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 context. If you were talking for 10 hours a day, you’re going to say stuff that could very easily be misconstrued.”
Piker has done almost 20,000 hours of entirely unscripted, off-the-cuff streaming. I spent some time watching a tiny fraction of that footage. What I found left me disturbed—but not about Piker. Rather, I was floored by the hypocrisy and bad faith of those attacking him.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, condemned Piker last week amid the news of his upcoming appearance with El-Sayed, writing that “Piker has a long track record of commending and excusing terrorism. He routinely uses his platform to spread anti-Jewish tropes, amplify propaganda from designated terrorist groups, and promote toxic anti-Zionism.”
Greenblatt didn’t cite specifics, but Third Way’s Cowan and Cohen, in their Journal op-ed, identified four comments as evidence of Piker’s antisemitism: “He has referred to ultra-Orthodox Jews as ‘inbred,’ employed antisemitic dog whistles (‘bloodthirsty, violent pig-dog’) against an anti-Hamas viewer of his stream, compared liberal Zionists to ‘liberal Nazis,’ and said ‘Hamas is a thousand times better’ than the Israeli state.” Piker has also been attacked for having said, “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”
I dislike much of this quoted language, but the context is undeniably important. I asked Piker to respond to each example.
“It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”
“I think it’s very clear what I was saying,” Piker told me. “I was debating someone at the time about there being sexual violence that occurred on October 7th. And I said sexual violence does take place in situations like this, and there was definitely testimony of sexual violence that had taken place amongst the hostages. But that doesn’t change the dynamic of Israel committing a genocide against the Palestinians, and my opposing that genocide.” The original footage of this moment bears this out; the claim that Piker was condoning sexual violence—rather than saying it does not justify Israel’s actions—is simply bad faith.
“Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” of Israel.
Putting aside the hyperbole of “a thousand times,” Piker says he stands by the basic sentiment of this comment. “I think it’s unquestionable at this point that, yeah, Hamas didn’t do a genocide. Israel did. And I think that’s very hard to argue against, beyond saying, how crazy, how ridiculous, Hamas is a terrorist organization, you’re a terrorist.” Personally, I think there are limits to a quantitative comparison of Hamas and Israel, both of which have done horrendous things—but it’s not antisemitic of Piker to make the observation that Israel has killed more innocent people and caused more suffering and destruction than Hamas.
Comparing “liberal Zionists” to “liberal Nazis”
Here’s the full quote: “When people say, like, ‘Oh, well, I’m a liberal Zionist, I want there to be a Jewish ethno-state,’ I’m like, ‘OK, what do you mean?’ It’s like saying you’re like a liberal Nazi. Like, you want an Aryan majority ethno-state?” Piker was clearly making a point about the problematic nature of all ethno-nationalisms. “These are the exact same forces that I combat here in the United States of America as an American citizen,” he explained to me. “The growth of fascism that’s taking place in this country. In some ways I see Israel as, like, our future, as where we are headed here in the United States. And in many ways, we’re already there, right? So it’s not a special status for Zionism, is what I mean. It’s just like any other reactionary ideology that I actively combat.”
Much of the argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitic boils down to a sense that Jewish ethno-nationalism is treated differently than other ethno-nationalisms. But it’s clear that Piker has long demonstrated a universal opposition to ethno-nationalisms of any kind. You can argue that his comparison between Zionism and Nazism is insensitive, but it’s not antisemitic—particularly when you consider that prominent Zionists like Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse recently made a similar comparison, albeit framed (horrifyingly enough) as a positive.
“Bloodthirsty, violent pig-dog”
“I’ve never heard that be referred to Jewish people,” Piker told me, referring to “pig-dog.” “Someone showed me there has been one instance where a Nazi called Jewish people that, but I didn’t know that.” To be clear, I have never before heard anyone claim that “pig-dog” was an antisemitic dog whistle. The only other use of “pig-dog” I’ve been able to find was in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which a taunting Frenchman tells King Arthur, “You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person!” I suppose one could argue that “bloodthirsty” and “violent” are dog whistles referencing the antisemitic “blood libel” trope, but this comment occurred in the context of an exchange about bloody acts of violence—that certainly seems like a more reasonable explanation to me.
Referring to ultra-Orthodox Jews as “inbred”
I told Piker that I thought calling ultra-Orthodox Jews “inbred” was dehumanizing and indefensible. He essentially agreed with me, though he provided some important context. “As far as the utilization of the term ‘inbred,’ there’s a 10-minute compilation of me calling white nationalists, white supremacists, racists, neo-Nazis all inbred, because at the end of the day, I just use it as a substitute instead of other pejoratives.” (I checked, and it’s true that Piker does frequently use the term “inbred” as an insult for all sorts of groups.) Having said this, Piker also expressed regret about this comment, saying, “But yeah, I agree, that’s the one quote that’s like, someone could hear that and sincerely be like, ‘Oh, this guy’s actually antisemitic.’ It’s one that I will be more careful not to utilize in the future. Yeah, of course I regret that.”
So, to review: Over the course of nearly 20,000 hours of streaming, Piker’s attackers have found one offensive comment about ultra-Orthodox Jews and several other comments that essentially boil down to strident anti-Zionism. And the immediate context of those comments is only part of the picture. Here’s the fact that Piker’s critics never mention: For years, he has consistently warned of the dangers of antisemitism and spoken up for Jewish people, in a world of online streaming where doing so can be unpopular.
In his broadcasts and elsewhere, Piker has called antisemitism “a canary in the coal mine of fascism” and “a problem in Western society in perpetuity.” He has said, “There’s nothing grosser than both being antisemitic and then using the cause of Palestine to feed people more antisemitic commentary.” He has shut down the antisemitic trope of a global Jewish cabal—“Zionists don’t run the world.… That just sounds like you’re antisemitic but trying to hide it. No, capitalists run the world.” He has praised Judaism, saying, “The history of the Jewish people is one of withstanding pogroms and resisting genocide” and noting that Jews have “been at the front of any matter of injustice globally, whether it be the Civil Rights Movement in America, whether it be apartheid in South Africa.” And he regularly calls out his followers—risking backlash from paid supporters—when they engage in antisemitism during his streams.
This is the person that figures like ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt—who, it’s worth remembering, defended Elon Musk after the Tesla CEO threw up a Sieg heil! to an arena full of Trump supporters—are telling us is a major threat to Jews today. You can come to your own conclusions about such claims.
Given this demonstrated commitment to pushing back against antisemitism, I asked Piker whether he thinks it’s possible to arrest its growth. He was surprisingly optimistic.
“There’s a lot of people that have told me that I’ve played a formative role in them snapping out of the white supremacist pipeline, the right-wing rabbit holes,” he told me. “I’ve seen people go from being Groypers to slowly but surely recognizing that a lot of this stuff is distractions from class war. A lot of this stuff is distractions from the real economic pain that they’re feeling on a daily basis. And I’m able to, like, rip them away from that. I think for young men, they’re very malleable. They can change their minds. I don’t think the average American fascist is a card-carrying ideologically minded fascist. There’s an opportunity to just shake these guys and bring some sense back into their worldview.”
Between Piker and his critics, it seems pretty clear who’s in a better position to do that shaking.
