Hasan goes to a costume party

www.americanthinker.com

I’ve always thought that a large number of left-wing “activists” are actually cosplayers – people playing at being big, bad revos in order to boost their egos and arouse terror among their relatives and neighbors. This week, we got evidence to support this. The aptly-named Hasan Piker, leftist podcaster and “spokesman,” gave a Nuremberg-style rant to an audience of College Democrats while wearing a Mao jacket.

The Mao jacket is an interesting piece of clothing. Tyrants of the 20th century dropped the traditional ornate plumage of the early modern authoritarian ruler for the simple, even drab. The Mao jacket was evidently intended to reflect the kind of clothing worn by the proles while also having an air of command. Stalin introduced it in the late 20s and wore it for the rest of his career outside of a short period during WW II when he went for a marshal’s uniform jacket. It was picked up in turn by Mao Tse-tung during the Chinese civil war period.

It entered public consciousness in a serious sense with the Great Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, when mobs of Chinese Red Guards -- students loyal to Mao and all dressed exactly like their leader -- roamed Chinese cities destroying all signs of culture as well as murdering anyone who attracted their attention.

That, it seems, is what Piker wishes to project by wearing the thing. It’s supposed to act as a combined proclamation, threat, and revolutionary symbol, but in truth it simply represents a fantasy. Piker is nostalgic for a time that he never actually experienced. A time when Marxist revos walked tall, when murder and torture ruled the streets, when a single word could send anyone to the Gulag, never to return. He’s cosplaying, seeing himself as one of the leftist monsters of the 20th century: “To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed... there is nothing sweeter in the world.”

Does it work? No. Piker is a rather weedy mutt with the build suggesting somebody who suffered from malnutrition his entire life. (Even though he comes from a wealthy family. Yep -- the spokesman of 21st-century leftism is a Porsche lefty.) It doesn’t help that the jacket appears slightly oversized, giving him the air of a sixth-grader trying on one of dad’s sportscoats.

As for the speech, the less said the better. Piker has made his rep through threats, insults, and disorganized rants, and it’s simply more of the same here: “We have a message. We are coming. And we will… become… undeniable.”

At that point the crowd rose to its feet, shouted “Heil,” and started marching around the venue holding torches. Actually no, that didn’t happen, but it will give an idea of the general atmosphere.

So this, in the year of the midterms, is the best they can do: a man who presents himself as a Mao pretender, but who in simple truth comes off as a cheap knockoff of a Bond villain.