NY Times Tries Normalizing Hasan Piker the Same Week He Reiterates Support for Hamas

NY Times Tries Normalizing Hasan Piker the Same Week He Reiterates Support for Hamas

Sadly but not surprisingly, radical leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker is emerging as the man of the moment for the uber-woke, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, as Legal Insurrection‘s Mike LaChance covered earlier.

Piker, who once said America “deserved 9/11,” is now a featured guest speaker at political rallies for Democratic candidates for public office, including antisemitic Senate contender Abdul El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-backed Democrat who the NRSC has dubbed the “Michigan Mamdani.” It’s rather fitting considering Zohran Mamdani infamously broke bread and shared laughs with Piker during his 2025 NYC mayoral campaign.

Zohran Mamdani refuses to condemn his friend Hassan Piker who blamed America for 9/11 & calls for viewers to kill conservatives. https://t.co/HfuYleohIC pic.twitter.com/1kAnyBwzTl

— Izengabe (@Izengabe_) September 12, 2025

Piker is an unapologetic supporter of Hamas and an unabashed hater of Israel. On top of that, he’s notorious for advocating for the killing of people or groups he doesn’t like, as noted above. There are also statements like this, which are apparently okay in the eyes of Squad members like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and their political followers:

Democrat spokesperson Hasan Piker unleashes profanities against a Vietnamese refugee who escaped communism:

"Shut the f*ck up you stupid f*cking idiotic old lady…Suck my dick." pic.twitter.com/QaJ5tsIrk6

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) April 8, 2026

Hasan Piker – nephew of @cenkuygur – who said “America deserved 9/11,” is now streaming with Squad member @IlhanMN … after appearing alongside @RashidaTlaib and @AbdulElSayed .

Show me your friends, and I’ll tell you who you are. pic.twitter.com/JYfAVRh7ij

— Stella Escobedo (@StellaEscoTV) April 11, 2026

With all of that in mind, we turn to the New York Times, which again joined the “Normalize Hasan Piker” brigade on the left by featuring an opinion piece this week from columnist Ezra Klein, a Jewish leftist who tried to argue that, yeah, Piker has said some repugnant things, but the left should still be having conversations with him. And, oh yeah, Piker’s not antisemitic, he’s merely “anti-Zionist,” according to Klein, a common gaslighting tactic we hear from supposedly enlightened Democrats while trying to defend the indefensible:

He has also said: “From pogroms to the Holocaust, Jews have always been singled out by those in power as a scapegoat for the instability and economic volatility that people in power caused. A resilient, nascent antisemitism is a constant threat.” He has called antisemitism “gross,” “immoral” and “a hate crime.” He has promoted Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia who is Jewish, as a 2028 presidential possibility. In previous presidential primaries, Piker supported Bernie Sanders, who is also Jewish. It is an unusual form of Jew hatred that calls out antisemitism and promotes Jewish Americans for the presidency.

Left out of Klein’s piece, of course, were arguments and quotes from Piker that were inconvenient to the point he was trying to sell about himself.  Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) explained just some of the many examples of Piker’s antisemitism in a scathing letter to Amazon and Twitch a year after the 10/7 terrorist attacks:

Hasan Piker has emerged as the poster child for the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism in America. Mr. Piker has demonized Orthodox Jews as “inbred” and has dehumanized a Jewish man as a “bloodthirsty pig dog”: the association of Jews with pigs and blood-thirst is textbook antisemitism. Mr. Piker has all but exposed himself as an apologist for the sexual violence and savage rapes of October 7th. “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me,” Mr. Piker declares before finally admitting that “Palestinian resistance” (his euphemism for terrorism) is not perfect.”

Mr. Piker has said he has “no issue” with Hezbollah, the world’s the most heavily armed terrorist organization in the world, and has given a platform to a suspected terrorist from the Houthis. The US government has declared Hezbollah a Foreign Terrorist Organization (in the case of the former) and the Houthis a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group. Platforming any of these terrorist organizations, as Piker has done, is beyond the pale. Piker has even gone as far as to incite violence, telling his followers to “kill” and “murder” people “in the streets” and “let the streets soak in their red-capitalist blood.” The incitement of violence merits scrutiny from federal law enforcement.

And just this week, in a sit-down interview with the Obama bros on the Pod Save America podcast, Piker reiterated his support for Hamas over Israel:

“I mean, it’s all of the above. I do mean it,” Piker responded. “I’m a lesser-evil voter and therefore I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.” He described Hamas as a “paramilitary organization that has like a political party as well, a politburo as well, that is entirely comprised, not as an alien force, but of orphan children that have had their parents killed by an apartheid state that has been dominating the lives of Palestinians for 80 years at this point.”

Watch:

When given the opportunity to walk back his remarks saying Hamas is better than Israel, Hasan Piker doubled down. There are lots of acceptable viewpoints on Israel. Endorsing the perpetrators who killed the most Jews in a single day since the Holocaust isn't one of them. pic.twitter.com/1O0MfoJ4hi

— Ethan Wolf 🇺🇸 (@ethanmwolf) April 13, 2026

Because of the backlash they received, Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau lovingly amplified Klein’s opinion piece while continuing to portray his interview with Piker as a “just having a conversation” kind of thing:

It’s also why having conversations with people like @hasanthehun, as I did for today’s @PodSaveAmerica, is not really a hard call for me. Anyway, check out Ezra’s full piece: https://t.co/Fx36E1q7AL

— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) April 12, 2026

Not long after that clip made it to social media, however, a funny thing happened to the headline on Klein’s piece:

1) Pod Save America gives Hasan Piker softball opportunity to say he can't actually *mean* it when he says Hamas is "1,000x better" than Israel

2) Piker declines opportunity: "I mean it"

3) Headline of Ezra Klein's NYT op-ed, "Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy," mysteriously changes pic.twitter.com/dbdWtHzZWz

— Oren Kessler (@OrenKessler) April 14, 2026

I could not love this more. The Obama Bro tries so freaking hard to sanitize Piker's love of terrorists, only to have it revealed that Piker is exactly who the Right says he is. The absolute state of the Democratic Party in one glorious 20-second clip. https://t.co/tK73dgQWCi

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) April 13, 2026

What David said. And as someone who’s been paying attention to Klein for 20 or so years, you have to ask… does he really believe in anything? https://t.co/CIclrtR207

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) April 14, 2026

Call me crazy, I think Noam Chomsky being replaced with Hasan Piker is bad for the long-term intellectual prospects of the American left.

— Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) April 13, 2026

Yeah. I mean, we’ve gone from leftists accusing the right of all kinds of vile things simply because a Republican might have appeared in the same room as someone who has morally repugnant views, to now saying it’s okay to treat flamethrowers like Piker as valued contributors to the public discourse, who we should hear out.

That argument, however, only works when one is reasonably assured that the person on the other side of the microphone doesn’t want the people with whom he disagrees dead.

– Stacey Matthews has also written under the  pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via X. –

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