Why Hasan Piker has become a target for US Democrats

If you follow US politics at all, you probably would have noticed the raging debate about the role of controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker in endorsing several candidates from the left of the Democratic Party. For most people over 35, your first questions will be: what is a Twitch streamer? Why is this man getting so much attention?

Twitch is a website where users livestream themselves. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, it was largely confined to niche gaming enthusiasts, but with billions of people stuck indoors, Twitch suddenly got a huge new audience. Streamers expanded beyond gaming into music, movies, art, and other topics and the biggest personalities became celebrities in their own right. Increasingly, Twitch began to resemble an evolution of television rather than simply a platform for watching nerds play video games.

Another big development is that the US right, aka MAGA, picked up on this new platform where millions of people spend hours of their time every week, and organised to make it a venue for the dissemination of right-wing discourse.

With their massive funding and advertising advantages, Twitch streamers with a MAGA agenda like Adin Ross and FaZe Banks gained massive followings, even though the overwhelmingly young Twitch audience wasn't their most natural ally.

That contradiction is where Hasan Piker came in. His early streams mostly featured him playing video games while talking about current affairs from his idiosyncratic leftist, anti-imperialist perspective. Along with him just being very charismatic and funny, it resulted in him having 3.1 million subcribers, a far larger and more organic following than any of the MAGA streamers he was effectively an alternative to.

In more recent years, some of his streams have focused on discussing political issues with other personalities, and even interviewing ‘Yemeni Timothée Chalamet’ during the 2024 Red Sea blockade.

This year, Piker’s young following has been large enough that he’s been able to mobilise support for outsider candidates in the Democratic Party. For instance, he’s widely considered to have played a crucial role in Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign.

Several other Democrats from the ‘democratic socialist’ wing of the parties have appeared on his stream in the last year, or have benefited from his fundraising efforts. The most prominent has been Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the Michigan Senate election, who has even had Piker speak at his rallies.

But Piker’s most important intervention in that campaign was to publicise a clip of someone who sounds a lot like El-Sayed’s election opponent Jeremy Moss, saying that the “entire purpose” of his campaign was to ensure “continued United States support for Israel”, and that it’s not wrong for American Jews to “put Israel first” because the United States “is not our homeland.”

We’ve since had very bizarrely framed coverage. For example, in one piece published by the Washington Post, there is acknowledgement that experts have determined there’s no evidence the clip was edited by AI, spliced together or anything to indicate it’s not authentic; yet the conclusion is that AI content has “made it harder for voters to know what to believe.”

A couple of months ago I thought the liberal hysteria at the spectre of Hasan Piker had reached its peak when the UK banned him from entering the country due to the “risk [he] may pose to UK society.” But since then, the Democratic Party-aligned press in particular seems to have become somewhat obsessed with him.

It’s no exaggeration to say his name is being mentioned practically daily in mainstream coverage, as though he were a major player in US politics.

In the last few weeks, Piker has been condemned as “dangerous, malicious and antisemitic” by Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in Congress. Other Democratic Congress members have chimed in, with one saying Piker has a history of “hateful ideas and antisemitic remarks”, or claiming his rhetoric is “right out of the Nazi playbook”.

This all seems a bit much for a man who’s given lengthy speeches opposing antisemitism, or who recently squeamishly replied, “I’m a little too woke for this,” when Norman Finkelstein said on his stream that he “doesn’t talk to Israelis” after the Gaza genocide.

But of course, we have to directly address the issue here. Although his other leftist opinions may be controversial, the real sticking point against Hasan Piker is his principled and well-articulated opposition to the state of Israel. That’s the central thrust behind all of the attacks on him.

Underlying all of this is the severe anxiety that support for Israel in the United States is deteriorating across the board, but especially with Democratic voters, where it is now a ‘fringe position’. The number of Democratic voters who say they have a positive view of Israel is now 13%, which is lower than the percentage who support banning all abortions.

So how can the party leadership rationalise being so diehard in support of a position the vast majority of their members oppose? Right now, Hasan Piker has become their scapegoat. Similar to how a lot of Americans vastly exaggerate the amount of influence Vladimir Putin has in domestic US politics to avoid dealing with the uncomfortable fact that MAGA is homegrown, the Democratic establishment has convinced themselves that their members’ sharp turn against Israel is not because they’ve had to watch them commit a live-streamed genocide for almost three years; it’s because a witty Twitch streamer bamboozled them into it.

Daniel Lindley is a writer and trade union activist in the UK.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.