I didn’t even know who Hasan Piker was until probably this year, yet now it’s hard not to know him because of all the national media attention he’s getting. His past comments have turned him into a lightning rod, and now several Democrats are trying really hard to put as much distance between them and Piker as they possibly can.
From what I’ve been able to find, Piker streams to roughly 3.1 million followers on Twitch and has another 1.9 million subscribers on YouTube, where his channel has racked up more than a billion lifetime views. The Anti-Defamation League puts his combined following at about 11.3 million as of April of this year.
That’s a lot of reach for the guy who declared in 2019 that "America deserved 9/11.” Sure, he claims to have disavowed it, but I believe that as much as I believe James Talarico suddenly realized that transgender ideology is evil.
He's dismissed evidence of sexual violence during the Oct. 7 massacre and repeatedly described Israeli and Orthodox Jews as "inbred" and "psychopathic." He's also mused about letting wealthy men commit "date rape" against wealthy women. His latest disgusting quote, which my PJ Media colleague Catherine Salgado reported on Thursday, was in an interview with Axios in which Piker claimed the United States is worse than al-Qaeda "pound for pound" in terms of deaths. He said, “We have caused tremendous terror all around the world." Al-Qaeda murdered nearly 3,000 Americans in a single morning. Piker put that organization on the same moral plane as the country it attacked, on the record, to a mainstream outlet, and faced no meaningful consequence for it.
In short, this isn't a guy with one bad tweet in his past. He’s made it perfectly clear what kind of person he really is.
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Piker's opinions are ugly, but he's just one man. It's the 11.3 million people who tune in that give him his power, and that audience is exactly why Democrat politicians and congressional candidates keep cozying up to him.
So how does a man with pro-Hamas sympathies and a habit of comparing his own country unfavorably to al-Qaeda turn into a de facto celebrity? It's been 25 years since 9/11, and an al-Qaeda apologist who calls the United States the real enemy now commands more reach than most cable news anchors. That's a sad reflection of what's happened to the culture in a quarter century.
Piker's turn in the spotlight won't last forever. Someone else will take his place, and the opinions that would have ended a career 25 years ago are becoming mainstream inside the Democrat Party.
So what happens in the next 25 years? Who will Democrat leaders be pandering to then, and how much further will the party's standards need to fall to get there? It's a genuinely frightening question, and Democrat leadership doesn't seem interested in answering it.
