Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers’ student outreach team includes young activists who partook in a leaked group chat brimming with Hitler praise and Holocaust jokes (as well as slurs and rape apologia), according to new reporting. But Rogers supports Israel and the apartheid state’s genocide in Gaza, so you’ll hardly hear anything about this. Instead, a different candidate in the race—Abdul El-Sayed—is the one facing bad-faith accusations of sympathizing with Nazis, because he recently campaigned with pro-Palestine influencer and popular leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. Many of said bad-faith accusations are coming from within El-Sayed’s own political party.
In the last week, Piker’s support for El-Sayed has set off a particularly aggressive strain of Hasan Derangement Syndrome. This has included an entire CNN segment on Piker’s supposed “anti-Semitism” (AKA his opposition to Israel), an increasingly delusional outrage campaign by the centrist think tank Third Way, and El-Sayed’s Democratic opponent, Mallory McMaster, equating Piker with out-and-proud neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
There are certain factions of the Democratic Party that believe—or at least want the rest of us to believe—that being anti-Israel or being mean to them are the same as being a bigot or a Nazi. As a result, they’re really just normalizing actual bigots and Nazis.
After all, to compare Piker to a Holocaust denier like Fuentes simply because Piker is critical of Israel only helps to normalize someone as odious as Fuentes—at a time when Fuentes, once a fringe far-right voice, is becoming alarmingly influential.
It should speak volumes that a prominent Democratic think tank is this focused on Piker instead of Fuentes or, say, the Republican president who recently forced us into a deeply unpopular and immoral war and has never been more vulnerable, as gas prices soar and inflation skyrockets. Instead of Trump, Third Way is zeroing in on Piker with memo after memo and tweet after tweet, this week pressing El-Sayed to state line-by-line where he agrees and disagrees with a Twitch streamer.
Last weekend, Democratic Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin said she’d refuse to go on Piker’s stream—at the same time that she went on Islamophobic bigot Bill Maher’s show, on which Maher regularly justifies Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. Coincidentally, Maher himself has famously made controversial comments rationalizing 9/11—but he supports Israel, so I suppose it’s all good! Cory Booker also said he’d refuse to appear with Piker, even as he posed for smiling photos with Benjamin Netanyahu as recently as 2025, well into the Gaza genocide.
The hypocrisies are frankly endless. Last week, Third Way called Piker “anti-American, anti-women, anti-Western, and antisemitic,” and said “he should be pushed to the fringe, not welcomed onto the stage.” Speaking of stages, serially accused sexual predator and known Epstein associate Bill Clinton literally spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2024—where was the outrage for that? Democrats routinely tout their good relationships with “reasonable” Republican war criminals like Dick Cheney or other Republicans responsible for anti-abortion policies that have effectively rendered American women subhuman. Working “across the aisle” with right-wingers and fascists is to be celebrated—working with those who vocally oppose Israel’s genocide, meanwhile, is to be condemned.
Both Slotkin and Booker have voted to send billions in arms and aid to a foreign ethnostate that leads the world in child murder and mutilation. They are, in this way, materially responsible for an unquantifiable, unthinkable amount of death and suffering. But god forbid a leftist Twitch streamer point out how generations of U.S. imperialism created the conditions for a terrorist attack like 9/11.
It is ultimately useless to get into the minutiae of what Piker has or hasn’t said, because that is irrelevant to centrist Democrats’ crusade against him. He could disavow anti-Semitism a thousand times over (he has), or clarify his 9/11 comments a thousand times over, and it wouldn’t change a thing to the Democrats who just don’t want leftists in their proverbial tent, period. As people have already pointed out, their MO, no matter what, is to sideline and silence leftist voices.
Piker speaks, particularly, to young men who are disillusioned with the Democratic establishment and status quo politics, because his takes are sometimes brashly and crudely expressed—consequently, there is an infinite well of material for centrist Democrats to handpick, decontextualize, and subject to performative handwringing. Ironically, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, many of these same Democrats obsessively insisted they needed to cultivate some messianic ‘Joe Rogan of the left.’ It’s now clear what they really, paradoxically wanted was someone who simply doesn’t exist: an organically popular influencer who could somehow, inexplicably appeal to increasingly disaffected young men while being pro-Israel and unconditionally supportive of the Democratic establishment.
Piker is one of the only prominent political influencers who appeals to young men and isn’t a neo-Nazi, manosphere freak. Yet, on any given day, centrist Democrats will go after him more aggressively than they do Trump. Some will nebulously call him a misogynist, all while they themselves fund and arm Israel (or endorse Democrats who fund and arm Israel), when women and children comprise 70% of those killed in Gaza. In reality, Piker is an influencer and activist who doesn’t hold any state or institutional power—even if he did make the occasional objectionable comment, how is that more shameful or misogynistic than Democratic elected officials who hold actual institutional power, who sat by and let Roe v. Wade die, who have barely lifted a finger while abortion bans have killed American women?
Again: It is ultimately useless to get into the weeds or go line-by-line about what Piker has or hasn’t said, because no matter what, his centrist critics will say anything about him with little to no pushback or follow-up questions. Rep. Brad Sherman last week called Piker an “unapologetic antisemite.” It doesn’t seem to matter how thoroughly Piker condemns anti-Semitism; he will never shake this smear because he criticizes Israel. Throughout last year, top Democrats repeatedly, nebulously disavowed Zohran Mamdani’s comments on Jewish people—even though his comments were only ever positive. But they never faced any follow-up questions about what comments, in particular, they were referring to; the smear was accepted at face-value because Mamdani is critical of Israel.
I’m old enough or at least online enough to remember when liberal critics of Piker railed against him for not “actually organizing,” or campaigning for or lifting up Democrats. Yet, now that he’s very much doing so—for Democrats like El-Sayed, Mamdani, Claire Valdez, and other left-wing candidates—those same critics are insisting that he shut up and go away.
In 2021, popular liberal streamer ContraPoints said leftists “don’t want power, they want to endlessly critique power”—a line that resurfaced as a viral meme last year. In reality, it’s not that leftists don’t want power, but that time and again, centrist, establishment Democrats shut them out of power with bad-faith purity tests and smear campaigns. Democrats’ treatment of Piker, by equating him with the likes of Fuentes, shows that to them, leftists and fascists are the same—the only difference is, Democrats will often embrace fascists so long as they’re polite and don’t jokingly call people “inbred.”