensive around here.
	This is West Hollywood, which of course is not a response.
	Piker 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.
	Yeah, 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.
	He says, I don't give a bleep.
	I'm doing this in the least exploitative way you functionally effing can.
	Really?
	He says, it's my labor.
	I'm the one who's streaming for 10 hours.
	Welcome to capitalism, my dude.
	It's my labor?
	Yes, whose labor?
	So, in other words, you bet on yourself, you've done really well, and you believe that you deserve to keep the proceeds of that labor.
	But aren't you exploiting all the people who are engaged in commerce with you?
	After all, what service of value are you providing them?
	You are Twitch streaming video games.
	Is that a vital social service?
	What makes that service significantly more important, socially speaking, from a Marxist perspective, than the guy who picks up the garbage?
	Why doesn't he own a $2.7 million home in West Hollywood?
	According 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.
	But unlike most of the platform's top users, Piker mostly talks politics.
	He trawls through Twitter and roasts bad takes from career right-wing correspondents like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson.
	He breaks down hawkish New York Times op-eds line by line, steadily working himself into a frothy fury.
	It's free associative and open-ended.
	I have an accelerated version of brain worms.
	He says, I'm literally always online.
	I'm consuming media nonstop.
	Tune into a Piker stream, watch him condemn the civilian death toll in Afghanistan.
	An hour later, he may move on to revisiting his favorite WWE feuds.
	Fans don't need to have studied Marx to understand where Piker is coming from.
	Well, they might have to read Marx to understand why Piker is violating core tenets of Marxism.
	them.
	.
	He 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.
	On election night, from the same room, he hosted nearly 230,000 concurrent viewers, making him the sixth most-watched election livestream across the internet.
	A month prior, he broadcast playing the video game Among Us with representatives AOC and Ilhan Omar.
	Okay, and then later in this little SOP piece, he talks about the tax-the-rich dress that AOC wore.
	And here's what he said, quote, I think the Met Gala is a disgusting gluttonous exercise.
	And if given the opportunity to go, I do it in an effing heartbeat.
	I'm sorry everyone would.
	Why wouldn't you want to hang out with Frank Ocean?
	They're not going to the effing Davos summit.
	Well, but.
	Yes, they are.
	What do you think the Met Gala is?
	It is a bunch of rich liberals who are getting together to feed themselves for their rich liberalism.
	Again, the media are not interested in calling out hypocrisy.
	The reason I say that is because this story was now updated, okay?
	So, there was a Twitch data leak.
	Here's how it was reported from the New York Times.
	Twitch, 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.
	Twitch, 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.
	The 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.
	Find out how much our favorite streamer is really making, the user posted.
	Jeff Bezos paid 970 million bucks for this.
	We're giving it away for free.
	Again, we're going through this New York Times piece about Twitch.
	Buried way down in this article.
	Way down in this article.
	Is 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.
	One streamer, Hassan Piker, anticipated people getting angry about the amount of money the list said he had made.
	Just woke up to some fun news, he tweeted.
	Can't wait for people to be mad at me about my publicly available sub count again.
	And then he trended.
	He said, bro, come on.
	So, it never says in here what exactly Hasan Piker made.
	Now, let's just put it this way.
	It makes headlines every time a conservative signs a contract.
	If the IRS information of conservative commentators were leaked, you think that wouldn't be front page news?
	It would absolutely be front page news.
	And it wouldn't be about the leak or how the leak came about.
	What it would be about was the amount of money that everybody was making.
	How do we know this?
	Because the front page of every major newspaper this week was about what international figures made via IRS documents that were leaked.
	Right?
	And other sort of financial documents that were leaked.
	It was the content.
	It was the story.
	So, what exactly did these leaked documents show?
	It showed that Hassan apparently rakes in about three million bucks a year by doing his Twitch streaming.
	Which is a lot of money.
	It's a lot more money than your average day-to-day Marxist Lower class worker.
	The social class of people who are doing the actual labor that is being exploited.
	Why isn't that the headline?
	The reason that isn't the headline is because socialists are never held to their own standards.
	They are never held to their own standards.
	See, here's the thing about socialism.
	If 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.
	So 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.
	I can explain it because market says that's what it's worth.
	Things are worth what people say they are worth.
	But I'm not sure how, from a Marxist perspective, you can make that case.
	I 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.
	No, no, no, that's my perspective, dude.
	If you're gonna do the it's my labor routine, Welcome to capitalism, Madude.
	Seriously.
	So it is amusing to watch the media play this game.
	You're a hypocrite if you're a right-winger who abrogates your own principles.
	If you're a left-wing socialist who earns millions of dollars for talking online, Then you are not a hypocrite in any way.
	By 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.
	That's the way this works.
	Nobody 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?
	If you're, if you are the, the outlet for unionization, unionization is the only thing that matters.
	And 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.
	Nobody seems to care very much about that.
	And now here's my belief about hypocrisy.
	You can make the case for Hassan or TYT or who I believe Hassan used to be at TYT.
	You can make the case for all of these people that personal activity doesn't abrogate the principle.
	You 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?
	This is sort of the religious perspective.
	There are religious principles about morals.
	You don't always live up to those because everybody is a sinner.
	That doesn't mean the morals are wrong.
	It means you're wrong.
	But you can't have it both ways.
	You 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.
	Here's my capitalist view of all this.
	Congratulations to Hassan on earning his business success.
	I hope he enjoys his $2.7 million house and his $200,000 of earned income every month.
	I hope he enjoys it to the fullest of his ability and lives a happy, fulfilling capitalist life.
	Same for all of the people over at places like TYT.
	But please, stop pretending that you are a good Marxist if you don't live like a Marxist and justify yourself in capitalist terms.
	Because that ain't the way this works.
	At least acknowledge your sins against the great gods of socialist redistribution.
	I know what you're thinking.
	It's time to binge some more Ben Shapiro videos.
	Well, you are right.
	You should.
	But first, like and subscribe.
	Perfect!

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