Johnny "Joey" Jones
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.”
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)Why we used 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.