There are many strange spectacles in modern American politics, but few are more frustrating to watch than a major political party tying itself in knots over a Twitch streamer in the middle of a war. Predictably, the campaign to de-platform Hasan Piker is a political gift to Fox News, which has eagerly elevated the leftist gamer into a kind of all-purpose villain. The network has run somewhere between 20 and 25 distinct pieces of content — articles, newsletter items, podcast episodes, television and radio segments — about Piker in the month of April alone. A man who holds no office, no formal power and a relatively narrow slice of public recognition has garnered coverage on cable’s most-watched network on roughly 18 to 20 out of the last 30 days — and often with multiple mentions throughout the day.
The irony is hard to ignore. After the 2024 election, Democrats and their aligned media figures belatedly fretted over their inability to reach younger audiences, particularly young men who were drifting rightward or out of politics altogether. Pundits and politicians lamented the absence of a liberal equivalent to Joe Rogan, someone with the ability to engage disaffected voters outside the confines of cable news. Entire donor strategies were reoriented around building a new media ecosystem that could compete with the right’s decades-long investment in alternative platforms.
Simultaneously, confronted with an unruly but influential figure who fits that description better than anyone on the left, centrist think tanks and their media surrogates decided that attacking him was the political priority. Third Way, the centrist Democratic think tank backed by billionaires and corporate interests, has been explicit about its goals. Its president, Jon Cowan, co-authored a Wall Street Journal opinion piece declaring that Piker was “anti-American, antiwomen, anti-Western and antisemitic” and that “no Democrat should engage with him.” This is the same organization that has pledged to spend between $30 million and $50 million to remain, in Cowan’s own words, “the chief opponent of the left in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary” — targeting candidates who support Medicare for All, the Green New Deal or immigration reform. The campaign against Piker is not an isolated moral stand. It is a tactical operation, and he is simply the most convenient available target.
A streamer who broadcasts for hours at a time to an audience that can number in the hundreds of thousands on a platform still largely alien to older political elites, Piker’s politics are explicitly socialist. His style is combative, frequently profane and often deliberately provocative. He also reaches millions of people who are otherwise disconnected from Democratic messaging.
This combination — mass reach without institutional control — makes him both valuable and unnerving for the Democratic Party establishment. So instead of grappling with that reality, many Democrats have chosen to treat Piker as a liability to be excised.
This combination — mass reach without institutional control — makes him both valuable and unnerving for the Democratic Party establishment. So instead of grappling with that reality, many Democrats have chosen to treat Piker as a liability to be excised.
In recent weeks, elected officials, candidates and party-aligned commentators have competed to distance themselves from him. Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., wrote a letter to the CEO of Twitch demanding action against Piker, whom he called “the poster child for the post-October 7 outbreak of antisemitism in America.” Illinois Rep. Brad Schneider argued that Democrats who don’t condemn Piker “risk losing our credibility to condemn those on the right who traffic in bigotry, antisemitism and hate.” Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow compared him to Nick Fuentes — a Holocaust denier. Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey went further, introducing a resolution co-sponsored by New York Rep. Mike Lawler that formally condemned “antisemitic, hate-filled rhetoric” and explicitly named Piker alongside Candace Owens — a pairing that collapses a left-wing streamer and a right-wing provocateur into the same category.
And then the White House Correspondents’ Dinner happened. After a heavily armed man was apprehended attempting to enter the Washington Hilton where the dinner was being held, apparently intending to kill the president, the suspected shooter’s manifesto drew on a range of ideological grievances. Before details were even established, critics on the right began suggesting that Piker bore some responsibility for the shooting — the logic being that his commentary on political violence — such as comments during a recent New York Times podcast accusing slain UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson of “engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder” — had contributed to a climate in which this kind of act could occur. Piker, on his stream, observed that virtually every person making this argument happened to be a critic of his Gaza commentary. Whether that observation is entirely fair, it is not an unreasonable thing to notice.
What followed was another news cycle’s worth of Fox coverage. Another round of Democratic condemnations. Another set of bipartisan denunciations. Another data point confirming, for anyone watching Piker’s stream, that the political establishment operates as a unified body when one of its critics becomes sufficiently prominent. The machinery is working exactly as Piker’s critics would least want it to work, and the people running it either cannot see that or do not care to.
For his part, Piker has walked back his most offensive remarks, including his comment, which dates to 2019, that “America deserved 9/11.” Piker addressed it at the time — acknowledging it as a hyperbolic critique of American foreign policy and saying he should have used more precise language. He also said he regretted his remark about ultra-Orthodox Jews being “inbred.”
His detractors’ more substantive criticisms are real, even if a bit selective. Piker’s comments about China are genuinely muddled. Given the country’s record of repression, mass surveillance and ethnic cleansing, his past admiration for its revolutionary leader Mao Zedong and his description of China as the “closest” system to socialism he admires are hard to square with his stated values. Piker’s defense of Russia’s annexation of Crimea based on the idea that the region’s residents supported it ignores the actual record. His statements about Hezbollah and the Houthis reflect an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend logic that collapses under scrutiny.
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These are fair criticisms. They are the kind that a healthy left-wing media ecosystem should be making, in dialogue with Piker and his audience.
But the current uproar is not prioritizing or promoting such careful evaluation, and the people leading this campaign are not interested in a dialogue. The anti-Piker effort is about political positioning. We know this because the standards being applied to Piker are not consistently applied elsewhere. The Democratic Party continues to include figures who have supported policies resulting in large-scale violence abroad, who have made inflammatory statements of their own or who regularly appear alongside commentators with troubling records. Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin and other Democrats who tut-tut at Piker still eagerly appear on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” even though the host’s ABC show was canceled after he said the 9/11 hijackers were “not cowardly,” unlike U.S. armed forces “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker — who rushed to announce he would never appear on Piker’s stream — was among those who had previously voted against blocking weapons sales to Israel, only flipping last month. Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry remain central figures in the Democratic Party decades after voting for the Iraq War. The selective outrage suggests that the issue is not simply what Piker has said, but what he represents: a challenge to the party’s center of gravity on issues like Israel, economic policy and media strategy.
All the while, Fox News has been watching the furore — and capitalizing on it.
When Democratic politicians and mainstream outlets publish their own denunciations of Piker — comparing him to far-right extremists or demanding his ostracism — they are providing the network with ready-made material.
When Democratic politicians and mainstream outlets publish their own denunciations of Piker — comparing him to far-right extremists or demanding his ostracism — they are providing the network with ready-made material. This is the real boon, and it is not simply that Fox News gets to talk about Hasan Piker. They always identify a figure who can be framed as extreme, amplify their most controversial statements and present them as representative of the broader opposition. This time, Democrats are helping them do it.
The dynamic becomes self-reinforcing. Fox highlights Piker as a dangerous figure on the left. Democrats respond by condemning him, thereby validating his prominence. That condemnation is then fed back into Fox’s coverage, which presents it as confirmation of internal Democratic chaos. Meanwhile, every Fox News segment about the dangerous radical leftist streamer that Democrats are fighting over is, for Piker’s actual audience of young, disaffected men, an advertisement.
Progressive members of Congress who understand what is actually happening here — such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ro Khanna of California — have appeared on Piker’s show without incident and without endorsing every sentence he has ever uttered. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been interviewed. Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, neither of whom could be described as ideological allies of Piker, have suggested they would be willing to appear. Ezra Klein, the center-left New York Times columnist who is not particularly close to Piker’s politics, defended him against the antisemitism charges. Pod Save America, the flagship podcast of Obama-era liberalism, had him on. These are people operating from different political premises who have nonetheless reached the same conclusion: Engaging a figure with millions of young viewers is more useful than denouncing him from a distance.
There is a deeper structural issue at play. For decades, conservative donors and activists invested heavily in building a parallel media ecosystem, from talk radio to cable news to digital platforms. This infrastructure allows them to shape narratives, elevate voices and coordinate messaging with remarkable efficiency. Democrats, by contrast, largely relied on existing institutions, assuming that mainstream journalism would provide a sufficient platform. That assumption has been eroding for years. The fragmentation of media, the decline of trust in institutions and the rise of personality-driven content have all altered the landscape.
The progressive movement’s largest donor network is reportedly planning to invest tens of millions of dollars into a new media fund. The conversation about building a left-wing media infrastructure that can reach young men the way Rogan reaches them — and the way Piker reaches them — is finally happening in earnest.
This is a genuinely important development. But it will mean nothing if the instinct of the Democratic Party and its institutional allies is still to punish anyone within that ecosystem who says something inconvenient or acquires an audience without permission or criticizes Israel or talks about class in ways that make high-dollar donors uncomfortable. You cannot build a new media ecosystem while simultaneously demanding that everyone in it behave like they are operating within the old one.
Ultimately, the fixation on Hasan Piker distracts from more substantive issues. Spending political capital on intra-party disputes over a streamer, and turning him into a litmus test, risks alienating the very audiences Democrats are trying to reach. And that, as we witnessed in the 2024 presidential election, can be politically fatal.
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from Sophia Tesfaye
