Critics are leveling baseless charges of antisemitism and bigotry at the mega-streamer. But they’re really scared of the challenge he poses to their power.
Hasan Piker.
(YouTube)
Over the past few weeks, Democratic establishment figures and the Israel lobby have come together to denounce mega-streamer Hasan Piker and to demand that left-wing Democrats shun his extremely popular platform. Their charge is that he’s an antisemite. The reality, of course, is that Piker is not an antisemite. But he is a trenchant critic of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, of US warmongering, and of a Democratic establishment that supports both. What’s more, he’s an unmatched online warrior against MAGA and an American far right that is increasingly open about its fascism and antisemitism.
Seeing someone like that rise in stature and influence is an inherent threat to Democratic bigwigs and pro-Israel hardliners, which is why they are working so hard to destroy Piker’s reputation. But their moment is passing, and their power is fading. This time, Piker and the American left will not be silenced.
In attacking Piker, the centrists and Zionists are reaching for a playbook that once seemed foolproof. For decades, any criticism or protest of Israel’s occupation and apartheid system was met with an accusation of antisemitism. Those accusations did the trick, driving dissonant notes out of mainstream media and politics—or even from their jobs. It didn’t matter when the critic was Jewish—or even, as in the case of scholar Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors.
With the onset of the genocide in Gaza in 2023, such accusations accelerated and intensified. As the global movement against the genocide grew, so did the scale of the disinformation campaign mounted by Israel and its allies. Above all else, the attacks were meant to make people forget that large numbers of Jewish anti-Zionists, particularly youth, were active leaders in the movement—and that the US left, like many lefts, has always been profoundly Jewish. (The myth that communism was a Jewish conspiracy was a core feature of 20th-century fascist ideology; that shouldn’t obscure the fact that being on the left in the United States and elsewhere has long meant being in community with large numbers of Jewish people dedicated to universal human emancipation.)
Democratic politicians from New York Mayor Eric Adams to President Joe Biden nonetheless condemned this substantially Jewish movement as antisemitic. Such bogus charges were credulously regurgitated by The New York Times and CNN. Democrats cheered the repression of the movement on campus, a crackdown more severe than that meted out against any such student movement in recent US history. Then Democrats lost the election to Donald Trump. The DNC found, in a still-secret autopsy of the 2024 election, that Palestine cost Harris a lot of votes. Upon taking office, Trump took the bogus charge, legitimized by Democrats and the liberal media, that campuses were infested with antisemitic leftists as a pretext to engage in its ongoing attacks on higher education and academic freedom.
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But the smears that might have worked before 2023 found much less purchase amid the genocide. Ordinary Democrats could clearly see that it was unacceptable to blindly support a state committing such unspeakable atrocities. Today, 67 percent of Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians, and just 17-percent with Israelis.
That hasn’t stopped the attacks from coming. During Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor, Andrew Cuomo and his allies on the center and right wings constantly and falsely claimed that Mamdani was antisemitic, whipping up a fake scandal around his refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Cuomo allies also charged that he was an Islamist jihadist, the sort of Islamophobia toward which false charges of antisemitism often lead. Even Mamdani’s resounding win hasn’t quieted the slander; there’s currently a new wave of fake outrage over his wife’s past social-media likes. Mamdani has, by and large, never taken the bait, which is wise.
It is in this context—of a centrist and Zionist movement straining to keep a grip on its political power—that the attacks on Hasan Piker have emerged. Piker has also become a stand-in for the broader fight to define the future direction of the Democratic Party, and to keep the left outside the party’s borders.
Every day seems to bring another hysterical establishment figure scaremongering about Piker. His appearance at a rally with Abdul El-Sayed, a left-wing Senate candidate in Michigan, became a major issue on the campaign trail. CNN’s Jake Tapper hosted a lengthy segment about Piker’s supposedly malign influence on the Democrats. Jonathan Cowan, the president of centrist Democratic group Third Way, cowrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal charging that Democrats were “too cozy” with Piker. In an interview with The Bulwark on Thursday, Cowan went even further, comparing Piker to David Duke.
It would take too much space to go through all of the specifics behind these claims—but any serious examination of them reveals their flimsiness, and ignores Piker’s long history of denouncing antisemitism. To use just one example, Piker’s critics say that he referred to Jews as “inbred.” In fact, he referred to some far-right Haredi Jews as inbred. This is precisely how, with great frequency, he has described various far-right Americans. It’s not a very nice thing to say, and it might not be your preferred political discourse, but it has nothing at all to do specifically with Jews.
In reality, the antisemitism smears’ greatest impact is to generate actual antisemitism—not on the left but on the far right. Increasingly, far-right leaders and commentators are breaking with the Zionist consensus. In the case of figures like Nick Fuentes, they are leaning in to breaking the taboo against antisemitism: The reason there are special rules against criticizing Israel, Fuentes charges, is because a transnational Jewish conspiracy controls the levers of power. Fuentes doesn’t care about being called an antisemite: He knows that there’s a growing audience that is asking questions about the US-Israel relationship that mainstream politics and media refuse to provide answers to.
The left provides a critique of Israeli settler colonialism, occupation, apartheid, and genocide grounded in anti-racist universalist principles. The far right offers classical antisemitism. Every establishment effort to shut down left-wing anti-Zionism cedes ground to the most dangerous forces in American society.
The anti-antisemitism push isn’t about stopping antisemitism; it’s about protecting the state of Israel from legitimate criticism. In fact, it prioritizes the latter over the former. Hasan Piker dedicates his enormous platform to winning the hearts and minds of young men who are otherwise being courted by the likes of Fuentes or by misogynists like Andrew Tate. The attempt by the Democratic establishment and Israel lobby to drive Piker from the public square is a direct attack on one of the most powerful anti-fascist, anti-racist, feminist forces on the Internet.
Despite these efforts, the evidence shows that leftist forces are getting bolder, not more afraid, when it comes to Israel and Palestine. On March 31, for instance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to movement demands and called for a full arms embargo on Israel—including banning funding for so-called “defensive” weapons systems like the Iron Dome, a position she had previously shied away from. The move was belated but historic. Ocasio-Cortez, a leading figure on the Democratic Party left, has drawn a new line in the sand that every aspiring Democrat will have to answer to. The move will also consolidate her leadership of a fractious left that demands principled stands on Palestine. And it will spark no real backlash from a larger liberal voter base who understands that Israel, like apartheid South Africa, can only be democratized through the global imposition of an arms embargo and sanctions.
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After Kamala Harris lost in 2024, the liberal mediasphere was awash in hand-wringing over the need for a “Joe Rogan of the left.” It soon became clear that we already had one in Piker. But he is unacceptable to the Democratic powers that be because he supports Palestinian liberation. He’s also unacceptable, however, because he provides a platform for an ascendant socialist left that is challenging the entire oligarchic order—starting with the militarist and business-aligned Democratic Party establishment. They want to shut him up because he is a potent force in a movement to end their careers. But he’s not shutting up, and the left-wing politicians who are being called upon to defend him are standing firm. The Democratic Party base has changed. Its establishment leaders will apparently be the last to find out.
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