Hasan Piker, the leftist influencer, has millions of followers across Twitch, YouTube, and other platforms. And so it is not without interest that he has described Mao as “one of the great leaders of this world” and that, when challenged about this, he conceded that “there was a lot of f***ing excesses, let’s be real, but. . . .”

Ah yes, there is always a “but.”

The “but” in this case was that “the People’s Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong.”

True enough. Then again there were tens of millions of Chinese who would have existed for quite a bit longer were it not for Mao or his republic. And many of those did not meet their deaths because of yet another catastrophic communist “reform,” but because they were, in one way or another, murdered.

The easy response to Piker’s comments is to write him off as a provocateur or a nut. But the wiser course is to take him seriously, to believe that he either believes what he says or, at least, that he wants his followers to believe what he says. If that’s so, he will want them to agree with his comment about the greatness of Mao, and to join with him in dismissing those millions of dead as “excesses,” a blot on a glorious record. It’s an old argument. To borrow from a notorious phrase, those millions were the eggs broken to make an omelet.

And once people come to accept that way of thinking, there will, sooner or later, be other omelets — and other eggs.