Why I’ve been listening to Hasan Piker’s analysis

Almost every line in the following video was important and necessary for people to hear. I dare say …. brilliant. This video seemed completely extemporaneous. It’s Hasan expressing his deeply held and well-considered beliefs, pretty much all of which I agree with. Chapeau.

TRUMP'S MILITARY REVENGE by HasanAbi (YouTube)

The video’s not even 20 minutes long and I found nearly all of it worth citing below.

“What could be a solution to crime? Great question. This has been something that thinkers have gotten together and and tried to find solutions to since the ancient times. Okay. From ancient Greece onwards, the answer has always been the same. Solve poverty and you solve crime. That’s it.

“Just as Americans and their inability, the American government’s inability to address any of these problems and then their solutions are always just like to basically make the problems worse. With the conversation around crime, the solutions are identical.

“They are basically doing the just one more lane on the highway and we will fix this traffic issue. Please, one more lane. But in terms of addressing the crime, the real solution to lowering traffic density, as we all know, is not more lanes on a highway. It’s actually public transit. Okay? Making a less car reliant infrastructure would be the perfect solution to the traffic density problem. But we don’t do that. And we just keep adding lanes onto the highway. But you still get bottle-necked when you enter the city. That’s just how it works.

“And the same principle applies to every single thing that these guys are seemingly trying to solve. If militancy was actually an adequate solution to crime, then America would be crime-free. We have the most militant police force on the planet. Nothing comes near the militancy and the militarization of our domestic police force. This is before we even talk about utilizing the military.

“[Reading from the chat] ‘But I like my car is the only freedom we have at this point.’

“This is what I mean. No, true freedom is not having to sit in traffic. True freedom is actually being able to have a much more affordable alternative to having a car. You can still have a car if you want to, but like real freedom would be the freedom to have a diversity in transport options as opposed to just simply being in your car. But Americans just do not comprehend that at all because it’s been sold to you. This has been sold to you since birth that like cars are actually—cars equate to freedom.

“But anyway, that’s like that’s just one aspect of this. Here, give me any problem that has a major impact on American day-to-day existence and I will show you that they do the same every single time.

“[From the chat] Gun violence, school shootings.

“Okay, the solution is simple. Gun control is the most effective means to at least cut down some of the gun violence. And yet, no one wants to do that. So, we constantly look for other alternative reasons. Okay, we’re like, “Oh, door control. Oh, we you need more guns. We need to give the teachers guns.”

“Okay, it’s so stupid. You’re not solving the problem. You’re making the problem worse. I already gave you the example of just one more lane on the highway for traffic density.

“Same with healthcare. Solution to healthcare is to take out the profit incentive from healthcare. It should be free. It’s free in many other countries, in almost every single country. Every country that has decent governance has realized that this is the bare minimum thing that they need to do.

“In America, we don’t do that. And we’re like, “No, no, you don’t understand. We need to let the free enterprise thrive even more and then it’ll automatically solve itself.” Nope. It hasn’t. Why would you think that doing the same thing over and over again and leaning into the private enterprise aspect of it is going to actually solve this problem?

“And the same goes for crime. Same goes for crime. The only solution to crime is the eradication of poverty because that is where crime manifests. Crime manifest as a byproduct of people’s material conditions. Crime increases when people are poor. When they feel as though they have no alternatives.

“The American government is already like pretty ruthless in terms of dealing with crime have refused to reckon with this problem. they just say nah actually it’ll be different this time. The best mechanism to solve crime is more deterrence, more violence, more punitive measures and, if that was the case, we’d be crime-free already, as opposed to like all these other countries. But all these other countries have significantly lower crime rates than we do.

“All these other countries have significantly lower recidivism rates than we do—the likelihood to re-offend—right? Once someone is in jail and that’s directly a consequence of the way our prison structure works, our prison system works is so ruthless and so violent that you become like a better criminal. You become like…you are pushed into being a more rugged criminal once you go to prison as opposed to like rehabilitate and reintegrate into society.

“It all stems back to this like insane concept that we have. It’s the profit motive. We have private prisons in this country which is abhorrent, morally repugnant obviously, but then also on top of that it’s the lack of interest in solving any of these real problems because someone can make more money off of not solving these problems.”

“Why do you think people in high crime neighborhoods want more police? Because they also believe the same that everyone believes. They believe the same that your uncs in the suburbs believe. The false notion that like more police presence is actually actively solving crimes or is like active deterrent. Also, these under-served neighborhoods oftentimes do have a ton of police presence, but they’re just not doing the normal function of policing. And that is precisely the reason why they think, “Oh, if there were more cops, maybe they would actually solve these problems.” When, in fact, a big problem with policing is that they’re just not doing their jobs. That’s the issue.

“I’m not saying ‘no police’. I’m saying do your job. Okay? Do your job. Do your job. The theoretical job of a police force, whether it’s a democratic design or not, is supposed to be: to protect and serve the citizens, protect and serve the public. But policing historically and in contemporary American society simply protects and serves capital, the interests of capital. That’s all they do. Their active response time to incidents in rich white neighborhoods is far better than their active response time in black neighborhoods, in poor neighborhoods in general. That’s the reason why a lot of people that live in areas where there are higher rates of crime think like, oh, if we have more if we had more cops, maybe they would like actually come faster.”

“Attorney General Pam Bondi has made clear that cities and states with these so-called sanctuary policies which limit local law enforcement from working with federal agents to enforce immigration policies. Also, that has nothing to do with crime.

Ironically enough, sanctuary city policies are oftentimes backed by the local police because is a successful way to have undocumented migrant communities collaborate and cooperate with the authorities without fear that they’re just going to be like unjustifiably deported for being a witness to a crime. That is the real reason why sanctuary cities were implemented. Okay? Or, at least, one of the reasons why sanctuary cities were implemented. It is so ridiculous that these dudes are trying to bring up the the lack of collaboration between federal law enforcement that’s mechanism is to violently prosecute civil offenders.

“Like imagine you you just get like ripped away from your family and sent to a totally separate country for a moving violation. You know what I mean? a traffic violation. And I’m not even talking about like DUIs. I’m talking like a tiny offense cuz that’s what it is to cross the fucking border. That’s literally what that is. That’s just how it’s seen in the legal system. And it shouldn’t even be seen as an offense really cuz the best possible way to fix that problem is to document these people, right?

“So, they’re basically saying the real issue is that like these criminal scum, you know, that work every single day to make your lives better for pennies on the dollar. Those are the real rugged criminals. Okay. And they must be violently seized and kidnapped by mass-armed thugs of the state and ripped away from their families. And if we don’t do that, then, you know, crime is out of control. I think many Americans still don’t fully comprehend this issue. And I can’t even necessarily fault them for their clear lack of humanity, like their clear lack of recognition for the humanity of undocumented migrants because like there’s not that many people out there convincingly speaking on this issue, convincingly speaking on the humanity of migrants in the way that I try to do every single day.”

“Hasan Piker streamingI think it still loops back. I hate to be a broken record on this, but I think this still loops back to white supremacy, right? What I mean by this, is like immigrants are black and brown in the minds of like many Americans. So, you can kind of turn a blind eye to like over-policing in those communities, no matter how unconstitutional or ridiculous it is without ever actually having to care about their humanity or their contributions to American society and American existence and the social fabric that keeps everything together.

And the same goes for black neighborhoods and black cities in general where it’s just like, this, the assessment from like regular Americans, from all different backgrounds, is that like higher-percentage black cities and higher-percentage black neighborhoods are just like scary and filled to the brim with crime. And therefore you just have to be violent and brutal to these people and you know if you use the military like this then it’s still good.

“They don’t even think about it like, “Bro, that’s your city, too.” You know what I mean? They don’t even comprehend it, because they just think, “Oh, it won’t happen in my city. There’s not a lot of black people here, so it’s fine.””