By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, September 01, 2026
At first blush, it might seem strange that J.D. Vance and
Abdul El-Sayed have zeroed in on each other as foils, given that they’re so
much alike.
But is it so surprising? The nastiest feuds are often
explained by the narcissism of small differences.
The vice president and the Democratic nominee for Senate
in Michigan are both Midwesterners, born less than three months apart in 1984.
Both are published authors with postgraduate degrees from the Ivy League. Both
are ardent populists who believe America is overextended abroad. And both are fans of socialist economics.
One parlayed a Senate seat into a position of national
influence over the direction of his party. The other is hoping to follow suit.
There are differences between the two. For
instance, El-Sayed seems to hold many terrible political beliefs in earnest
whereas Vance cynically glommed onto a terrible belief system circa 2021 to
advance his career. But the parallels are uncanny—including and especially the
fact that both are notoriously chummy with Israel-hating postliberal
provocateurs who enjoy large followings online.
Vance is a friend and protégé of Tucker Carlson, who used
his Fox News megaphone to promote the future vice president during his 2022
Senate run in Ohio. El-Sayed is buddies with far-left streamer Hasan Piker,
enough so to have attended a pool party with him the day before Michigan’s
Democratic Senate primary. Few Republican officials apart from Ted Cruz have had much to say about Vance’s ties to
Carlson, but lots of Democrats have had lots to say lately
about El-Sayed’s relationship with Piker.
Which is partly Piker’s fault.
Late last month El-Sayed was in talks with Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who’s
Jewish, for his endorsement. Then his pal Hasan piped up during a livestream, with an image of Moss
onscreen, that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they
are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around
and take action. Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against
American Jews.”
He delivered this in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone
of concern-trolling (I’m not condoning it, I’m merely predicting it)
that reminded me of Donald Trump warning the Republican Party in 2016 that there would be riots if he were denied the GOP nomination
in a convention floor fight. Then Piker ended his spiel by warning Jewish
Zionists starkly that “you’re making antisemitism worse,” effectively blaming
them in advance for their own victimization.
To quote George Will: Well.
El-Sayed
issued a statement equating his commitment to Jews’ safety with his commitment
to his own family’s safety and clarified that no one unaffiliated with his
campaign speaks for him. That wasn’t good enough for Michigan Rep. Hillary Scholten, though, who told Politico that she
won’t “campaign with someone who continues to associate with Hasan Piker.
Today, Abdul El-Sayed had a prime opportunity to cut ties with Piker and
directly disavow his words, but he did not.”
Video compilations of Piker endorsing
various forms of political violence—including September 11—have begun recirculating on social media, as
have clips of him declaring his
hatred of America. El-Sayed is now being
peppered with questions about Piker every day, throwing him off message.
And not just him: Exasperated by the albatross that’s been hung around their
necks, other Democrats are demanding that the subject be dropped.
“Don’t any reporter ask me again about Hasan Piker,”
Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell declared at an event last week. Obama
veteran turned podcaster Jon
Favreau invited fellow Democrats to “take the Don’t Talk About Hasan Piker
For A Day Challenge,” touting it as a potential first step toward avoiding the
topic for an entire week.
That seems reasonable to me, provided Favreau and others
can answer this question: If now isn’t the right time to talk about Piker, when
is the right time?
Déjà vu.
Observing the Piker freakout as a longtime consumer of
right-wing media is part comedy and part tragedy.
The comedy lies in watching Democratic politicians cope
with what’s traditionally been a Republican ordeal, being pressed by reporters
to react to the latest inflammatory nonsense from some embarrassingly
influential populist media chud. Buttonholing Debbie Dingell to ask what she
thinks of Piker’s takes in 2026 is the near-equivalent of buttonholing
Reaganite congressmen to see what they thought of Glenn Beck’s latest
chalkboard vomit on Fox News circa 2011.
It’s one of many commonalities between the right’s Tea
Party era and the left’s current socialist insurgency. If your party is being
taken over by Jacobins, prepare for many uncomfortable questions about the
crankish and illiberal beliefs those Jacobins might expect you to endorse.
As with Vance and El-Sayed, though, the analogy isn’t
perfect. The difference between Republican congressmen 15 years ago and
Democrats now is that it was El-Sayed himself who injected Piker into
this year’s Senate race. This wasn’t a case of some right-wing reporter setting
out to make Democrats squirm by quizzing them about a random left-wing
streamer. According to Piker, the candidate invited him to campaign in Michigan this year on his behalf.
The “Piker freakout,” in other words, isn’t really a
freakout about Hasan Piker. It’s a freakout about how radical Abdul El-Sayed’s
and the far left’s politics might have become, especially with respect to
Israel, given their affinity for the streamer. Because most Democrats don’t
want to undercut their nominee when he’s in a tight race for a must-win Senate
seat, they’re making Piker the target of their anxiety instead, hoping that
doing so will reassure wary centrists that most of the party is still with
them.
El-Sayed himself has begun grasping for ways to distance
himself from his buddy. He went on Jesse Watters’ Fox News show and tried to
change the subject by arguing with the host about sex changes and circumcision. He’s also borrowed a
page from Vance’s playbook on how to deflect questions about
Carlson by allowing that he
agrees with Piker on some things and disagrees on others, noting that, in
any case, the topic is a distraction from the “real issues.”
And he’s done something the vice president isn’t known
to do, apologizing for an illiberal remark. Both have undertaken lately to repair relations with Jewish constituents, but El-Sayed
took the extra step last week of admitting to a prior mistake when he addressed
a group of Jewish Democrats. Earlier this year a Michigan synagogue was
attacked by a Lebanese man who had lost family in an Israeli incursion in
Lebanon; El-Sayed denounced the crime at the time but noted ominously that
“violence is a cycle” and that “hurt people hurt people.”
That sounded suspiciously like Piker warning American
Jews to prepare to suffer for Israel’s sins, and El-Sayed knew it. “I should
have issued a statement, of course condemning it, and it just should have been
the full stop,” the candidate told his audience last week of the synagogue attack,
regretting that he had affronted “the dignity that that fear and that pain
should have been afforded. … If my statement caused pain, I’m sorry.”
And yet: He still refuses to disavow Piker. Maybe he fears that doing so
would anger the streamer, making him a target of his broadcasts. More likely is
that El-Sayed worries that throwing Piker under the bus would anger
progressives, who might come to see their new senator as weak and feckless for
having caved to media pressure rather than the “fighter” they had imagined him
to be.
Either way, El-Sayed and most other Democrats seem to
agree that if there’s a good time to give Hasan Piker the full “Sister Souljah”
treatment, it surely isn’t in the thick of a nip-and-tuck Senate race. And
that’s the tragic part of this fiasco: As the American right has demonstrated
repeatedly over the last 10 years, realistically there’ll never be a good time.
Flight 93 revisited.
If it isn’t today, which date on the calendar is the
right one for the Democrats to aggressively anathematize Hasan Piker for his
brand of “watch your back, Zionists” postliberalism? The day after El-Sayed
wins election to the Senate, maybe?
Well, no. If he wins, he’ll owe his victory in
substantial part to the far left, particularly for propelling him past Rep.
Haley Stevens in this year’s primary. How could he repay them by immediately
turning around and pronouncing Piker persona non grata?
Why would he even want to? His victory would stand for
the proposition that Democrats don’t need to marginalize Pikerism in order to
win statewide races in key battlegrounds. Picking a needless fight with the
streamer and his sympathizers would amount to fracturing a victorious
Democratic coalition to no apparent end.
Besides, El-Sayed’s vice presidential doppelganger has never
picked a fight with Carlson, and he remains his party’s presumptive
presidential nominee in 2028. J.D. Vance’s viability is proof that
Sister-Souljah-ing is no longer necessary to advance in politics.
What about instead anathematizing Piker next year, after
the new Senate is seated? Maybe progressives will be more tolerant of a
left-versus-left battle once they’re back in power.
But, actually, that’s unlikely too. The last thing
Democrats of any stripe will want once they’re in a position to move
legislation and take on Trump is to get bogged down in ugly intramural
bickering over where, precisely, the line lies between “acceptable”
illiberalism toward Jews and antisemitism. Sen. El-Sayed certainly won’t want
to get caught up in it, as he’ll be focused on building a national profile by
picking fights with Republicans and squishy centrists like John Fetterman.
So, when? When does the urgency of confronting
Piker-esque postliberalism, a conflict that risks fracturing and weakening the
broader left, overtake the urgency of confronting Trumpism, a conflict that
promises to unite it?
The answer is never, and any anti-Trump conservative who
remembers 2016 knows why. There will never be a good time to marginalize Piker
and other Jew-baiting tankies because, for Democrats, every election will be a
“Flight 93 election” until right-wing postliberalism is
vanquished. (Spoiler: It’ll be years, if not decades, before it’s vanquished.)
In a Flight 93 election, when the survival of America as we’ve known it
supposedly turns on the outcome, all moral qualms about an ally’s depravity
must be set aside for the greater good of victory.
Ask Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, who urged
fellow Jewish Democrats at an event last week to support the party this fall despite the grassroots left’s
hostility to Israel. We must be willing to risk “the comfort, safety and
security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the
opportunity to save the rest of humanity” by defeating the right, she told the audience.
It’s a Flight 93 election, you see. Humanity itself is on the line.
Tea Party catastrophism led the right to rationalize
Trump, and rationalizing Trump led to a form of right-wing politics that’s
amoral on a good day and ruthlessly immoral on a bad one. The Overton window on
what it’s acceptable for Republicans to believe has moved accordingly,
particularly among young adults who grew up under postliberalism.
Democrats like Scholten are trying to stop the window on their own side from
moving further than it already has, before Pikerism is fully normalized and
builds the sort of huge grassroots following that, on the right, has made the
Republican establishment a hostage of populist media.
To see how bad things could get, look no further than
J.D. Vance’s pal Tucker. Like the vice president and El-Sayed, Carlson and
Piker have important things in common: Both are chronically and ferociously
morally outraged by Israel and prone to
antisemitic tropes in expressing that outrage, and both are conspicuously not outraged by scumbag authoritarian regimes with
far higher body counts than the Jewish state. (Fun fact: Of the two, Tucker
might be a bigger fan of sharia.) Yet, despite becoming a fierce critic of the most powerful man in the party,
Carlson still wields such immense sway over the “America First” faction that
hardly any Republican officeholder will dare criticize him apart from Trump
himself. He even stands a nonzero chance of being nominated
for president in 2028 by the radicalized American right if Vance were to
stand aside for some reason.
That’s the potential future Democrats are looking at with
Piker or some as-yet-unknown progressive Father Coughlin if a “no enemies to
the left” ethic prevails among their base the way a “no enemies to the right”
ethic has prevailed among the GOP’s. If you think it’s worth resisting that
ethic eventually but not quite yet, fine. When?
Isn’t it better to declare Piker an enemy now, try to win
without him and his fans’ support in Michigan, and prove that the party doesn’t
want or need him by doing so?
Pretending.
I suppose the answer to that question is: It’s already
too late.
What would it mean for El-Sayed to declare Piker a
political enemy at this point? Nothing the latter has said lately about Jews,
Israel, or anything else is wildly out of character; the candidate knew what he
would get when he invited Piker onto the campaign trail and chose to invite him
anyway. To feign horror now, amid a general-election pivot to the center, would
be so transparently expedient that it might do El-Sayed more harm than good.
Bad enough that he’s a chud, but a chud and a liar?
Again, I think that explains why so many other Democrats
are in a tizzy over El-Sayed’s relationship with Piker. This controversy is a
proxy for what sort of demagoguery next-generation leftist politicians should
be willing to condone in the name of resistance to Israel, and it turns out the
party’s bright young star from battleground Michigan is willing to condone
quite a lot. The flak Piker is now taking is aimed at resetting the baseline
for what sort of agitation against the Jewish state is tolerable, and “Zionists
have it coming” in response to terror attacks ain’t it.
One might wonder at this point why Republicans weren’t in
a similar tizzy over Tucker Carlson’s relationship with J.D. Vance and Trump in
2024, but that’s not hard to answer, is it? Partly it’s a function of
desensitization. Once a party has gone morally numb from defending things like
attempted coups and insurrections, there’s only so much outrage left to muster
at a podcaster for babbling about “rootless cosmopolitans” or what have you.
Partly it’s a matter of Piker being more of an outlier
among the sort of media Democratic voters consume than Carlson is among media
that serves Republicans. Liberal politicians might believe they can thwart the
proliferation of postliberal voices on the left by turning Piker into a villain
in the eyes of most of the party. The right is waaaaaaay past that.
Villainizing Tucker wouldn’t dent the demand or supply for the sort of
conspiratorial and adversarial populism that right-wing media has always thrived
on.
Partly it’s a reaction to electoral reality. As a Muslim,
a far-leftist, and a newbie, El-Sayed is a risky nominee who’d have work to do
to win over centrists under the best of circumstances; Piker’s baggage makes it
that much harder for him. Trump, on the other hand, was a supremely known
quantity in 2024 who’d proved his ability to win swing voters once before
despite toting mountains of political baggage of his own.
It’s hard to imagine any voter during that cycle
thinking, “I’m fine with the Republican nominee being a vindictive coup plotter
whose personal behavior is a chronic embarrassment to the country, but his
relationship with Tucker Carlson gives me pause.” It’s not hard to imagine a
voter looking at El-Sayed’s friendship with Piker and filling in some of the
many blanks about him from it.
Finally, if you want to be charitable to Democratic
politicians, they might simply take antisemitic trends within their own party
more seriously than Republicans do—and have good reason to. That’s not just a
matter of the Democratic establishment feeling obliged by the last 10 years to
defend liberalism when it’s besieged on both sides, it’s a matter of there
being less margin for error on the left with regard to animus toward Israel
decaying into animus toward Jews.
Republicans are still a pro-Israel party, after all, however unfortunate
that might seem to the Carlsons of the right. But Democrats are now anti-Israel
on balance, and a party in which hostility to the Jewish state is normal or
encouraged might logically run a higher risk of normalizing hostility toward
Jews as well. That’s precisely why Piker’s comments about Jeremy Moss were so
offensive.
The long and short of it is that a fully postliberal
right is a lost cause when it comes to restraining its worst influences, but a
not yet fully postliberal left might not be—emphasis on yet. A few more
years of “Flight 93” logic should take care of that, though. Why, with any
luck, in 2028 we’ll get the J.D. Vance versus Abdul El-Sayed presidential
election that America deserves.
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