Conservatives don't often get the opportunity to thank Hasan Piker for much, but one thing we can thank him for is his candidness.

During one of his characteristic rants, Piker said he wants moderate Democrats, particularly those who oppose the party’s progressive wing, thrown in prison. He went further, invoking “Chinese-style communism” and “Cultural Revolution s**t,” implying that he advocates for severe violence against his political opponents. It remains unclear which parts of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution he finds most inspiring: the imprisonment and murder of political opponents, the coercive social upheaval, or the mass death that followed. 

"I will throw you in prison, okay? I want to put you physically behind a prison. I want Chinese-style communism to happen inside of the Democratic Party right now, okay?" Piker said. "I want to do Cultural Revolution s**t when I see that."

The one thing Americans can be thankful for is that Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward probably cannot be marketed on top of a Cultural Revolution. The United States has somehow remained at the frontier of modernity without engineered famine, mass purges, or turning political disagreement into a criminal offense, an achievement that may come as a surprise to Hasan Piker. 

Perhaps that is because Americans have traditionally resisted taking political advice from online revolutionaries whose preferred policy platform appears to be “Cultural Revolution s**t.” Still, that tradition may be at risk if the Democrat Party decides that calls to imprison ideological opponents are merely another contribution to the marketplace of ideas.

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This comes as Democrats, by and large, have declined to confront the radicals in their own ranks, including Piker and others who have defended the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, embraced socialism nearly wholesale, and increasingly allowed what was once the party’s fringe to shape its agenda. The result was predictable from the start: a party that has grown more comfortable accommodating extremism in the name of electoral victory, rather than opposing it.