Johnny “Joey” Jones says Piker repaints history on Mao and Iran
Fox News contributor and co-host, on the network's programme The Five
“Hasan Piker is going on the podcast and saying the terrible thing … what he said about Mao. And so, you know, like, “Well, Mao did a lot of great things, it was just that cultural revolution part that was a little bit, you know, wasn't good.” And so what it is is you can't talk bad about a communist or a socialist, no matter who they are, because that's what they believe. And so they have to repaint history. Now, Iran being authoritarian, because I guess that's what they believe as well, there are good parts about it. “Let them have a nuclear weapon. It's just, you know, they have a few domestic policies I don't like.” At the end of the day, Hasan Piker is a poster boy for why we should challenge birthright citizenship. His parents come here from Turkey, they go to college, they have a baby, they take him back to Turkey, they raise him there, and then he comes back here to partake in capitalism and talk bad about it.”
Source and context
Original video
About this source
Fox News' own recording of the twelve-minute opening segment of The Five for 18 September 2026, in which the panel discusses Hasan Piker's Axios Show interview. The segment plays the Axios clips of Piker on Iran's nuclear programme and on Mao Zedong, and the Oval Office exchange in which President Trump called Piker "a terrible liability." This locator carries Jones's answer in full, from his characterisation of Piker's Mao remarks to his argument about birthright citizenship.. Speakers were identified from the broadcast itself: MacCallum names the panel in the opening line and hands to each of them by name, and each speaker was confirmed on camera at their locator. Fox's own @TheFive account attributes the closing lines of this passage to Jones, and Fox's page for the segment attributes "the Democratic Party has allowed itself to be infiltrated by influencers" to Conway.
Archived copy (opens in a new tab)Before the quotation
The programme had played the Axios clips of Piker on Iran, and MacCallum had asked Jones to respond. Jones first said he agreed with Piker that Iran should be assessed “regardless of its domestic policies,” but for the opposite reason — that Iran's conduct towards its neighbours and towards the United States is what leads most Americans to support action against it. He then said that while it is “easy to laugh him off as like a radical,” what Piker is doing is “taking radical ideas and making them palatable,” and that the more Abdul El-Sayed pushes him away, “the harder he's going into the paint.”
After the quotation
Jones closed: “And that is someone who does not appreciate what this country is. And the fact that he's a citizen is what it is. But it's not someone who wants to see this country succeed. He's someone that wants to see this country change from the inside out to its core. And I'm not down for that.” Fox's own account for the programme posted the capitalism line as a clip the same evening. MacCallum then introduced the Mao clip and turned to Harold Ford Jr.
How this statement is classified
Case context: Hasan Piker's Axios Show interview claims about terrorism, Iran, China and Israel
The label describes this statement’s response within the context above.
Why this label?
Relative to the case's fixed reference point — the claims Piker made in the Axios Show interview — Jones condemns. He calls what Piker said about Mao “the terrible thing,” mocks the Iran answer by paraphrasing it, and says the effect is that communists and socialists “have to repaint history.” The closest competing label is minimizes, on the strength of his opening concession that it is “easy to laugh him off”; that loses because he says so in order to argue the opposite — that the danger is precisely that Piker makes radical ideas palatable. The scope should be read with it: the birthright-citizenship argument and the capitalism line go to Piker's standing and character rather than to the truth of anything he said in the interview, and are recorded here as part of a single continuous answer.
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- Hasan Piker
Hasan Piker's Axios Show interview claims about terrorism, Iran, China and Israel
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Read the full case“Obviously, Hasan Piker is ridiculous. He is a podcaster, he's provocative, he does that, that's his game. But the politicians decided. El-Sayed decided to pal around with him. Why? Because they thought, “I can deal with this controversy because I want his likes, I want his listeners, his viewers.” So he is tied to him. … I don't like that denounce game. You know, I remember we tried that with Obama: “When will you denounce Reverend Wright?” … El-Sayed is on record. He has a terrible record. He's a terrible leftist. So denounce him. Don't say, “When are you going to denounce this other guy?” He's got enough bad things to his name.”Read statement
“So, Harold, respectfully, I know at least one person who's willing to entertain this. His name is Abdul El-Sayed. He's palling around with this guy. He will not disclaim him and the crazy by-the-moment things that he's saying. And I think that Hasan Piker the person is actually even less important than Hasan Piker the performance artist now, because it represents how difficult it is now and will be in 2028 for Democrats to transition from shock-the-conscience crazy talk in the primaries to trying to present themselves as reasonable and semi-capitalist and connected to voters, to everyday voters. The way that some responsible Democrats wanted to distance themselves and their party from Graham Platner and his Nazi tattoo and his abuse of women and his adultery, I think that people should be doing that now with Hasan Piker. Here's the problem with Piker: the Democratic Party has allowed itself to be infiltrated by influencers and streamers and to live online.”Read statement
“These views are so outside the periphery of the most extreme views in either political party in all of politics in America. And the fact — in some ways I'm disappointed we've been giving this nonsense airtime, because he talks about it in ways, I think, to Joey's point, that he almost tries to normalize it. No Democrat, no Republican, no progressive Democrat or liberal Democrat in their right mind subscribes to any of this. I'm a conservative Democrat.”Read statement