OpinionAugust 26, 2026 — 5:00amAmerican Twitch streamer Hasan Piker has amassed a millions-strong following with a potent combination of handsome good looks, provocative bombast and an ability to make Marxist politics accessible to a chronically online Millennial and Gen-Z audience. Last month, Piker went viral for talking up Chairman Mao as “one of the great leaders of this world”. When questioned about the tens of millions killed as a direct result of Mao’s policies, he brushed this aside as “a lot of f---ing excesses” that were seemingly necessary because “the People’s Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong”. Presumably he doesn’t think that would be a good thing.Far-right media personalities have become similarly enamoured with authoritarian despots. The war in Ukraine saw an explosion of pro-Russia punditry on the MAGA-right, whitewashing atrocities and revising history to present brutal and corrupt leaders like Vladimir Putin as brave defenders of Christianity and Western civilisation. The most prominent include influential commentators like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, who routinely regurgitate Kremlin talking points like accusing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of being a dictator and blaming NATO for Russia’s invasion.YouTuber Hasan Piker.Increasingly, it feels like not a day goes by without some mega-influencer or another proclaiming their admiration for a mass-murdering despot. Such people have always existed. Where they used to occupy the extreme fringes on both left and right, the popularity of figures like Piker, Carlson and Owens shows that authoritarian revisionism risks seeping into the mainstream. While some of this may be a genuine response to the very real failures of the current system, it is certainly more insidious than that. If we care about the health of our democracy we should be paying attention.Right now, the democratic world resembles a much-cherished yet increasingly dilapidated family home. Painstakingly built brick-by-brick by generations past, its current inhabitants live comfortably inside with all the windows and doors wide open – no locks, no grates, no shutters. While this may invite the occasional insect, bird or stray marsupial to scamper in, we’ve long resisted putting up barriers of any kind. To do so would stifle the sweet breeze of freedom that wafts throughout. But what to do when squatters loiter outside, graffitiing walls, dumping garbage and threatening to carry off the furniture?It’s no secret that Western democracies are facing a crisis of legitimacy. Young people in particular are checking out of democratic politics or are shifting their votes to radical populist parties promising to drain the swamp or burn it all down. What we should replace the current system with is rarely articulated.Right-wing influencer Candace Owens.BloombergWhile these frustrations are legitimate, humanity is yet to come up with a better system of government than parliamentary democracy. Every alternative involves some form of freedom-crushing authoritarianism. It says a lot about our current zeitgeist that to some, the case needs to be made that authoritarianism is bad.Examples abound. Piker’s fellow travellers in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who are attempting to mount a MAGA-style hostile takeover from the far left, recently commemorated the 100th birthday of Fidel Castro. The Cuban dictator ruled with an iron fist for almost five decades and is accused of egregious human rights abuses against his own people. These “excesses” also went unmentioned. Instead, the DSA bizarrely blamed Cubans’ suffering on a “genocide” orchestrated by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.Of course there’s also been the rebranding of violent Islamist terrorism as anti-Imperial resistance. Remember when Osama bin Laden inexplicably started trending on TikTok? Some on the radical left have explicitly embraced illiberal terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis, revelling in the October 7 massacre and amplifying extremist Islamist slogans like “glory to the martyrs”. The fact that the Muslim populations of Africa and the Middle East have overwhelmingly been the victims of jihadist terror is an inconvenient footnote to those who see the world through the Western-centric lens of so-called “anti-Imperialism”, a position which, ironically, is itself deeply Orientalist.The actions of brutal leaders like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are portrayed as unproblematic by their fanboy influencers.Korean Central News AgencyEven the mass-murdering Islamic Republic has seen a bump in popularity since Trump launched his disastrous war on Iran, with Western influencers flown to Tehran to launder the regime’s image just months after it massacred tens of thousands of innocent protesters in the streets. Among them has been disgraced Australian academic Tim Anderson, fanboy of dictators everywhere from Syrian war criminal Bashar al-Assad to North Korean despot Kim Jong-un, who has made numerous trips to Iran to broadcast Islamic Republic propaganda back to his 260,000 followers.Trump himself, perhaps the biggest influencer of them all, has long appeared more comfortable in the company of dictators than among America’s democratic allies. He exists in a kind of circular symbiotic relationship with the MAGA-influencer ecosystem, signalling permission by endorsing leaders like Putin, former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while himself absorbing narratives from the same influencers affirming the virtues of strongman politics.Illustration: Jim PavlidisPhotographicWhether it’s dispatches from Iranian missile depots, viral trends like “Chinamaxxing” or enthusiasm for the need to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, we need to ask why authoritarianism is suddenly so appealing, and more importantly, who is benefiting from it.Authoritarian regimes see democracies like ours as a threat because the relative freedom and prosperity we enjoy is a repudiation of the Orwellian stories told to their own citizens: that dictatorship is a natural, inevitable and even desirable means of ordering society. Degrading the ability of the democratic West to present itself as an alternative social and economic model is one reason why China and Russia cut their internet off from the rest of the world, extending authoritarian control into online spaces.While the “great firewall” restricts access to the hearts and minds of our adversaries, the open doors and windows of the democratic family home have allowed for disinformation, manipulation and influence operations to infiltrate the Western media landscape. Foreign friends and foes alike, from China, Russia and Iran to India, Israel and Qatar, have been caught flooding the information zone with content that sows discord within our societies or advances their own foreign policy interests.The influence campaigns that have been exposed are likely to be the tip of the iceberg. While some influencers, like Laura Loomer, have admitted to being bamboozled by authoritarian propaganda, others may be paid-up mouthpieces of foreign adversaries.Our democracy isn’t perfect, but the alternative is so much worse. Regimes like China, Russia and Iran might not be able to defeat the West on the battlefield, but they have already shown that they are capable of convincing us to take apart our own house from within.In the prescient words of the forefather of mass-murdering propagandists, Adolf Hitler: “Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.”It’s time we figured out how to close the windows and lock the doors.Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a research fellow in Security Studies at Macquarie University and a regular columnist.The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. 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