If you put a gun to my head, I honest-to-fuck couldn't pick Hasan Piker out of a lineup that included Grimace, that pirate thing from Backrooms, and Sadie Sink. I'd probably say, "I don't think he's big and purple, but maybe he's small and redheaded" You're having one of a couple of reactions to that petty little bit of snark. One is "How can he possibly not know about Hasan Piker, left-wing firebrand and one of the most popular Twitch streamers and podcasters? Doesn't he know that's the Joe Rogan of the Left?" And that's fair to think that I, who have wallowed in the mud pits of political commentary for far too much of this one precious life, would have more than a passing knowledge of someone who is getting so much ink and spittle spilled over some of his more indulgently pseudo-extreme statements.
Another entirely fair reaction is "Who the hell is Hasan Piker and why should I care?" To which I would only tell you that you don't need to care. Really. No matter how many times some random Democrat is asked about Piker or some other idiot Democrat puts out a statement condemning some Piker remark about Israel or, even worse, condemning a fellow Democrat for talking to Piker, you don't have to give a dull tortoise fuck about him.
But it seems like, for some fucked up reason, Democrats from Cory Booker and John Fetterman in the Senate to Josh Gottheimer and Debbie Dingell in the House, as well as reliably old and disconnected consultants like James Carville and David Axelrod, have all taken the bait and attacked Piker for comments about Israel that are frankly not that different than what acceptable pundits like Ezra Klein have said. I'm not going to go into the whole issue itself, except to say that it's the mainstream of Democratic voters' beliefs to disapprove of Israel's genocide in Gaza and to want to stop arms sales to the nation. Indeed, you could say it's not just the minority view among Democrats to support murderous pricksore Benjamin Netanyahu, but with any support now at around 20% among Democrats, you could call that the extremist perspective.
Look, Democrats, you have one fucking job to accomplish in this midterm election season, and that's to take the Congress back from Republicans so you can attempt to fuck Trump's shit up. That's it. Everything else is bullshit and a distraction and a waste of everyone's time. Donald Trump is an existential threat to the continuation of the United States as a constitutional democracy, or, hell, as a place where people can even live without fearing disease, deportation, or death. Hasan Piker and the Democratic Socialists of America and trans athletes are not, even if you combined them into one Zord of Fake Shit That Terrifies Moderate Assholes. But that's just dancing to the Republicans' tune, and if you let the GOP set the agenda for what Democrats can be questioned about, if you let the media try to push you to condemn a widely popular opinion within the party's voters, then you're fucking it up.
I get that corporate Democrats are butthurt as hell over some of their chosen candidates losing in the primaries. The people who are whining about Michigan's nominee for Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, are the same ones who tell the leftist wing of the party to suck it up and vote for whatever AIPAC- and billionaire-approved centrist gets the nomination. Take your own fucking advice. Shut the fuck up and vote for El-Sayed. Let the man campaign as he sees fit. The shit people say to get elected is not the way that they legislate. El-Sayed will be one voice. If he wins or if any Democratic Socialist-aligned or sympathetic candidates win, they don't just take shit over. It's not a coup. And the corporate Democrats know this yet still are losing their shit. But they've played this game the same way for decades, and all they know is to freak the fuck out when someone slightly left of Bill Clinton gets a nomination. (I use Clinton because the most paranoid of the motherfuckers worked for him.)
Take a lesson from El-Sayed, who parlays each time some media puke tries to swing at him with his association with Piker. Take a page from his opponent in the tight primary, Haley Stevens, who immediately endorsed El-Sayed.
The thing is that Piker doesn't have any actual power. Meanwhile, the president of the United States is threatening free speech rights, posting videos about going to war with Canada, and wantonly murdering people at sea, along with forcing the country into a useless war we've lost. The Republican Party's top donor, Elon Musk, who was once the second most powerful person in the administration, regularly agrees with genocidal racist sentiments and posts white supremacist statements, and he's meeting with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson because he's giving hundreds of millions of dollars to help the GOP in the midterms. While Republican members of Congress and candidates are occasionally asked about some fuckery Trump has committed, they are, as far as I've seen, never asked to condemn Musk or to pledge not to take any of his filthy money.
No, some podcaster no one beyond those with terminal Twitter-and-Twitch brain has heard about is treated as more important than the DOGE-ing motherfucker who is personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths so far. That's what's fucked. Ask Republicans if they agree with horrific things that Megyn Kelly has said. Or some buffoonishly sexist or violent thing that Jesse Twatters...sorry, Watters has blurbled lately. Or gets some real guts and ask where they stand on the abjectly disgusting things Charlie Kirk would say. A hundred influential conservative commentators say objectively worse things every goddamn day. A hundred conservative members of Congress, too. What fucking farce.
In other words, Democrats, when someone asks you to condemn Hasan Piker, you can kindly ask them to go fuck themselves because you have more important things to fix, like the country. And maybe the world.
