Hasan Piker energetically used the N-word while appearing on his uncle's show, The Young Turks, a montage of resurfaced video shows.
It was all in the family, as Piker's uncle, Cenk Uygur, couldn't stop spouting the famous slur—with a hard R—in an N-word slur-fest with his Young Turks regulars.
Piker's use of the word came while discussing a 2016 Obama Department of Justice investigation into the Baltimore Police Department, which accused them in official findings of minimizing at least 60 instances where cops called residents the N-word.
"Then the 60 instances of citizen complaints that alleged Baltimore officers' use of the racial slur 'N—' were misclassified as a lesser offense," Piker said, looking into the camera with a slight grin.
Uygur, who, like Piker, is Turkish, along with Ana Kasparian and Jimmy Dore—who are white—all used the derogatory term for black people openly during broadcasts of the show, video shows.
In most cases, it seems the videos touched on current events. Several mentions of "n—head ranch" are references to an actual ranch in Texas owned by the family of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (the origins of the name and what the Perrys knew was the source of a major controversy in 2012).
Other segments appeared to discuss the acceptability of using the N-word vs. "cracker."
"White crackers? Does that mean now we can say black n—?" asked Steve Oh, a former chief business officer of The Young Turks. Oh left the podcast in July 2021 to start the Okiboru Group, "a consumer and hospitality brand specializing in Japanese noodle concepts," according to his LinkedIn.
Various other uses of the word appear to be Cenk and the gang mocking other people who would use the word.
"N— this or n— that," says a more youthful Uygur. "They're like, 'you cover that Jerry Rice-looking n—.'"
Uygur's past use of the N-word surfaced in 2019 during his failed run for Congress, one of several controversies which ultimately led Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.) to pull his endorsement.
Uygur said at the time the show had a policy of using the word in full when quoting racists—a practice which was later abandoned. In 2020, a viral video of Uygur emerged which showed him berating black airline employees over a delayed flight.
"If we just sit here and take it, they'd have us here until six in the morning and then they'd f—k us even harder," Uygur said in the video.
"I'm sorry, I am not going to answer your questions," a black female airline employee told him.
Piker has already faced questions in the past about his attitude toward black people. In a video unearthed by CNN contributor Scott Jennings last week, Piker can be heard self-describing as a "racist" and saying that it was a "better time when lynchings were happening."
"I don't give a f–k what black people care about," he added. The video has also been widely circulated by the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Team Piker has said he was being sarcastic and has threatened to sue Jennings for surfacing the clip, with the streamer calling it "defamation."
After spending years in relative obscurity as a common internet shock jock and pick-up artist, Piker has rocketed to fame as the surrogate of choice for a wave of Democratic Socialist candidates around the country.
Despite claiming that "America deserved 9/11" and expressing open support for Hamas and Hezbollah, Piker has campaigned with New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. William Lawrence, a Democratic Socialists of America candidate who won a Democratic primary for a House seat in Michigan's seventh district, openly fanboyed over Piker when they met at an event earlier this year.
Piker told Rolling Stone that he's fielded requests from "hundreds" of political campaigns.
In the past, Piker has also called Orthodox Jews "inbred" and blamed Iran's "death to America" and "Great Satan" rhetoric on the United States "messing around in the Middle East."
He's also said that the reaction to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson "was not so negative" because Thompson "was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder" in his capacity as a health insurance executive.
Piker's brother, Murat Piker, who frequently appears on the influencer's social media channel, spent more than 10 years working as an aerospace engineer at Boeing, where he worked on a still-under-construction Air Force One and the top-secret "doomsday plane" designed for nuclear war, the Washington Free Beacon reported this week.
