I have a question about the critical Michigan Senate race: Are centrist Democratic officials and pundits going to spend the next 60 days loudly making the Republican Party’s arguments for them?
The last week has seen a meltdown over Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee. The controversy involves the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who is not an elected official, or a candidate for anything, or a member of El-Sayed’s campaign, but did appear with him during the primary at a few events. Piker made some comments on a Twitch stream (more on that in a moment) that provided a convenient pretext for Republicans to whip up a frenzy of anti-Muslim bigotry and smear El-Sayed by association. Most Democrats did not join in, but many did, including some in leadership positions.
It should come as no surprise that Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, has much worse associations, first and foremost his doglike attachment to Donald Trump, which affects actual policy like what Rogers would do about his deranged trade war with Canada in a state whose economy is more intertwined with Canada than any other. But this is going totally uncovered.
It’s not ideal.
To grasp what is going on here, it is useful to start by breaking down Piker’s relevant comments in detail (which can be heard starting at about 1:54 in this recording). In response to a viewer who identified themselves as a Jewish member of a Reform synagogue and mentioned how hard it was to get his community to reconsider their position on Israel, Piker argued that dogmatic advocacy for Israel is dangerous for American Jews:
“For the anti-Zionist Jews in my community, you have a very tough job ahead of you. You have to go back to your communities and try to get your elderly relatives to understand that this connection between Israel and Zionism that is expressed over and over again through a lot of these Jewish institutions … is a very dangerous mode of propaganda … If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action. Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews … Every single time you have prominent Zionist Jews come out and be like ‘No, this is antisemitic, to oppose Israel is antisemitic,’ you’re teaching people the trope of dual loyalty.”
Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, has much worse associations, first and foremost his doglike attachment to Donald Trump.
Granting a little interpretive charity for a guy making somewhat muddled comments off the cuff, the argument is clear enough. Zionists who insist that criticizing Israel is antisemitic are themselves advancing an antisemitic trope, namely that of dual loyalty, and thereby helping erode the taboo against antisemitism. If American Jews are identified (wrongly) with the Israeli government, Piker contends, that raises the risk someone will come to believe that attacking them is a way to punish Israel for its many heinous crimes. This is a fairly common strain of argument. Ezra Klein, not exactly some fire-breathing radical, said almost the exact same thing on his New York Times podcast the other day.
Now, one might respond that this is an inaccurate or inappropriate thing for Piker to say, but his critics are not doing that. They are misconstruing his words so they can accuse him of blaming all Jews for antisemitic violence, and holding El-Sayed responsible for that caricature. “Claims that American Jews are responsible for the violence being committed against their communities are unacceptable and cannot be tolerated,” posted Rep. Susie Lee (D-NV). Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI), who still refuses to endorse El-Sayed at time of writing because of Piker, said that Piker is “a hack who thrives on hate.”
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) went much, much further. He joined Fox News and accused Piker of putting out “an open call for violence against Jewish Americans … this is right out of the Nazi playbook.” Gottheimer added that El-Sayed’s clarification that Piker does not speak for him is “pathetic.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries made a similar implication. “There is zero justification for threats against the safety of our Jewish brothers and sisters at a moment of rising hate,” he posted.
Others are just flinging frenzied accusations in general. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) posted: “Why is anyone platforming a man who advocated raping little girls? No wonder he rejoiced on October 7 when Hamas followed his advice.” (Piker defenders say various comments of his about October 7 were ripped out of context.) Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress (the Democrats’ de facto in-house think tank), directly compared Piker to Osama bin Laden as an explanation for why Piker had not been asked for comment in any of the dozens of cable news segments all but calling him an antisemitic jihadist. (She later deleted the tweet when it turned out bin Laden had been interviewed, many times.)
It is perhaps indicative of how honest this discussion is that much of it took place on Fox News or on Twitter/X, the website owned by a Nazi salute–throwing, Jews-are-doing-the-Great Replacement guy.
Piker streams many hours a day, and like his radio shock jock predecessors of old, has said many outrageous and offensive things over the years. Even he has disavowed some of them. But in this instance, he’s being unambiguously smeared.
Why are centrist Democrats doing this? It’s not that hard to discern: bigotry, specifically Islamophobia. Piker (like El-Sayed, notably) is a large, strong, outspoken Muslim man, and after 9/11, a large swath of Americans blamed all Muslims everywhere—and especially big, assertive men—for the attacks. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman infamously explained the invasion of Iraq as collective punishment of the entire Middle East for 9/11: “We could have hit Saudi Arabia … we could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.” Almost a decade after the attacks, a proposal to build an Islamic cultural center to promote interfaith dialogue near the World Trade Center site (caricatured by opponents as the “Ground Zero Mosque”) touched off such a frenzy of anti-Muslim hate that the developers eventually gave up.
To this day, mainstream journalists are granting sympathetic interviews to gutter racists who are upset that Zohran Mamdani—the sitting mayor of New York City, I must emphasize, who was ten years old on 9/11—will be present at the annual commemoration of the attacks. “This guy, I think, is just an in-your-face type of guy that … enjoys this kind of controversy,” Robert Hughes, a retired Long Island resident who lost his son in the attacks, told CNN’s Gloria Pazmino. “Just the thought of him there rubs me the wrong way.” I’ll bet it does!
Incidentally, this is one reason why the centrist dogpile on El-Sayed is so strategically disastrous. These Democratic attacks give reporters permission to jump in with both feet with their own Islamophobic remarks. If it’s just Republicans doing it, then that’s one-sided and therefore not Objective Journalism, but if Democrats are attacking each other that gives permission for people like Wolf Blitzer to take sides.
In any case, Republicans have a time-tested strategy for when one of their candidates has some noxious association: ignore it, deflect the question, and change the subject. Sure enough, as Mehdi Hasan points out at The Guardian, Mike Rogers is closely associated with Lorenzo Sewell, a flagrantly bigoted evangelical pastor—he’s called Islam a “death cult” and accused El-Sayed of being an “Islamic jihadist”—and Sewell actually is a member of Rogers’s campaign. Sewell also organized a recent anti-Muslim hate rally with Jake Lang—who was charged with assaulting police officers during January 6th and later pardoned by Trump—at which neo-Nazis were present, KKK literature was distributed, and police made 22 arrests. This has gotten approximately 0.1 percent of the attention that Piker’s comments have, in part because the Piker controversy is sucking up all the media oxygen.
The usual bargain of primaries is that the various party factions will fight it out, and then keep their mouths shut about intraparty criticism until the general election. The El-Sayed race began that way when his opponent Haley Stevens, who lost only narrowly, made a full-throated endorsement. If Gottheimer, Jeffries, and company can’t manage this much—to the point of risking the party’s Senate majority in 2027—then they ought to find another line of work.
