cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/74519
A growing number of establishment Democrats are facing backlash from progressives for their escalating attacks on leftist streamer Hasan Piker, with critics accusing the party’s corporatist wing of obsessing over an online influencer while ignoring the economic and foreign policy grievances driving millions of voters away on the eve of the critical midterm elections.
The latest controversy erupted after Piker argued during an online broadcast that Jewish Americans’ public support for Israel could contribute to antisemitism. Piker’s comments drew swift condemnation from prominent Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY), who, without naming Piker, called them “dangerous and antisemitic.”
Other Democrats piled on, prompting rebuke from progressives, who accused the centrists of caring more about an online personality than winning back control of Congress in November.
Former progressive Michigan congressional candidate Kyle Blomquist called it an “absolute mass psychosis event.”
“Too many demotivated Democrats stayed home in 2016 and 2024. We can’t repeat past mistakes,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said on social media.
Khanna implored Democrats to stop calling Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who is Jewish—an antisemite and “stop wasting time attacking Hasan Piker instead of [President Donald] pTrump’s robber-baron corruption.”
“Don’t put Israel hawks out of touch with our voters in charge of our Middle East policy,” he added. “It is time for a reckoning: Are we a party that represents corporate interests and super PACs, or will we represent the American people?”
According to Track AIPAC, pro-Israel Democrats have taken tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from pro-Israel lobby groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s United Democracy Project.
Khanna’s comments came a day after Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the leading Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced the appointment of Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) as ranking member of the Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee. Moskowitz, who said earlier this year that he is “to the right” of Vice President JD Vance in his support of Trump’s illegal US-Israeli war of choice on Iran, is one of the strongest supporters of Israel in Congress.
This, at a time when three-quarters of Democratic voters oppose US aid to Israel—up from just 45% three years ago—and after the issue was a factor in former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
A majority of Democratic voters also believe that Israel’s US-backed war on Gaza is a genocide, a position also held by United Nations experts, around 20 countries that joined South Africa’s ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice, human rights groups, and scholars around the world—including in Israel.
Jasper Nathaniel, a US journalist known for his coverage of Israel’s illegal occupation, settler colonization, and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, posted on X: “The entire bipartisan political establishment has coalesced around a willful misreading of what Hasan Piker said in order to silence criticism of Israel. They’re doing the same thing to Mark Ruffalo in Hollywood. It’s all fucking gaslighting. Don’t give an inch.”
“What Hasan said is completely intuitive. Everyone knows that Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—and the Jewish institutions’ blanket support for it—has created more hostility towards Jews,” he added. “There is no good-faith argument against this.”
Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic asserted Wednesday that “centrists despise Hasan Piker more than they want to win.”
“It’s an extreme stretch to describe Piker’s remarks as an incitement of or justification for violence and bigotry against Jews,” he continued. “The basic point he’s making—that the tendency by pro-Israel voices to conflate Jewishness with lockstep support for Israel makes Jews less safe—has been made by a number of Jewish voices, including Ezra Klein at The New York Times, David Klion at The Nation, Norman Solomon at The Guardian, union organizer Molly Kraft, and Hannah Arendt nearly 80 years ago.”
The dispute has now ensnared Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who campaigned alongside Piker during his successful Democratic primary bid. El-Sayed has somewhat distanced himself from Piker’s comments, emphasizing that the campaign represents his own views and condemning antisemitism. It hasn’t placated establishment Democrats.
Some Democrats have implored their party to keep its eyes on the proverbial prize—winning back Congress—instead of engaging in senseless internecine battles.
“Billionaires are draining our resources to develop a technology they want to replace us, millions will lose Medicaid in the new year to pay for tax cuts for the rich, and we’re spending billions on genocidal wars the voters oppose,” said Melat Kiros, the progressive Democratic nominee for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. “But sure, let’s keep talking about Hasan Piker.”
It’s not just Democratic Socialists of America-type progressives who get it. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) admonished reporters during a Wednesday campaign rally for El-Sayed at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
.@RepDebDingell (D-MI) says Hasan Piker is “not what November is about,” and that Republicans are trying to divide Democrats over it: “I’m still trying to figure out is it the reason he exercises and looks buff why he has so many followers?” pic.twitter.com/zZLTCHHbTy
— CSPAN (@cspan) August 26, 2026“Don’t any reporter ask me again about Hasan Piker,” she said angrily. “It’s not what November is about.”
“Republicans are… trying to divide us,” she continued. “And we’ve got to stop letting them try to divide us.”
Weighing in on corporate Democrats’ attacks on Piker from across the Atlantic, British writer and activist Owen Jones said Wednesday that “the Democratic establishment know they’ve lost their base. These smears are driven by panic.”
“The bottom line about what’s happening here is this: The American people have turned against Israel in revulsion at the genocide and want to stop facilitating its crimes. That opposition is overwhelming among the Democratic rank-and-file,” he continued.
“But the Democratic Party establishment remains invested in the alliance with Israel—and they fear being swept aside by pro-Palestinian left-wing candidates in upcoming primaries,” Jones asserted, adding that centrists “would prefer to lose to the Republicans than win with the left. They would prefer to keep facilitating Israel’s genocide and heinous crimes rather than win.”
“That’s what we are dealing with here,” he added. “And if it means destroying US democracy to defend Israel—that’s a price they’re willing to pay.”
Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sanders, expressed a similar sentiment on social media.
“You’ve never seen corporate Democrats fighting as hard and as on message against Trump as they are against Hasan right now,” he said. “It’s insane.”
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
I would genuinely say it still is, America is still a slave state despite having abolished chattel slavery in 1865 on paper, on paper all people have equal rights in America and indigenous have special reservations as well but its ideology and its conduct both are still driven by the settler colonial project. Same for other colonial states like France and Britain, they need to be fully uprooted to even begin approaching actual historical justice imo.
The person you are replying to said “genuinely” and it kind of looks like you are begging the question here.
Any real right can only be on paper imo, I don’t think you can ever really achieve equality of people with genuinely equal civil rights which are enforced equally as well if one people group’s way of life is not accepted equally. If America stopped racist policing today and made reservations system actually good even then it would still be a settler colonial state because the logic of its existence hasn’t changed, similarly for a state like Isn’treal, its logic for existence is inherently colonial and thus its governance and civics structure is made for said thing. No matter how much you give the right to people to live the way they choose to, they can’t live that way so long as there’s a structure that wants to impose a different life style on the land you live on.
Can you give me a definition of “structure” here?
You are still question begging. “Rights existing only on paper exist only on paper”
Structure will be the socio-economic order of any place. I don’t think I am begging the question there because I directly addressed actual rights existing, civics rights of safety, for example, being in place and practiced however any number equal legal rights or civics rights can ever fill the gap between the incompatiblity of the life a settler nation wants to impose and the life the indigenous of the land on which the nation has been imposed lived.
You are begging the question because you are assuming that when they said “genuinely equal rights” they only meant that such rights would nominally be written into the law, with no concern for all of these other factors which would be necessary for their rights to be genuinely equal. You are taking as an assumption that they meant something other than they actually said, and that what they meant was basically that symbolic declarations are enough. At least since I first replied, you have not demonstrated that that is what they meant.
Which is why I said ‘imo’ because I don’t see any right now matter how well enforced solving the contradiction of the settler question because both the economic system depends on depletion of land and culture depends on separating people from the land they live on. That problem of settler colonialism can’t be solved by equal rights, like how now matter how much you try you can’t have queer rights under capitalism because it requires gender binary to exist, no matter how good faith someone is, these are inherent contradiction of these systems.
But did they ever say we just write in a law “all ethnicities and religions are equal btw” and don’t address land seizures or anything else? This is an assumption that many times in a row you are just making about what “genuine equal rights” means, assuming it means “nominal equal rights” instead of considering the possibility that it includes these things. It’s question begging.
Then it’s difference of foundational belief, I don’t think you can have anything approaching that kind of justice in a capitalist economy let alone in a reformed settler state, not in the European system of state craft that exists right now at least. Then it’s no use arguing over.
right on paper isn’t genuinely equal rights. An equal “america” would have to not be white supremacist (just to begin with) and barring some weird scifi shit i don’t think it would still be “america” if it gets there.
Yes I think so too