Michigan Democrats’ Attempted Denial Is Telling

Democrats’ attempted denial that Michigan’s Senate race is about Hasan Piker is more telling than intended. What it tells Michigan is that one party chooses political expediency over moral necessity. It also tells America how silence permits evil to grow.

It is worth quickly recapping just how extreme Twitch streamer Hasan Piker is. He has dismissed Hamas’s October 7 atrocities and supports Hamas (“a thousand times better” than Israel and “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time”). He supports Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Chinese Communist Party. He is routinely antisemitic, anti-women (trivializing the rape of Israeli women by Hamas), and anti-American (“America deserved 9/11”). He is a self-proclaimed socialist.

Piker is everything negative that most Americans deplore but seemingly everything that America’s Left now adore.

Michigan Democrats’ Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed made use of Piker in his recent Senate primary campaign. Now, in his general election campaign, where a non-Left audience dominates and Piker is rightly a liability, El-Sayed and other Democrats are insisting that this campaign is not about Piker.

Nice try, but a spectacular “fail.” It is also an even more telling one.

First, elections are about what the electorate determines them to be about. This is the reason we have them. Voters are choosing who should represent them on the important issues of the day. For a candidate to tell the electorate what an election is about is presumptuous in the extreme.  And it is telling regarding the candidate’s view of the role he seeks: He is presuming to lead them not represent them; he is, because his views are not representative of them.

Piker’s vile ideas are certainly relevant to Michigan, as well as to America as a whole. These have no place in decent society and did not have a place in American society until recently.  Antisemitism was something that existed elsewhere. Socialism was something that existed elsewhere. Hatred of America was something that existed elsewhere. We knew they existed, but they didn’t exist here, so we could dismiss their importance. No longer.

Now thanks to America’s Left, they do exist here. And now thanks to the Democratic Party’s dependence on the Left, they exist in American politics. That one of America’s two major political parties could associate itself in any form or fashion with Piker’s ideas is very important. That the Democratic Party should take the course of denying Piker’s relevance, rather than unequivocally disassociating itself from Piker, is also telling.

The simplest solutions to most problems are the most direct ones. In regard to Democrats’ problem with Piker, the direct route would be to directly renounce him and all his ideas. Then they would be done and could move on. Instead, they have chosen the roundabout way of seeking to deny Piker’s relevance to the campaign in Michigan.

The reason is that Democrats need the Left, because they increasingly are the Left. They are no longer their former coalition of ideological positions that was cemented into a legacy by the New Deal and survived for decades thereafter.

The Left on which Democrats now depend has for some time been descending into antisemitism, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and any number of “anti’s” you care to name.

Democrats’ silence to this descent has encouraged it. Even more important, their silence has validated this descent. By not denouncing, they are giving it entry into America’s political system.

In response to this extremism’s threat to their party and our country, Democrats have chosen the tactic of denying the obvious. Of saying, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Of gaslighting. Of hiding behind an accusation of Islamophobia.

By doing so, they are avoiding their moral responsibility for the sake of political necessity. It is nothing less than cowardice. They are afraid of alienating voters, people who are moving to their ranks because these people find their approach met only with silence, not a rebuke. In their cowardice, Democrats therefore bear a responsibility for the rise of Piker and all that he embodies and embraces.

Yes, this election is about Piker if the electorate decides that it should be. And yes, the electorate should decide that Piker is relevant to it, because Piker is a vile, unrepentant, and El-Sayed is as well, so long as he fails to simply and completely renounce Piker. It is long overdue that Americans should have a conversation of the evil being spewed forth from the Left. And it is long overdue that elections should be about Piker and all the hatred he stands for until his evil is driven back under the rock from which it crawled.

J.T. Young is the author of the recent book "Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left" from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.

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