Hogan Gidley to Newsmax: Voters 'Ignorant' of What Marxism Brings

Hogan Gidley, a former White House principal deputy press secretary, told Newsmax on Saturday that the Chicago socialism conference featuring streamer Hasan Piker is drawing voters who "don't know any better" about the ideology they are supporting.

Gidley, who served as principal deputy press secretary in the first Trump administration, said on "The Count" that Republicans running in the coming midterms are letting the left define the terrain by hedging on plain language.

 

The Socialism 2026 Conference, a four-day gathering that opened Friday at Chicago's Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, features more than 100 workshops, a Marxism education series, and a session titled "Confronting Zionism: Decolonizing Palestine and Building the World Anew." Angela Y. Davis and Naomi Murakawa headline the opening plenary.

Twitch streamer Piker, a self-described democratic socialist, is scheduled to speak at the event, Breitbart reported. Piker in July wore a Mao-style suit at a College Democrats convention in Washington, and old clips of him declaring "I do hate America" continue to circulate, now tied to his support for Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

Gidley faulted Republican candidates for talking around the ideology.

"If you're a Republican and you're running in this cycle, if you're not drawing stark contrasts between freedom-loving, American-loving patriots versus those who wish to destroy this country, and instead you're talking around the edges and saying words like communism while you and I know what it means, a lot of people don't," he said.

Voters, he argued, are not stupid but uninformed.

"They can be ignorant to the fact of what communism, socialism, and Marxism has brought on the world, a wave of death, destruction, and poverty," Gidley said.

Candidates promising "free this and free that" find takers among Americans souring on incumbents and casting for alternatives, he added.

He reserved his sharpest language for Piker, whom he cast as a hypocrite.

"He's a Cartier communist," Gidley said. "He wears expensive watches, Cartier, and he goes to these countries that are communist in nature, stays at five-star hotels and says how great everything is in these places."

Piker, profiled by NBC News as a Twitch fixture reaching a young, mostly male audience, broadcasts from a Los Angeles home studio and has drawn years of criticism from both left and right over his lifestyle.

Gidley tied the appeal to young Americans carrying college debt and squeezed out of housing.

They argue that "you should be able to afford a penthouse in Manhattan. And because you can't, it must be because of the man," he said, describing the pitch as antithetical to American self-reliance.

"Instead of saying, 'Hey, pay your dues, stay with roommates, live, scrape, claw, work to get where you are.' No, you should be given that on day one."

Democrats, he warned, have built a durable pipeline of new voters.

"Democrats have done an outstanding job selling this lie to so many young people in this country," Gidley added.