Alex Thompson, hosting the Season 3 premiere of The Axios Show, asked left-wing streamer Hasan Piker a straightforward question: Would the Middle East be more stable if Iran had a nuclear weapon?

"I believe yes," Piker said.

That's a real answer from a real person with a real audience — not some anonymous troll buried in a Reddit thread. Hasan Piker is one of the most-watched political streamers on the internet by far-left zealots, and he just told a national audience that the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism should possess nuclear weapons.

Piker didn't stop at nuclear proliferation. He went further, arguing that the United States is itself a terrorist state. "Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes, we've caused tremendous terror all around the world," he said. Then he offered this: "There's no distinction between blowing up a school, triple tapping it with Tomahawk missiles. If you're killing 140 schoolgirls, that is an act of terror."

He followed up with what he apparently considers the reasonable conclusion. "This doesn't mean that all Americans are terrorists, but the reality of the matter is we have to create an environment of accountability."

Generous of him. We're not all terrorists — just the country, collectively, as an enterprise. The "accountability" he's proposing starts with arming Tehran.

This is the same Hasan Piker who previously said America deserved 9/11. That wasn't a career-ending statement on the left. It was a career-building one. His audience grew. His platform expanded. And now he sits across from Axios interviewers delivering nuclear policy recommendations with the confidence of someone who has never faced a consequence for being wrong about anything.

The theory — if you can call it that — is mutually assured destruction. Give Iran a nuke and suddenly everyone behaves. It's the freshman-dorm version of deterrence theory, stripped of every inconvenient detail: that Iran funds Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis; that its leadership has called for the annihilation of Israel; that its own people have been shot in the streets for protesting the regime. Mutually assured destruction requires rational actors. Iran's government executes women for not covering their hair.

Abdul El-Sayed, a political figure in Piker's orbit, has been asked repeatedly to denounce the anti-semetic, anti-Americans streamer. Thus far he has refused.

Piker streams from a mansion in West Hollywood. He got rich playing video games and offering foreign policy takes between rounds. His audience skews young, online, and convinced that America is the villain in every story. He tells them what they want to hear, and what they want to hear this week is that a theocratic regime chanting "Death to America" deserves the most destructive weapon ever built.