Hasan Piker. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Now that primary season is over, many general election campaigns and their parties face an inevitable crisis. Over the last few years, populist candidates across the country built momentum not just by appealing to partisan activist bases, but by courting fringe media figures and their radicalized audiences to juice primary turnout. Now they have to win over mainstream voters. But breaking clean from the extremes risks alienating the volunteer energy and donor money that secured their nominations in the first place.

To thread this needle, candidates lean on a familiar line: “I don’t agree with everything they say.”

We hear this every time a politician gets pressed on an affiliation with someone who pushes hateful, bigoted, or illiberal views. It serves as an all-purpose pass. The candidate captures the full benefit of an extremist’s audience, drops a quick verbal shrug to reassure the center, and moves on.

Imagine a candidate campaigning alongside David Duke and brushing off the backlash with, “Look, I don’t agree with everything David has said.” No serious journalist or voter would treat that as a defense. It would be an immediate scandal, because Duke’s explicit, hateful, eliminationist bigotry violated a foundational moral taboo. Yet when candidates cozy up to modern radicals who express open bigotry on par with Duke, that exact deflection is treated as standard political maneuvering. A generic disclaimer is not a principled stance. It is a way to harvest radical votes without paying a reputational penalty.

While politicians and pundits across the ideological spectrum use this tactic, the institutional response is not symmetrical.

On the right, figures like Tucker Carlson give huge platforms to historical revisionists like Darryl Cooper and flirt with open white nationalists like Nick Fuentes. Carlson retains a following, but key Republican figures have pushed back and distanced themselves. That does not mean the right handles this sufficiently well. Carlson remains in good standing with high-profile figures like JD Vance, and when Donald Trump dined with Fuentes, he claimed advance ignorance while still dodging a direct condemnation.

On the left, fringe extremism meets far less institutional resistance. As Noah Rothman laid out in Blood & Progress, American institutions have spent decades excusing left-wing radicalism under the assumption that its motives are fundamentally idealistic. We are now watching that dynamic play out in real time. Streamers like Hasan Piker — who openly expresses hateful bigotry and has praised violence — are not pushed to the fringes. Instead, he gets glossy magazine profiles, broadcasts from party conventions, and campaigns alongside candidates like Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed. When questioned, El-Sayed and other candidates dismiss the criticism as “gotcha politics” while keeping Piker’s audience in their corner.

The underlying game is identical: deliberate ambiguity. Refusing to be specific lets politicians project moderation to swing voters while signaling to radicals that their alliance is safe.

Candidates run the exact same play on their own records. When past statements endorsing bigotry or illiberalism resurface, the standard line is, “That was years ago,” or “I’ve evolved.” In a healthy democracy, we want people to change their minds. We should leave the door wide open for anyone willing to discard foolish ideas, revise their views, and repair any harm they caused. But shifting positions without explaining what was wrong with the old one is not intellectual growth; it is political convenience. If a candidate cannot explain how their thinking changed, voters should assume only the audience changed.

The same accountability must apply up the chain of endorsements. When establishment figures and party leaders unreservedly back a candidate who elevates an extremist, they share moral responsibility for normalizing that hate. You cannot hide behind the idea of a “big tent” if you refuse to set any boundaries on who enters it. Every Democratic politician who criticized El-Sayed in the primary for sanitizing Piker, only to fall in line and endorse him for the general, has played a direct role in that laundering. If we treated Piker like Duke, it would be obvious that this laundering — even a few degrees removed — is completely unacceptable.

If we want to stop eliminationist rhetoric from becoming ordinary background noise in our politics and society, generic disclaimers cannot be enough. Anyone who leverages an extremist’s platform, or who is asked about their own past illiberal statements, should have to clear three basic hurdles:

1. Name the exact statements, ideas, or individuals in question that they now disagree with.

2. Explain plainly why those views are wrong and incompatible with basic democratic life.

3. Explain what changed in their thinking, or why they chose to associate with that person despite those views.

We rarely have a press corps that consistently pins politicians down on these deflections. Because the media often lets them slide, the burden falls on voters to assess these candidates not based on what they said, but what they refused to say.

We cannot know what resides in a politician’s heart, nor should we presume to know with certainty their private intentions. But we can see what they are willing to tolerate, amplify, and cater to for the sake of winning an election. If a candidate refuses to disavow specific hateful views by name, our default assumption must be straightforward: Even if they do not hold those views personally, they have decided that pandering to the people who do is a price worth paying for victory. We cannot treat silence as neutrality; it is permission. In an era where democratic norms are already fragile, a leader’s willingness to tolerate bigotry and illiberalism for the sake of political power should be a definitive line in the sand — and for voters who value and want to maintain basic civic decency, that failure of courage should be disqualifying.

Erez Levin is an advertising technologist trying to affect big pro-social changes in that industry and the world at large, currently focused on restoring society’s essential moral taboos against overt, hateful bigotry. He writes on this topic at elevin11.substack.com.