Michiganders can’t allow him to suddenly distance his campaign from Hasan Piker’s toxicity.
Michiganders can’t allow him to suddenly distance his campaign from Hasan Piker’s toxicity.
‘I do not agree with this statement, nor do I give much weight to the statements made by a social media streamer,” Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed told Axios this week. “Streamer” is the dismissive sobriquet El-Sayed has applied to Hasan Piker ever since the scandalous online commentator became a millstone around the candidate’s neck. And yet, the pejorative isn’t doing as much heavy lifting as El-Sayed might like.
The comments El-Sayed tried to distance himself from were certainly toxic but, for Piker, hardly uncharacteristic. “Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes,” the “streamer” said when asked by Axios reporter Alex Thompson whether the United States is “worse” than al-Qaeda. “We have caused tremendous terror all around the world.”
👀 NEW: @hasanthehun joins @alexthomp on the Season 3 premiere of The Axios Show in what Piker called "the most contentious interview" he's done.
Piker claims that "pound for pound," America conducts more terror around the world than al-Qaeda. pic.twitter.com/c8xFVvbixl
— Axios (@axios) September 17, 2026
In the interview and his subsequent remarks, Piker displayed an impressive level of ignorance about the subjects on which he opines. He suggested that accidental mistargeting in wartime amounts to “terror.” It doesn’t. Legitimate mistakes are not even war crimes, properly understood. He indicated that the U.S. — and, presumably, our Israeli overlords — installed and propped up the Ahmed al-Sharaa regime in Syria. He conspicuously elided Turkey’s significant role in the operations that brought down Bashar al-Assad, as well as Israel’s skepticism toward the al-Sharaa regime and Washington’s overtures to it.
Piker doesn’t seem to know much. But he does have a following among the similarly dispossessed and bitter. That was what attracted El-Sayed to Piker in the first place, and vice versa. He was a vehicle that helped introduce El-Sayed to young Democratic-primary voters. El-Sayed may want to run away from that record today, but Piker is not playing along. In that regard, Piker has a point. He brought El-Sayed to this dance, and he shouldn’t let anyone forget it.
Piker’s outsize presence in Michigan’s Democratic senatorial primary race was controversial from the outset. Even before the pair held their first joint rally in early April, El-Sayed was forced to explain the association. The candidate told Politico that it was “critical” that Democrats embrace Piker. “I’m not here to disavow people’s views,” El-Sayed insisted. “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture — I thought we were over it.” Indeed, he cast his own lack of discernment as a species of bravery: “In politics,” El-Sayed insisted, “condemnation is what you do when you can’t win an argument.” After all, if “perfectly inoffensive won elections,” he later added, “then Donald Trump would never have been president.”
El-Sayed’s Democratic opponents were not convinced. Both State Senator Mallory McMorrow and Representative Haley Stevens objected to Piker’s invitation to participate in Michigan politics, and they made El-Sayed’s indiscretion a wedge issue.
Piker is a “misogynistic and antisemitic” “provocateur,” McMorrow said. He “says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks,” not unlike, she added, the racist right-wing influencer Nick Fuentes. Piker’s presence in Michigan has caused “pain and trauma across our state.”
Stevens agreed. Piker is “the exact opposite of someone I’d be campaigning with,” she said. “El-Sayed is choosing to campaign with someone who has a history of antisemitic rhetoric.” To her credit, Stevens declined to back away from her condemnation even after she narrowly lost the Michigan Senate primary to El-Sayed.
Even much of Michigan’s Democratic political establishment rained opprobrium down on El-Sayed. Piker’s rhetoric “sounds deeply antisemitic, consistently, and therefore not someone that should be helping anybody out in the Michigan political environment,” Senator Elise Slotkin observed, adding that he consistently unleashes a “cascading set of antisemitic tropes.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told The Atlantic’s David Frum that she believed Piker was “very antisemitic, in addition to being racist and sexist and many other things.” Moreover, Nessel challenged the Democratic establishment to stand up and be counted. “Who are the members of Congress, of our congressional delegation in Michigan who will say, That’s not right?” she asked. “Is it only going to be a handful of us? Will we have any allies that are non-Jews who will stand up and say, This is wrong?”
Democratic Representative Hillary Scholten went so far as to promise to withhold her vote for El-Sayed if he won the party’s nomination to the U.S. Senate. “I think that condoning behavior like this from candidates like Abdul El-Sayed is taking us in a direction that we don’t want to go as a party,” she said. “I would never stand on a stage or be at a rally with someone like Hasan Piker because he chose to say comments like that.”
Even some of El-Sayed’s own staffers have experienced crises of conscience. The candidate’s comments in public as well as private “give credibility to the claims of [El-Sayed’s] antisemitism and pro-Islamist regimes/factions,” said Jordan Domingue, a former top security official on El-Sayed’s campaign. “Personally,” he added, “I regret and feel shame for excusing antisemitism and for not leaving sooner.”
Through it all, El-Sayed retained his penchant for stoic condescension. “I love and revere the Jewish people because I love ALL people,” read El-Sayed’s late-March response to sharp criticisms from the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt. “And I criticize Israel’s genocide because I love ALL people. I pray someday you understand.” If only the ADL wasn’t so pig-ignorant about the ongoing “genocide” in Gaza, where Israeli combat operations had ended almost six months earlier.
El-Sayed’s initially protective instinct toward Piker stemmed from self-interest. Far from undermining his prospects, the El-Sayed–Piker buddy act boosted his support. Before their joint rallies, El-Sayed never led any poll. Afterward, he led in all but three polls of that race — often by double digits.
Piker helped El-Sayed corner the market for anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment among the youngest and most radical members of Michigan’s Democratic-primary electorate. That was barely enough to push him over the finish line. Now, sensing danger, El-Sayed would like to erase the primary from public memory. Good luck with that.
Hasan Piker has no interest in letting El-Sayed squirm away. Piker will not quietly allow voters to overlook his claims that Americans deserved the 9/11 attacks, that Israel is more immoral and inhumane than Hamas, and, now, that the United States is a greater force for evil in the world than even al-Qaeda.
Piker is a true believer, as is El-Sayed. The difference between them is that one is trying to win a statewide election. To do that, El-Sayed seems to believe that he can ensorcell Michigan voters into forgetting all they know about the toxic presence on the Democratic column this November.
Michiganders shouldn’t let him get away with it.