Twitch streamer and political gadfly Hasan Piker has a nose for publicity. More than a billion people have seen his Twitch stream that features some truly outrageous, hate-filled — even for a radical leftist — rants.
He says that America “deserved” 9/11. The pro-Israel group StopAntisemitism nominated Piker as “Antisemite of the Year” in 2024 for remarks he made about Israel after the October 7 attack. Specifically, he excused Hamas’s sexual violence against Israeli women, saying it “doesn’t change the dynamic” of the conflict.
Indeed, he has been disavowed by much of the establishment Democratic Party, although they’re perfectly willing to use his immense popularity to tap into his young, hip, leftist viewers and piggyback their own message on the hate.
Radicals like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have invited him to speak at their rallies, as have other Democrats who know that Piker attracts huge crowds and can be counted on to “stir the pot” and gain publicity.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed doesn’t see anything wrong with Piker’s rhetoric.
“I’m not here to disavow people’s views,” El-Sayed said. “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture — I thought we were over it.”
El-Sayed defended the decision to appear with Piker on the campaign trail, where the two spoke to a room of about 400 people at Michigan State University, and said hesitancy to engage with left-wing surrogates like him is “exactly why Democrats too often fail to get our message out to everybody.”
El-Sayed and Piker also campaigned at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Tuesday.
Piker downplayed attacks from other Democrats, including the center-left think tank Third Way and some potential 2028 presidential candidates, suggesting they were delivering “talking points that someone else has given them.”
“It is a heinous smear at the end of the day, and it’s one that many of these groups actually apply, because they can’t have a conversation about Israel’s influence over American foreign policy on moral terms,” Piker said. “So instead of attacking the message, they attack the messenger.”
Piker is an extremely savvy political bomb thrower. He knows the path to power in a party at war with itself: the radical and the uber-crazies like himself, who aren’t as focused on winning elections as they are on getting control of the levers of power in the Democratic Party.
He says he’s a “megaphone” for an “angry electorate, and he believes the criticism that he faces is less about him personally and more about what he represents — a younger, more populist wing of the party,” says Associated Press.
“I think they find me to be a more appropriate target than to just actively disparage the voters,” he said.
Related: The Democrats’ Comical Efforts to ‘Rebrand’ Candidates as Born-Again Populists
Piker has been called the “Joe Rogan of the left,” even though Rogan is far less incendiary than Piker.
Meanwhile, candidate El-Sayed thinks he’s giving Democrats in Michigan exactly what they want: someone who will “fight” to overcome Donald Trump.
“I think the Democratic Party, frankly, has given up on the idea of persuasion,” El-Sayed said in an interview. “If you’re serious about persuading, what you do is you engage with that audience, and you engage through that creator to have a conversation about what you actually want to build.”
“[Just] because you appear with somebody, doesn’t mean you agree with them on everything,” he told Fox and Friends on Tuesday. El-Sayed thought it a good time to disavow the radical left invention of “cancel culture” to silence their political opponents and kill ideas they disagreed with.
“When did we start bending to cancel culture? When did we start saying that cancel culture was okay?” he asked.
When you and your ilk invented “cancel culture,” that’s when.
Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois, who co-chairs the Congressional Jewish Caucus, called Piker “an unapologetic antisemite.” And the CEO of Michigan Hillel, Rabbi Davey Rosen, said, “Such invitations [to Piker] normalize hate and contribute to a hostile environment for Jewish students.”
El-Sayed and other radical Democrats will take that kind of criticism gladly. In the end, their embrace of Hasan Piker will bring them power within the ever-shrinking ranks of the Democratic Party, but not much else.
PJ Media will give you all the information you need to understand the decisions that will be made this year. Insightful commentary and straight-on, no-BS news reporting have been our hallmarks since 2005.
Get 60% off your new VIP membership by using the code FIGHT. You won’t regret it.
