Hasan Piker Has a Few Choice Words for His Bad-Faith Centrist Critics

The group Third Way accuses the popular progressive streamer of being a “Jew-hater.” His record, and an interview with TNR, prove he’s the opposite of an antisemite.

If you only got your news from the Democratic Party’s corporate wing, you’d be excused for thinking that not much of consequence was happening in the world. Centrist groups like Third Way and pro-Netanyahu organizations like the Anti-Defamation League don’t seem to be fretting about the escalating war in the Middle East, the Trump regime’s insider trading, or Republicans’ plans for another reconciliation package that would drastically cut health care spending to fund the war (while also suppressing the vote). In their circles, there’s a different catastrophe that the Democratic Party should be prioritizing right now: left-wing influencer Hasan Piker’s efforts to rally in support of progressive Democratic candidates.

I’m pretty new to following Piker, who will join Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed at two universities next week. I think he first came onto my radar when he interviewed Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before one of their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies last year. I knew he was a popular Twitch streamer with a significant following among young men—essentially the exact “liberal Joe Rogan” figure that Democrats identified in the aftermath of the 2024 election as one of their greatest needs—as well as an unabashed anti-Zionist critic of Israel.

I also know that groups like Third Way have been the loudest voices urging Democrats to abandon “purity tests” like protecting immigrants and the transgender community. So when Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, and press adviser Lily Cohen wrote in The Wall Street Journal two weeks ago that Piker is a “Jew-hater,” against whom “the Democratic Party needs to draw a line in the sand,” I assumed that there must be something pretty serious behind their claims that Piker has helped spread “the surge of antisemitism.” And that worried me, as someone who has written about my own concerns regarding the growth of antisemitism in this country—so I reached out to Piker myself.

“Here’s the structural problem with what I do as a livestreamer,” he told me on Monday. “I’m talking for 10 hours a day on very volatile issues, oftentimes from a perspective that most Americans are not privy to, an anti-imperialist framework. These are issues that people closely identify with, so tensions are high. And then on top of that, I have a policy of letting whoever wants to speak in this 30,000-person, Madison Square Garden–size arena.” (That’s the size of his average livestream audience.)

“So people come in and piss me off,” Piker said. “They say shit when I’m delivering an impassioned speech or looking at some heinous war crimes. And there are moments where I just pop off and they’ll clip that. And then they’ll try to disseminate that to the end of the world and completely rob it of its........

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