The gaming streamer has become a big headache for Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed—but that’s the risk of targeting a campaign at younger, terminally online voters.
Streamer Hasan Piker speaks at this year’s Web Summit Qatar in Doha.
(Shauna Clinton/Sportsfile for Web Summit Qatar via Getty Images)
Since last week, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker has been the target of a sustained rhetorical carpet-bombing from across the political spectrum: Democrats, Republicans, Fox News, and MS NOW. Piker had few fans in those quarters to begin with, but after campaigning with Michigan Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in his primary race, he’s become the poster boy for left-wing division and antisemitism.
El-Sayed had hoped to take advantage of Piker’s estimated multi-platform audience of 11.5 million young leftists to expand his base, but now he’s facing a contingent of Piker haters that appears to be at least as large. It’s a big problem for El-Sayed, who only won the primary vote by 0.9 percent. He needs to build a coalition of centrist and left-wing Democrats and independents to defeat Republican Mike Rogers, who’s also using attacks on Piker to sow doubts among El-Sayed’s more Israel-friendly voters.
Piker spends seven to eight hours a day live on Twitch, talking mainly left-wing politics and gaming. He has a shock-jock mentality and considers his platform an outlet for comedy and political satire, a self-described “Rush Limbaugh for Zoomers.” He’s also stridently anti-Israel and anti-Zionist—which means that he provides a goldmine of opposition research in a Michigan race where centrist voters could play a decisive role. He stans authoritarians like Mao Zedong and has worn a Mao jacket to speaking events. In the course of his marathon streaming monologues and online appearances, he’s announced that “America deserved 9/11,” “I hate America,” and that “in a totally just world, regardless of your background, any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a fucking rabid neo-Nazi.”
By Piker’s lights, simple support for the existence of a Jewish state alone—i.e., Zionism—is tantamount to fascist terror. Whatever boost he gave El-Sayed quickly evaporated, with the candidate now struggling to keep his campaign on-message amid a steady barrage of Piker attacks. So far, he’s failed, as the Piker-dominated news cycle continues to roll on.
Piker is what’s known as a dirtbag leftist—a term coined in 2016 by Chapo Traphouse co-host Amber A’Lee Frost. Dirtbag leftists include incivility, vulgarity, and a bright and shining mean streak in their political toolkit as rhetorical weapons to be used from the left; they represent the hardest of all possible passes on Michelle Obama’s dictum “When they go low, we go high.” Piker, Chapo, TrueAnon, The Baffler, and a legion of funny, often mean-spirited social media accounts like Dril have all lent currency to the dirtbag turn in left political discourse. On the right, meanwhile our dirtbag troll-in-chief, President Donald Trump has blithely steamrolled most standards of respectable expression; indeed, El-Sayed’s plight stems from his determination to put meaningful distance between himself and Piker’s statements, a move that Trump has never adopted in reference his own vast army of extremely online hatemongers.
When Obama suffered his own Fox smears over birtherism, tan suits, Jeremiah Wright, George Soros, and Saul Alinsky, he always maintained his dignity and refused to give his trolls the satisfaction of rising to the bait. Still, in the end, Obama did cut Wright loose and produced his long-form birth certificate. Republicans learned that bullying works—and so did the dirtbag left.
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Piker is hardly the first dirtbag leftist recruited by a Democratic politician to expand a left-leaning base of support, have a better understanding of online culture, and perhaps lend some youthful edge to a campaign’s tone. And it’s hardly the first time the association has blown up in a politician’s face. In 2020, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign frequently spent time and resources coping with the fallout from the harassing online behavior of many of his dirtbag followers. His focus on class issues and general indifference to identity politics gave the impression he largely did not care what they said. At a Las Vegas debate that February, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg called him out for it. “99.9 percent of them are decent human beings,” Sanders said of his supporters, “And if there are a few people who make ugly remarks, who attack trade union leaders, I disown those people.”
Sanders got his chance to disown one a few days later. The Daily Beast’s Scott Bixby outed Ben Mora, a Bernie regional field director in Michigan who ran an anonymous dirtbag account. Anonymously, Mora called Senator Elizabeth Warren a “dumb Okie” and said she looked like “an adult diaper fetishist.” He wrote that Senator Amy Klobuchar looked like “that optical illusion where it’s an old lady but also a young woman depending on how you look at it but with her it’s just two different old ladies.” Mora, who is gay, said Pete Buttigieg “is what happens when the therapist botches your conversion,” and also that he could “never trust buttigieg because he combined the natural devious disposition inherent in gay men with a bloodthirsty careerist drive.”
Mora was hardly the reason Bernie Sanders lost, but he gave Sanders’s opponents a direct link between the candidate and his unruly online army of “Bernie bros.” It added up to several lost news cycles and a vindication of Sanders’s critics when his campaign could ill afford such setbacks. Whether Mora was intentionally using vulgar humor as a political weapon, or just a compulsive shitposter, he just couldn’t help himself. Today he’s hosting an online game show where judges roast the interior design of people’s apartments.
In 2023, about three weeks after the October 7 attack in Israel, the same online blowback happened in Los Angeles, when someone at the True Anon podcast Twitter account and one-time comedian Josh Androsky went after comedian Amy Schumer. She had circulated a series of ultra-Zionist, enraged tweets over the massacre that culminated in her re-posting of a racist, anti-Palestinian political cartoon that blamed all Gazans for the October 7 atrocities. Androsky and True Anon responded with Holocaust and fat jokes that amounted to a dirtbag Statler and Waldorf heckling of Schumer.
True Anon: The Nazis named a concentration camp after her. It was called Da Cow.
Androsky: It’s f–ked up that you would say this about her when you know it was actually Cowschwitz.
Androsky was not hosting an edgelord podcast or using an anonymous account; he used his real name. At the time, he worked as a senior political consultant for LA City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez. Androsky quickly found out that mainstream Democrats like LA Mayor Karen Bass and Soto-Martinez don’t actually like it when they get linked to Holocaust gags and fat jokes aimed at a Jewish comedian whose uncle was the Democratic minority leader of the Senate. Androsky resigned. If he’s worked in politics since, he’s kept it pretty quiet. Like Mora, his last public credit appears to be a comedy-adjacent online project, this one produced by Chapo Traphouse.
You just can’t take these kids anywhere. That’s what El-Sayed has learned as Piker rapidly became a major liability in his general election race.
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Do Republicans get judged like this? They did once—but then Trump got elected, and they learned that unlike Democrats, their voters don’t actually care about racism, religious bigotry, or extremism in their ranks. Just last week, The Washington Post reported this week that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth hired a secret social media team to enhance his public image. On the team: Kurt Schlichter, who once got into an online feud with the Auschwitz Museum Twitter account about who would qualify as a “good” or “bad” Jew in a concentration camp. In August 2021, he also tweeted out a thread that included: “For too long red state conservatives have offered to live and let live with blue state liberals but the blues are evangelical Marxists who cannot allow us to provide a counter example of freedom.” And then: “So, no more. We must, by any means necessary, force them to be like us. No quarter. No compromise.” He could go harder in this vein as a Hegseth recruit, but in a Department of Defense that is rapidly disappearing all sign of dissent and anyone not white, male, hetero, or clean-shaven, he would only get promoted.
The only real question arising from Hegseth’s troll offensive was why he had bothered to keep his media team a secret. It certainly wasn’t out of any fear that the Schlicters in its ranks would damage his political future: As Hegseth floats the idea of a 2028 presidential run, he likely calculated that he could be see as trying to overshadow his boss—and that might be the one thing that could finally get him fired.
Republicans just don’t care about anything like this. Trump has given them a license to shrug off bigots in their midst, since many of them—from Candace Owens and Laura Loomer to Curtis Yarvin and Nick Fuentes—have found that their strident bigotries only win them more clout in the MAGA movement. Senator Ted Cruz now regularly attacks Tucker Carlson for antisemitism—but only after Carlson roasted him about Cruz’s badly informed jingoism in backing the war in Iran. Another MAGA-aligned antisemite, Dan Bilzerian, was roundly trashed by Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Ambassador Mike Huckabee, but that wasn’t a battle for whatever might remain of the soul of the Republican Party. They called Bilzerian out because he dared to primary Republican Randy Fine—himself no slouch in delivering right-wing edgelord rhetoric—and they wanted Bilzerian to lose. These days the burden of doing the right thing falls squarely, and only, on the Democrats.
Another case in point: Last March, El-Sayed delivered a heartfelt statement denouncing the attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. A Lebanese man, Ayman Muhammed Ghazil, targeted the synagogue after his brother Ibrahim Muhammed Ghazil—a Hezbollah commander—had been killed by the Israeli military; security guards killed Ghazil outside the temple. Following up his original comments, El-Sayed said of Ghazil, “Hurt people hurt people.”
That might seem like a fairly anodyne sentiment, but El-Sayed delivered it the day after the attack, which appalled many in Michigan. And the fallout from that four-word aside continues—thanks once more to Piker, who observed in a mid-August broadcast that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action—not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”
Piker was not in any way threatening Jews himself; he was warning Zionist Jews that their views would provoke people who would. But his broadside gave new life to the age-old trope that Jews bring their own oppression on themselves. Variations of it have come from Richard Wagner, Father Charles Coughlin, Hitler, FDR, and Roald Dahl.
In Piker’s twist on this victim-blaming tradition, Zionist Jews bring persecution on themselves because they won’t disavow Israel. When you view this de facto demand to scuttle Zionist sympathies—at the price of prospective personal harm—alongside Piker’s claim that simply believing Israel should exist equates you with “a fucking rabid neo-Nazi,” you begin to see how Piker makes people who have recently been the subject of antisemitic violence in Michigan and all over the country a bit nervous.
It’s that quote that made El-Sayed particularly vulnerable, especially when lined up with his “hurt people hurt people” comment, which sought to find as much understanding and empathy for the attacker as it does the victim. El-Sayed was on defense for days, until he made a heartfelt apology this past weekend for his Temple Israel comment.
Previous skeptics, like Michigan Democratic State Senator Jeffrey Moss, who has held off from endorsing El-Sayed, saw it as sincere and productive. El-Sayed won’t completely kick Piker to the curb, Jeremiah Wright–style, as his critics keep demanding, but he makes it clear that no one speaks for his campaign but himself. And he now pointedly refers to his former campaign ally as a “streamer from California.”
For his part, Piker, did not react to this past week’s media frenzy with El-Sayed’s damaged campaign in mind. He did not say “I could have phrased that better,” or that “in America everyone should be free to speak their mind without fear of violence.” No, he went on the attack on X.com. When a fan tweeted graphics paired with the condemnations of his Democratic critics and a suggestion that their pile-on was cynically coordinated and organized, Piker quoted the claim in a retweet, adding:
aipac boss call was made. they are unanimous in their hatred of me, and i welcome their hatred. if you’re a defender of israel’s genocide, of its occupation, of its child killing spree – then your boos mean nothing to me.
That comment neatly illustrated the limits of dirtbag leftist rhetoric in the context of a campaign. Invoking the specter of AIPAC as the puppeteer of Democratic leadership not only continues reinforcing antisemitic tropes; it also plays to a conspiratorial mindset that further hamstrings general-election appeals in a state like Michigan. Piker can afford to say that he welcomes the hatred of his attackers. He’s a self-employed streamer whose social-media harangues play to his terminally online audience.
But El-Sayed, coming off the narrowest of primary victories, can’t afford to welcome the hatred of the leaders of his party—he needs their support and endorsements to win. Piker’s also called Michigan Congresswoman Hillary Scholten “an Israel 1st” candidate and slut-shame her about a rumored affair with a Republican. He also went into full Ben Shapiro Debate Me! mode when he challenged El-Sayed’s Republican rival Mike Rogers to appear on his show.
All that should matter to leftists and Democrats alike is winning the midterms and getting El-Sayed into the US Senate. Piker is and always will be at heart a dirtbag leftist; and true to form, he isn’t capable of shutting up and getting out of El-Sayed’s way. If campaigns like El-Sayed’s calculate that building a younger leftist base entails outsourcing part of their messaging to performative edgelords like Piker, they shouldn’t be surprised when normie voters, resistance liberals, and centrists start to run in the opposite direction.
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