MORNING GLORY: Hasan Piker’s radical rhetoric is becoming Democrats’ 2026 brand

At least Marx, Lenin and Mao were well-read.

Social media influencer Hasan Piker wears his Mao jacket and hoses his Twitch audience down with absurd political takes that do not betray any evidence that Rutgers University obliged him to read even a book or two of serious history before he graduated in 2013. Rutgers is a fine school and anyone can get a great education there, but Piker’s "body of work" shows us that serious study there is quite obviously not obligatory.

Piker uses social media to monetize the worst impulses of the extremes in American politics. In the course of doing so, he has become the face of the Democratic Party in the 2026 midterms and has personally carried the most radical major-party candidate in memory — Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed — to his party’s nomination for United States Senate.

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Piker has now gone so "supernova radical" that some Democratic leaders and elected officials have had to rebuke him without naming him — including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Elissa Slotkin — and others, like New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, have slapped Piker down by name.

This past weekend, Piker exploited the assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10 of last year — to the great disgust of the vast majority of Americans who saw the mocking performance as it went viral. The exploitation of the suffering of Charlie’s family, friends and colleagues is despicable, but the need to make himself outrageous and at the center of attention for a deranged circle of followers — and thus contagious online — has overwhelmed any sense of decency in Piker.

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Piker is from the extreme left, and the record is full of his inanities and his outrages. He is best and most infamously known for blurting out years ago that "America deserved 9/11," but as recently as last week, his comments about American Jews endangering themselves because of their support of Israel pushed the alarm buttons for Democrats across the spectrum. What seemed to some to be a warning of a looming Kristallnacht may have finally obliged most Democrats to explicitly exile Piker from their tribe. (One exception though is still El-Sayed, who shimmies from ambiguous statement to ambiguous statement about Piker but won’t disown the radical who is now effectively the Michigan Democrat's running mate.)

After graduating from Rutgers, Piker learned his trade from his uncle Cenk Uygur, co-founder and host of "The Young Turks," a sprawling digital media operation. Piker learned the ropes of the "attention economy" there, then amplified the schtick right on through the land of the "outrage economy" and into what Mary Katharine Ham of the "Getting Hammered" podcast described to her co-host Vic Matus last week as the "personality disorder attention economy."

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That approach to garnering audience, and thus profits, was on display this weekend with Piker’s revolting mocking of grief around Kirk’s murder, a video that will injure every Democrat associated with him, most especially Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrats’ candidate for Senate in Michigan, whom Piker got over the top for the nomination with a closing campaign blitz (and pool party).

Other political figures who will be injured by Piker’s increasingly unhinged antics are Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed candidates for United States Senate, like Chris Pappas in New Hampshire. The DSA-adjacent hard-left Senate candidates among the Democrats — like Troy Jackson in Maine, James Talarico in Texas, and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota — are also getting pulled down by Piker. Piker may never have met or even spoken with or about these candidates, but he has become the new face of the Democratic Party, its new "voice." Piker, like the DSA, is now effectively running with every Democrat in every race.

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The DSA is said to have about 120,000 dues-paying members. It appears to have nearly as many co-chairs, and not one of them can make a coherent argument about anything but their "we hate the Constitution" takes, while their extreme rhetoric has laid an oily film over every Democratic candidate. Piker then dances about the various stages — online and real — tossing matches. Voters notice.

Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer was pressed by Punchbowl News on the Piker- and DSA-led capture of his party’s leadership and momentum and could only lamely reply that "What people don’t understand is that a big tent is a strength, not a weakness. It’s how you build a majority."

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That’s a lot of copium.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune doesn’t have to play that game. He doesn’t have a problem like Schumer’s Piker problem. Voters awake to the Democrats’ double-time march over the left cliff of American politics and into a Marxist fever swamp won’t be fooled by "Medicare for All" slogans.

Voters in Michigan, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Texas, to name just a few Senate races where radicalism will cripple Democratic candidacies, can’t help but notice and be repelled by Piker. Piker lives everywhere these days, and he’s taken over the emerging wing of the Democratic Party. Voters have noticed. And they will remember through November.

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There is a quality of frenzy about Piker that repels moderate Americans who love the country and who exist in both parties and as independents. Piker’s Maoist rants and his long list of transgressive assaults on norms are having a cumulative impact on Democrats because Piker, like the DSA as a whole, is understood to be the future of the Democratic Party, not a fringe figure who can’t break onto stages with candidates.

Piker is estimated to have a cumulative audience of 3 million "Twitch" viewers and another couple million viewers on YouTube. But that’s still an insignificant audience within the American voting public, save for very close races like the Michigan Democratic Senate earlier this month, which Piker delivered for El-Sayed.

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Now Democrats have to ask themselves: "At what cost do we continue to indulge this fanatic with his violent, profane rhetoric and horrible arguments built on slogans and absurd assertions?"

Most voters want a better life for themselves and their families. They don’t want the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution or Mao’s or Castro’s murderous reigns of terror.

Piker is the brand of Democrats in 2026.

We will have to watch to see whether candidates for the party’s nomination for president in 2028 work to scrub that brand away in the months ahead.

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