TO BE FAIR, THEY’VE GOT QUITE LEGACY TO LIVE UP TO: Terrible Terrorist Tabloid: Rolling Stone Anoints Hasan Piker a Top ‘Influencer’ For 2026.
Rolling Stone names Hasan Piker as one of the most influential creators of 2026 🏅
The self-declared Marxist has found himself at the center of endless controversies, thanks to his criticism of Israel on his daily streams but also because he's become the face of a movement to… https://t.co/vfSmCe8oQx pic.twitter.com/oM4c62BWyG
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) August 28, 2026
Piker infamously said, “America deserved 9/11.” Rolling Stone staffers apparently thought that America deserved the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing as well, based on the cover image they ran of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, making him look like he’s the next Jim Morrison:
But then, some things never change at Rolling Stone:
As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner [who would then have been about age 24–Ed] leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”
Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’ ”
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Meanwhile, a lawyer in the DA’s office, believing he was doing a favor for a friend of [David] Felton’s at the Los Angeles Times and that this hippie rag from San Francisco was a benign nonentity, brought Felton [then-recently hired away from the L.A. Times by Wenner] and Dalton into the office to show them the crime scene photos of the butchered bodies of Manson victims — including a man with the word war etched in his stomach with a fork. Dalton blanched when he saw the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” painted in blood on a refrigerator, instantly recalling what Dennis Wilson told him about the coded instructions Manson heard in the Beatles songs. “It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” said Dalton. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.” Jann Wenner changed the headline.
Flashback: Sticky Fingers: A New Biography Explores the Seedier Side of Jann Wenner.