One of the weirder spats in Democratic politics over the last few years has been over what should be done about Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer and influencer who has become increasingly known for his outspoken anti-Zionism.
A couple of weeks ago Jonathan Cowan, president and co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way, published a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Democrats are too cozy with Hasan Piker,” arguing that Democrats need to distance themselves from Piker, who Cowan describes as “anti-American, antiwomen, anti-Western and antisemitic.”
I’m not particularly interested in litigating the details of the allegations against Piker, but suffice it to say that what I’ve seen is pretty weak. Cowan implicitly concedes as much, saying that “[l]eft-wing antisemites are savvier than the Nazi-endorsers on the right…the antisemites of the left cloak their attacks in critiques of the present Israeli leadership.” That’s a cute sleight of hand – there isn’t solid evidence that Piker is antisemitic, but that just gets chalked up to him being too “savvy” to reveal his true beliefs. (Cowan goes on to explain that he considers the use of the terms “apartheid” and “genocide” in the context of Israeli politics to be antisemitism, which gives you a sense of his angle here).
The dispute here isn’t really about Hasan Piker exactly. Piker is a proxy for the broader dispute about the future of the Democratic Party, and a symbol of the growing dissonance between the party’s establishment and its increasingly disillusioned base.
In that light, the pearl clutching over Piker’s influence is telling. Politico recently asked 14 potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates whether they’d appear on a livestream with Piker. A few, including Senator Cory Booker, said no. That’s interesting, because in the past Booker has expressly rejected “purity politics,” specifically in the context of his associations with Jared Kushner, Mark Zuckerberg, and John McCain. He went so far as to write about the issue in his latest book, arguing that Democrats are shrinking their coalition by “cancel[ing] everyone who fails a purity test.” Booker’s calculus seems to change when he’s asked to include people to his left in that coalition.
Booker’s office responded to Politico’s query by saying that the conversations Piker has “aren’t the kinds of conversations Cory participates in.” Here’s Booker talking to NY Mag in 2019 about the conversations he does participate in:
By the time I got to the Senate I was meeting with Grover Norquist in my office, with Newt Gingrich in my office. Every ally I could find on the other side of the aisle, and willing to do — have conversations that I think some people aren’t willing to sit down and have.
So Booker pats himself on the back for talking to Grover Norquist (a long-time radical anti-taxation activist who occasionally finds himself involved in lobbying fraud) while rejecting the likes of Piker, whose worst crime from what I can gather is a handful of marginally distasteful comments.
Most tellingly, Booker very warmly received Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in December 2024. The timing is important – it was just a few weeks after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Gallant’s arrest for using starvation as a weapon of war and targeting civilian populations in Gaza. Gallant, in cutting off food, water, and electricity to Gaza, said that “we are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.”
The theme running through Booker’s apparent hypocrisy is pretty clear. His concern is not expanding the coalition, nor is it having conversations with controversial figures. His actual concern is disciplining the left flank of the party by keeping them in a perpetual state of weakness. This is how the center of the Democratic Party keeps the left at bay. They forge alliances to their right and leave the left isolated from power. Convening with the right is practical politics; convening with the left is beyond the pale.
It wasn’t long ago that the big debate in Democratic circles was about how to find the left’s Joe Rogan. Rogan and his cadre of alternative media dipshits had supposedly helped swing the 2024 election to Trump, and Democrats were looking to imitate his success. Cory Booker himself led an effort to embrace alternative media platforms.
The most obvious “Joe Rogan of the left” is Piker, who already boasts an audience of millions. The trouble for Democrats is that Piker (like Rogan) presents a trade off: he’s not actually controllable. He will, with some frequency, criticize the Democratic Party and some of its political commitments. That’s the whole point – his audience wants and expects independence and authenticity. This makes him a bit of a cautionary parable for Democrats. They would like to capture someone like him, but if they do he will become inauthentic, and lose whatever value he could have provided them. The only path forward is to actually win Piker over.
Confronted with this dilemma, Booker and others in the centrist establishment have decided that it’s simpler to try to excise Piker entirely. You can’t win him over while you’re hobnobbing with the IDF, so why bother? It’s easier to cast him out.
One of the go-to frameworks for Piker’s haters is to compare him to Nick Fuentes and other far-right influencers. One Third Way co-founder told Politico that “Piker is close to — but not over — the Nick Fuentes line.” Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow (whose opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, recently announced an event with Piker), said that Piker “says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks and views and followers, which is not entirely different from somebody like Nick Fuentes.” The idea here is to portray the left and right as having parallel problems with extremists in their party. But Fuentes is an open Hitler-admirer who has said that the biggest challenge society faces is “organized Jewry.” Piker, on the other hand, has frequently condemned antisemitism. It’s not just that the comparison is inapt, it’s that it’s so wrong that it can really only be made in bad faith.
The centrist wing of the Democratic Party is making two simultaneous pitches about the left: first, it is so evil that collaboration is impossible, and second that it is so feeble that it can safely be ignored. The first pitch is plainly a lie. The second may or may not be true, but the Cory Bookers of the world are staking their political lives on it.
