Hasan Piker will come back to bite Democrats

OPINION:

In his campaigns, President Trump often turned the storyline of a 1968 pop song, “The Snake,” into a cautionary tale about the dangers posed by open borders and allowing in unvetted illegal immigrants, many with ill intent.

Al Wilson’s ballad tells the tale of a naively “tender-hearted woman” who rescues “a poor, half-frozen snake” and nurses it back to health — only to have it betray her kindness with a fatal, poisonous bite.

“I saved you. And you’ve bitten me … and now I’m gonna die,” she wails.

“Oh, shut up, silly woman,” the cold-hearted reptile replies. “Now, you knew darn well I was a snake before you brought me in.”

The story —derived from an Aesop’s fable, “The Farmer and the Viper” — could serve as a metaphor that Democratic candidates would do well to heed. Their embrace of left-wing extremist and social-media influencer Hasan Piker in Democratic Party primaries is likely to come back to bite the party in November.

Mr. Piker is a political viper whose profanity-laced rants are venomous, to say the least.

As such, it’s hard to fathom why prominent leftist Democrats such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont independent, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat and Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed would embrace him and welcome his support.

The following are just a few of the more extreme examples of Mr. Piker’s incendiary language:

• “America deserved 9/11, dude. F—- it. I’m saying it,” the Twitch streamer said on Aug. 21, 2019. He quickly backpedaled, suggesting he had been taken out of context—while still indirectly blaming U.S. foreign policy.
• Speaking fondly of the late Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong, on July 21 Mr. Piker recalled a November 2025 trip to China. “Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world, OK? A man who changed the entire universe, the entire planet,” he said. Never mind that Mao was history’s most prolific mass murderer, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people.
• “The fall of the U.S.S.R. was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century,” Mr. Piker lamented April 15, echoing the sentiment of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.
• Ranting about landlords, Mr. Piker said, “Kill them. Kill those motherf———. Murder those motherf——— in the street. Let the streets soak in their f—-ing red, capitalist blood, dude.” Asked about that on Australian TV last September, he claimed the remark was “hyperbolic” and “not meant to be sincere.” He added, “It’s not real policy that I would ever advocate for.” (Then why did he say it?)
• “We want more immigrants to come into your countries, and then they’re gonna f—- your sisters and then your daughters. We’re here to destroy the White race.”

By comparison to those remarks, his many anti-Israel and pro-Hamas rants are almost temperate.

Asked Aug. 4 on CNN specifically about Mr. Piker’s hateful statement about 9/11 — the 25th anniversary of which is now less than a month away — the worst that Mr. Sanders could bring himself to say was to call it “a dumb statement.”

Dismissing Mr. Piker’s despicable unwillingness to unequivocally condemn a horrific act of Islamist terrorism that killed nearly 3,000 people that day in 2001 as merely “dumb” says as much about Mr. Sanders as it does about him.

Candidates who embrace Mr. Piker and even campaign with him are by default agreeing with his vile rhetoric. Silence equals assent.

In the case of Mr. Piker, 35, imputing guilt by association is a legitimate political attack for the Republican opponents of the Democrats with whom he campaigns.

Although in any sane world it should be, Mr. Piker’s endorsement apparently isn’t a kiss of death in midnight-blue, far-left congressional districts like those in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City and Denver, where socialist upstarts in primaries have ousted entrenched Democratic incumbents. (Apparently the latter weren’t far-enough left for him.)

In purple swing states, however, association with Mr. Piker is very likely to be political poison, which clown-car Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong discovered the hard way in the Aug. 11 primary. (The Democrats’ “big tent” apparently wasn’t big enough to include Ms. Hong.)

When Mr. El-Sayed and Mr. Piker appeared together at a campaign event on April 7, a reporter asked the would-be senator if there were “any views that Hasan holds that you disavow.”

The Michigander demurred, saying he was there to discuss his own views, not Mr. Piker’s.

But the two options aren’t a zero-sum game or mutually exclusive. Mr. El-Sayed could both disavow the influencer’s extremist views and still discuss his own positions on the issues.

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in Michigan, would be committing campaign malpractice if he doesn’t hang Mr. Piker like a political albatross — or viper — around the neck of Mr. El-Sayed at every turn between now and Nov. 3.

Indeed, every GOP candidate should make Mr. Piker an issue this fall, whether their Democratic opponent embraces him or not.

• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.