The Democratic Party is adopting a “big tent” strategy, believing whoever they bring in can only benefit the cause.
The tent now includes several members of the Democratic Socialists of America, namely New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
……One of them recently labeled Tesla CEO and social media platform X owner Elon Musk a “valid military target,” and the tech billionaire responded with a warning.
Musk’s attention was brought to the comment by way of The Free Press.
The outlet published an article about the individual in question, Eric Hovagim. Townhall describes Hovagim as a campaign videographer currently living in Shanghai, China.
The Free Press noted that aside from his violent remark about Musk, he’s also called the United States the “Fourth Reich” and called OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “a human shield.”
On the comment about him as a “target,” Musk replied by saying, “If they come after me, I will come after them and finish the job.”
………Hovagim, who appears to function as a propagandist for the Chinese Communist Party, replied from inside a Tesla factory, writing on X, “Elon threatened to kill me, so I came to his battery factory here in China. Apparently he makes over 52% of his cars in this beautiful communist country.”
………Keep in mind that this is coming from an individual who worked for one of the two major political parties in the country.
The United States is the “fourth Reich” and the “Epstein empire,” Israel is “the most dangerous threat to humanity,” and both countries are run by “Zionist pedophiles.” The idea of selling weapons to Taiwan is like “Hitler arming Robert E. Lee while he’s posted up in the breakaway state of South Florida.” Elon Musk is “a valid military target,” and Sam Altman is “a human shield.”
These aren’t just the online rants of some anonymous troll. The man behind these posts is Eric Hovagim, who has said he helped film or edit three primary campaign videos for Zohran Mamdani—and posed with the future New York City mayor in an Instagram post in June 2025. In April, Hovagim helped produce popular far-left internet streamer Hasan Piker’s mini-documentary about the trip he took to Cuba in March along with hundreds of activists, politicians, and other assorted props of the regime.
Hovagim calls himself a “geopolitical commentator and video producer,” and he has over 150,000 followers or subscribers on TikTok, YouTube, and X, plus whatever secondhand influence he reaps through making content for Piker, who has 3.1 million followers on the livestream platform Twitch. Hovagim’s videos meander from topic to topic but echo positions of the Democratic Socialists of America and often hinge on three themes: conspiracy, anti-Americanism, and glorifying political violence, often connecting all three.
Now he lives in Shanghai, where he has uploaded a slew of videos, many of them sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), even though YouTube is officially blocked by China’s “Great Firewall” censorship apparatus. So is Signal, the encrypted messaging app we used over the weekend to discuss his political journey. In one typical take, Hovagim dismissed as merely “CIA propaganda” the Chinese government’s acts of mass detention, indoctrination, and other abuses carried out against its Uyghur minority, which observers say may constitute genocide.
Hovagim told me that he moved to China because he wanted to learn “how the world’s largest economy functions today without having to bomb little girls in elementary school,” a reference to the U.S. missile strike that killed 120 schoolchildren in Iran on the first day of the U.S.-Iran war. (In fact the U.S., not China, is the largest economy in the world.) In his September 2025 video titled “America failed, so I moved to China,” Hovagim said: “So much of what it means to exist as an American is to scrape by within the most violent system to ever exist.”
Beyond his work for Mamdani and Piker and his online rants, Hovagim is notable as yet another example of the left-wing worldview that is surging both politically and culturally. This in-your-face form of progressive populism, which often includes hatred of Israel, is taking greater hold at least in part because guardrails that once would have kept these far-left voices away from the mainstream are vanishing.
In January 2025, Hovagim introduced his video about the assassinations of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2022 and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024 by calling the New York City street where Thompson was gunned down from behind “hallowed ground.” According to Hovagim, Thompson’s accused killer, Luigi Mangione, is a “bisexual sweetheart” who did it on behalf of “all working-class Americans.”
Hovagim has something else in common with many of the far-left Americans who are becoming prominent in our culture: He grew up financially well off, was highly educated, and seemed headed down a promising career path before veering off into a radically anti-capitalist direction.
The son of an anesthesiologist, Hovagim grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, where a family trust registered under his parents’ names owns a home worth just shy of $2 million, more than quadruple the average home price in the United States.
“I have no problem when someone describes my life as privileged,” Hovagim said when asked how he would respond to the label “champagne socialist.” He said he has a deep appreciation for his parents, crediting them for a comfortable upbringing. His mother taught him about “the violent struggles she fled from in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa,” Hovagim said.
After earning “the highest merit scholarship,” he said, Hovagim studied industrial engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out in 2019 to focus on his AI-powered online sports and esports gambling platform, called Better, which later became Pogbet. He described it as a precursor to predictive markets like Kalshi and Polymarket.
According to Hovagim’s profile on LinkedIn, he led the company’s fundraising efforts, which raised $1 million. Corporate filings reviewed by The Free Press list Hovagim as corporate officer, CEO, and secretary, and show the address of its headquarters as being at a luxury apartment complex in Berkeley. After the betting platform shut down in 2023, Hovagim worked for almost a year as a senior project manager at New Consensus, a progressive think tank that helped develop the Green New Deal.
Hovagim’s videos for the Mamdani campaign were made before the democratic socialist’s stunning victory over former New York governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary in June 2025. “I helped make three of Zohran’s videos with his incredibly talented team and then moved to China to enjoy the fruits of socialism firsthand,” Hovagim posted on Bluesky in March.
He said he also filmed Piker’s four-day trip to New York in July 2025 and the streamer’s interview of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student now facing deportation for his role in the 2024 Columbia encampment and occupation of Hamilton Hall by anti-Israel activists.
Now that he is in China, where his girlfriend studies at a Shanghai university, he told me, Hovagim is more vocal than ever about American politics, with his ire focused against Democrats at least as much as Republicans. After three candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won primary races in New York in June, he called a group of moderate Democrats vowing to oppose them “rats.” Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer should be “sentenced to hard labor on a farm for the rest of his pathetic war criminal life,” Hovagim wrote on X in April.
Of course, Hovagim connects many of his grievances to Israel and a perfidious cabal of “Zionists,” often descending into antisemitism. After the U.S, Argentina, and Israel voted against a United Nations resolution in March condemning the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity” and recommending reparations, Hovagim wrote on X: “Was the transatlantic slave trade promised to the Axis of Epstein 3,000 years ago too?” When I asked what he meant, Hovagim said it was a joke but then reiterated the power of “capital interests” controlled by those who “would frequent Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile island.”
In February, he called the International Monetary Fund a “cabal of failing countries led by Zionist pedophile regimes” after it released a report advising China to shift to a “consumption-led growth” model. When former Evanston, Illinois, mayor Daniel Biss praised the pro-Israel lobbying group J Street for his House primary win, Hovagim called Biss a “Zionist donkey”.
And “if international law mattered,” Hovagim wrote in May, “Biden, Trump, and Netanyahu would be tried and executed for crimes against humanity.” He told me that a modern Nuremberg-style trial of U.S. and Israeli leaders would “have much to deliberate on,” but said he was “against capital punishment and violence of any kind.” He also accused Israel of being a “proxy state” of the United States, then attributed to Israel a litany of crimes in the developing world. “I believe in a collective humanity that raises up every single person,” he said.In April, Hovagim struck a different tone in his response to a Fox News post on X quoting Piker as saying, “Hamas over Israel every time.” “The indigenous people of Palestine fighting back against these Zionist running dogs of imperialism absolutely have the moral high ground over Israel,” Hovagim wrote in his post.
Hovagim’s social media accounts also are peppered with images of Hovagim posing with paintings of Mao Zedong, the former CCP chairman, with no mention of Mao’s responsibility for perhaps over 70 million deaths.
After a delegation of Israeli Knesset members visited Taiwan in May, Hovagim said that Mao was “vindicated yet again” and invoked the dictator’s 1965 quote that “Israel and Taiwan are bases of imperialism in Asia. They created Israel for the Arabs and Taiwan for us. They both have the same objective.”
Hovagim said that he doesn’t intend to stay in China forever. On a podcast in July, he said that his goal is to “learn a little bit of wisdom from the Chinese development model, and bring at least some bits and pieces back to America and hopefully civilize those goddamn Yankees a little bit.” He added: “I am in China trying to make videos and spread the good word about the Chinese state to the wonderful people of the West.”
Hovagim is an entitled punk who isn’t trapped in the ChiCom dystopia like the tens of thousands Chinese people who are homeless because they are blacklisted by the ChiCom “social credit” system.
Hovagim isn’t subjected to China’s brutal and oppressive regime because he’s not a Chinese citizen, he’s a compliant mouthpiece, and he can leave any time he wants.
They always praise communism while ignoring the carnage and human cost of the ideology.
He should stay in China. For good.