Funny how it works. A guy nobody in the Washington cocktail circuit ever heard of beats the establishment’s hand-picked candidate by a single point, outspent by millions from a foreign lobbying group, and within 48 hours every Sunday show and newspaper in the country is running the same play: make him disavow his friend.
Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic Senate primary by fewer than 15,000 votes. He did it with Hasan Piker at his side, a Twitch streamer with ten million followers who says things that would make your grandmother faint. America deserved 9/11. Mao Zedong was a great leader. Wore a Mao outfit to a college event. Said it doesn’t matter if rapes happened on October 7. None of that is defensible, and I’m not going to pretend it is.
But ask yourself who benefits from the pile-on.
Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, the New York Times, the New York Post, Fox News, the NRSC, AIPAC, Haley Stevens, Mike Rogers’ campaign. All of them, in perfect sync, demanding the same thing: disavow, disavow, disavow. El-Sayed called Piker’s 9/11 comment dumb and said Piker himself had walked it back. Not enough. The machine wanted a public execution, and when they didn’t get one, they called it “cancel culture” dodging. Which is a neat trick when you think about it.
Conlan Houston (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsHere’s what they’re not telling you. AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, buried El-Sayed under a wall of negative ads in the primary. The Independent reports they’re expected to dump tens of millions more into Michigan for Mike Rogers in the general. Ads that called Piker anti-Semitic. Ads that falsely suggested Stevens was endorsed by Barack Obama, which she wasn’t. But sure, let’s talk about who’s being honest here.
Haley Stevens, the establishment’s candidate, had every advantage. She had the money. She had the party infrastructure. She had the lobby cash. She lost. And her parting shot was that El-Sayed was at a pool party with influencers from LA and NYC. Because nothing says “I understand working people” like complaining that your opponent wasn’t spending his last night with small business owners.
James Carville, the guy who hasn’t won anything meaningful since 1992, vowed to abandon the Democratic Party if Piker becomes a leading voice. That’s the same James Carville who helped engineer the strategy that lost Michigan in 2016 and nearly lost it again in 2024. The party should be so lucky to lose him.
Now here’s where I’d normally say El-Sayed is clean as a whistle. He’s not. The man put out a video after someone drove a truck into a synagogue full of schoolchildren in West Bloomfield and said “violence always begets violence,” noting the attacker had lost family in an Israeli airstrike. Jewish constituents in Michigan are scared. A rabbi compared platforming Piker to platforming the Klan. These are real people with real fears, and they deserve more than a candidate who says he’s “focused on who I’m campaigning to.”
Morgan.rice.bassline.design (CC BY 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsBut the establishment doesn’t care about those people either. They care about control. El-Sayed won without them. He won with a streamer who talks to ten million young people they can’t reach and can’t buy. That’s the threat. Not the 9/11 comment, which Piker made in 2019 and has apologized for repeatedly. Not the Mao cosplay. The threat is that someone built a coalition outside the machine’s walls, and the machine can’t stand it.
Kamala Harris endorsed El-Sayed this weekend. Barack Obama hasn’t, but El-Sayed says they’ve talked. Funny how the party elders come around once the votes are counted and the money’s spent. They’ll hold their noses and smile for the cameras because they need the seat, and then they’ll spend the next six years trying to make sure nobody else gets the idea that you can win without them.
The real question isn’t whether El-Sayed should disavow Hasan Piker. The real question is why ten million people would rather listen to a Twitch streamer than any of the people demanding he stop.