The war against Hasan Piker, now in full force, isn’t about antisemitism or Israel, and it is not even about the 35-year-old streamer. Litigating Piker’s comments about Israel not representing all Jews is, in fact, a fool’s errand.
Understand the media frenzy for what it is: a DEFCON 1-level war against Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, by a Party establishment frantically hitting the panic button to reestablish its control. But since El-Sayed is the nominee for Senate — a chamber the Party also wants to control — it has to go after him indirectly, through proxies like Piker.
I could go into Hasan’s comments and the context being withheld in the mainstream depictions (see his comments in their entirety here), but what’s the point?
If you want to know why Piker is a diversionary skirmish compared to the full war, just listen to former Biden White House spokesperson turned MS NOW host Jen Psaki lament the real issue here: that the Party leadership is losing the ability to select its own candidates. Here’s what she said to a Democratic strategist on her show recently:
“ I think we both remember well when party leadership really selected the nominees. Now, you would never say it that way exactly, but they would … they would put money behind it; they would endorse. And now it looks very much like party leaders are not picking the nominees. In fact, party leaders pushing nominees is a negative — it is a negative in many of these races.”
El-Sayed, a political outsider, had the audacity to run against the party’s chosen candidate, Haley Stevens; and then, despite his unsanctioned campaign and unsanctioned backers like Piker, he won.
Stevens is the candidate of the past. She worked her way up in the Party apparatus, coming out of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008, to assume a life of public service based upon nothing more than being a Party hack.
El-Sayed, on the other hand, spent that time working as an epidemiologist after getting an advanced degree in public health. Informed by this expertise, he advocates universal healthcare and advancing affordability — things like reducing housing and utility costs and fighting predatory landlords — by taxing billionaire wealth. As Zohran Mamdani proved in New York, it is exactly what the voters want.
So why the frenzied attack? It happens virtually every time a candidate that didn’t come up through the usual party pipeline of internships and staff positions gets close to power. Washington reaches for the same playbook: declare a national security emergency (enter Piker) or find some remark to argue that the insurgent candidate isn’t “qualified,” polished, or — if all else fails — claim they represent a threat to America.
The message is clear: no groomed-for-higher-office candidate would ever say such things, so you better stick with the Party leadership’s superior judgment. We just saw an example in neighboring Wisconsin, with Francesca Hong’s Thanksgiving-gate.
We unfortunately live in a two-party dominated country, one that people find increasingly unresponsive and obsolete. Republicans were willing to blow up their Party to choose Trump. The same is happening with the Democrats, and the Party leaders clearly see the long-term threat to its survival.
Candidates like Mamdani and El-Sayed have no real choice but to run as Democrats, even when they are not followers of the national platform or the policy approaches. The Party reacts by closing the tent to these outsiders. That’s what it is doing now.
It’s the Party’s prerogative to enforce discipline, of course; but instead of saying that’s what’s happening here, the Party and its media mouthpieces pretend that these “scandals” represent some kind of grave national security crisis. The end result is us spending a week talking about Hasan Piker instead of, you know, actual policies and what El-Sayed represents.
I don’t care that the media is being mean to politicians. That comes with the territory. What I do care about is that we’re stuck talking about stupid shit like decade-old tweets and Twitch streamers instead of the very real problems this country faces and a new generation that is actually driven to action and not just words.
I call it panic button politics, and it’s the latest entry in the Washington playbook used to maintain control. Here are five phrases to be on the lookout for, keywords the political establishment uses to get you to back away from serious discussion of a candidate’s actual policies.
1. “Democratic Socialist”
Nobody actually believes we’re going to wake up one morning with Wall Street replaced by workers’ councils.
Bernie Sanders, the godfather of American democratic socialism who introduced the term to the mainstream, is on record saying he doesn’t believe the government should own the means of production. That’s the textbook definition of socialism!
His actual platform is Medicare for All, free public college, and increased taxes on the rich. That’s Denmark, not St. Petersburg.
The media knows this. It plays the kabuki anyway, treating a rhetorical banner as a legislative agenda — taking literally what neither the candidate, the voters, nor the reporters themselves take literally. But here’s the thing: the voters aren’t buying it.
CNN’s John King has a recurring segment called “All Over the Map,” in which he convenes panels of ordinary voters — the very people whose supposed skittishness justifies all this handwringing about insurgent candidates like El-Sayed. King recently asked the panelists, a group of self-identified Democrats from across the country — including swing states like Michigan, North Carolina and Arizona — how they felt about Democratic Socialist candidates, and their response was interesting.
King asked:
“In some congressional races, now this huge race in Michigan, elsewhere in the country, we’re starting to see more progressive anti-establishment, in some cases, Democratic Socialist candidates win these primaries for the Democrats. Are you excited by that, yes or no?”
All six panelists held up signs reading “YES,” as shown below.
I doubt all or even most of them were democratic socialists; but what’s clear is the term didn’t scare them.
2. “Abolish ICE”
El-Sayed recently sat down for what was to be a heavyweight battle with Fox News’ Jesse Watters, who opened with the panic button: Who is going to deport the criminal aliens from the country?
Here we’re meant to pretend that “abolish ICE” means zero immigration enforcement — that a sitting U.S. Senate nominee wants violent felons to stay put as a matter of policy. Come on.
El-Sayed’s answer was smarter than the format deserved. Long before there was an ICE, he pointed out, there was the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS.
INS sat inside the Justice Department, where illegal immigration treated as what it is: a civil matter. ICE was created in 2003 and placed within the Department of Homeland Security, an agency stood up in response to 9/11 and designed to fight terrorism — which quickly became the framework by which ICE approached immigration. That, El-Sayed said, is what he was opposed to. Not immigration enforcement.
El-Sayed disarmed Waters with his candor, the Fox News host later sheepishly admitting “I like him” and that he found him “compelling,” as I detail in the video below (“like” my page if you’re so inclined!)
3. “Defund the Police”
Here we’re supposed to picture Mad Max anarchy rather than what is actually on the table, which a reallocation of municipal budgets away from the local national security enforcer. You know, routing mental-health calls to clinicians rather than police.
Note that this slogan is essentially dead. I can’t remember the last time someone ran on it. But that doesn’t matter to those reaching into the playbook. Someone who endorsed you once said it, and that’ll do.
4. “Defund the Military”
This one always arrives with a reminder that the phrase appears in the DSA platform, and we’re again asked to read it maximally: that someone who wants to reduce military spending is advocating that the United States have no armed forces at all. I say again: come on.
Let’s check the tape to understand why at least a refund should be on everyone’s mind. The Pentagon’s FY2027 budget request is $1.5 trillion. That’s a 42 percent increase in a single year, the largest jump ever in our lifetimes. There’s a separate $67 billion supplemental for the Iran war on top of it.
I’m not lying awake worrying that we’ll wake up without a military someday. I wish more candidates were willing to take this on, with the very argument that the Pentagon gets everything it wants while the rest of society is lucky to hold onto what little it already has.
And consider this inconsistency: we are asked to be alarmed about a notion that the Pentagon is about to be shuttered when an anti-defense spending movement has never once succeeded in cutting a defense budget. Ever.
5. “Electability”
In an era when pollsters regularly flub election predictions by double-digits, it’s amazing how anyone still takes the sage admonition of “electability” seriously. But it is the all-purpose term the establishment reaches for when it wants to sideline a candidate. Think of it as page one of the playbook.
Not electable, and yet roughly a day after El-Sayed took the nomination, Stevens conceded and offered her support, party leadership that had spent months quietly backing his opponent coalesced behind him, and Kamala Harris was even raising money for him. The un-electability evaporated overnight because that was never the real concern.
Each of these five terms is a device a way to move a candidate out of the category of things you debate and into the category of things you dismiss, out of acceptable into a threat to the stability of the two-party straitjacket or the country writ large.
But think back to John King’s CNN panel. Six swing-state Democrats, hand-picked to represent exactly the caution the political class insists is out there, and every one of them held up a sign that said the opposite. DEFCON 1 declared, the button got pressed, but voters don’t give a shit anymore.
I know I don’t.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
They hate their Base, now more than ever.
"the government should own the means of production. That’s the textbook definition of socialism!"
You're reading the wrong textbook. (Certainly not anything written by Karl Marx . . . .)