You know what publications do with someone who doesn’t matter? They usually ignore him entirely.
The U.K. Guardian publishes another profile of Hasan Piker, emphasizing how no one knows who he is and how no one cares about him:
Voters, so far, don’t seem to care about Piker — at least not more than the cost of gas, or the war in Iran, or healthcare, or artificial intelligence, or immigration, or corruption. Around the country, many told the Guardian they hadn’t heard of Piker, or they knew who he was and sometimes had opinions, but those opinions didn’t factor into their voting decisions.
Expecting any political commentator to have a bigger influence on voters’ decisions than the economy or war is setting the bar exceptionally high.
A cursory search finds that The Guardian has published articles or columns about Piker, or discussed him on podcasts, on May 12, 2025, May 17, 2025, and December 11, 2025, and this year on April 6, April 8, May 22, June 1, June 3, June 4, June 8, August 17, August 25, September 1, September 2, and today.
For a guy who supposedly no one cares about, The Guardian spends an awful lot of time writing about him and talking about him. It’s almost like some people do care when a guy says things like, “America deserved 9/11,” and then appears with New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, California Representative Ro Khanna, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. In fact, if no one cares about Piker as The Guardian contends, it’s a little weird that so many prominent left-wing elected officials chose to appear on his program, isn’t it?
You know what publications do with someone who doesn’t matter? They usually ignore him entirely.
Also in that article:
Depicted on the right as an extremist, Piker is trying to be tame, he says. “For the election season, I have tried to be as serious as possible,” he says in his signature suit and tie.
Piker was “tame” and “as serious as possible” when he contended to Axios that America was worse than al-Qaeda, “pound for pound,” when it comes to terrorism. Good to know.
There’s also this curious argument:
Unlike the Democratic primaries, where he appeared alongside his chosen candidates from El-Sayed in Michigan to Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, Piker isn’t campaigning for anyone in the general election.
Campaigning with a candidate does not disappear like a shaken Etch-a-Sketch when the primary ends and the general election begins. Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s decision to appear with Piker at several events during the primary does not get erased by El-Sayed’s sudden insistence on referring to Piker as “some Twitch streamer from California.”
The hot new voice who allegedly excites the young progressive grassroots turned out to be a raving maniac who hates America — that’s not an accusation, it’s a quote: “Oh God, I f***ing hate America so much” — and loves Mao, wants to throw his political rivals “in prison,” and calls for “Chinese-style Communism in the Democratic Party and Cultural Revolution sh**.”
(I say allegedly because the most recent New York Times survey found that 60 percent of likely voters ages 18 to 29 in Michigan said they have never heard of Piker.)
Last December, examining the Jennifer Welch hype, I wrote, “If you see a mainstream media publication touting some commentator as the Next Big Thing, there is an excellent chance that the person being profiled will rank among the dumbest, most unhinged, and least informed people you have ever encountered.” Piker has been the subject of three glowing profiles in the New York Times in six years.
Hasan Piker and his raging id of political extremism are now a liability for the Democratic Party. Maybe not enough of a liability to overcome the overall political environment in the midterm elections, but a liability nonetheless. (If he weren’t, El-Sayed would be using his name and not acting as if he barely knows the guy.) It is more than a little amusing to see The Guardian attempting to argue that Piker doesn’t matter at all.