Retired United States Marine Corps staff sergeant and explosive ordnance disposal technician who lost both legs to an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in 2010. He joined Fox News as a contributor in 2019, co-hosts The Big Weekend Show and provides military analysis across the network's platforms. He is the author of the bestsellers Unbroken Bonds of Battle and Behind the Badge, and reenlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in May 2026.
Case
Hasan Piker told Axios the US has caused more terrorism than al-Qaeda "pound for pound." The full episode added more contested claims -- on Iran's nuclear programme, Mao Zedong, China and Zionism -- and drew condemnation from both parties.
Role at the time: Fox News contributor and co-host, on the network's programme The Five
Statement summary
Asked to respond to the Axios Show interview, Jones said Piker takes radical ideas and makes them palatable, paraphrased Piker's remarks on Mao Zedong and on Iran's nuclear programme back at him as evidence that socialists “have to repaint history,” and said Piker was a “poster boy for why we should challenge birthright citizenship.”
“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.”
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.
Statement dates: September 18, 2026
Statement dates: September 18, 2026
Statement dates: September 18, 2026
Statement dates: September 18, 2026
