In the latest escalation of the nationwide brain plague that is pundits and politicians’ complete inability to be normal about Hasan Piker, two members of the US House of Representatives, Democrat Josh Gottheimer and Republican Mike Lawler, introduced a bipartisan resolution “condemning the rise of antisemitic, hate-filled rhetoric disseminated by prominent online personalities, including Hasan Piker and Candace Owens, and calling on social media platforms and public leaders to take stronger action against hate.” This doesn’t really do anything, but it sure sends a message about where their priorities lie.
The resolution does its best to decontextualize and equivocate the statements of Piker and Owens, two online personalities with radically opposed beliefs, by cherry picking a greatest hits collection of supposed “gotcha” moments from over the years. For example:
Whereas Hasan Piker, a prominent online streamer, has often used antisemitic rhetoric, including expressing support for Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization;
Whereas, in August 2019, during a stream on Twitch, Hasan Piker stated that ‘‘America deserved 9/11’’;
Whereas Hasan Piker referred to Orthodox Jews as ‘‘inbred’’;
Whereas Hasan Piker downplayed sexual violence committed by Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization, against innocent civilians on October 7, 2023, stating, ‘‘It doesn’t matter if f-ing rapes happened on October 7th, like that doesn’t change the dynamic for me’’;
Whereas Hasan Piker has expressed support for Hamas on multiple occasions, including on April 14, 2026, stating, ‘‘Hamas over Israel every single time’’ and doubling down on claims in multiple media appearances that Hamas is ‘‘a thousand times better than Israel’’;
Whereas Candace Owens has employed rhetoric that has included conspiracy theories accusing Israel of controlling the United States Government, promoting false claims that Jews are taught by ancient religious texts to hate non-Jews, and casting doubt on the truth of the stories of Holocaust survivors;
Whereas, on February 1, 2026, Candace Owens posted on X an antisemitic claim that the United States is controlled by ‘‘satanic pedophiles who work for Israel’’;
Whereas, during a podcast appearance on December 8, 2025, Owens repeated false claims that Jews are killing Christian children as part of religious rituals and that Jewish texts and traditions promote the sexual assault of children, which is an antisemitic trope constituting a blood libel;
Whereas, in July 2024, Candace Owens called the horrific medical experiments committed by Josef Mengele on Jews during the Holocaust ‘‘bizarre propaganda’’, continuing that ‘‘some of the stories, by the way, sound completely absurd’’, downplaying and rejecting the veracity of these crimes;
Whereas, on February 21, 2025, Candace Owens hosted E. Michael Jones, who claimed on her platform that Hollywood ‘‘created the Holocaust narrative’’;
The most crucial issue here is that Owens is an actual antisemitic conspiracy theorist—something you can easily discern based on the timbre of her comments even in the resolution—while Piker merely opposes Israel. The latter is a common sentiment among those on the far left and also in America more generally, especially following October 7 and Israel’s brutal genocide of Palestinians.
The US government’s right and (right-leaning) left, however, consider Israel a close ally and have contributed hundreds of billions of dollars to the West’s favorite destabilizing force in the Middle East, making it “the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II.” With social media opening people’s eyes more widely than ever to the atrocities continued by Israel—and a wildly unpopular war in Iran still fresh on everyone’s minds—Republicans and Democrats have united to lug out the only weapon left in their arsenal: naked suppression of speech.
This after Democrats were aghast at Jimmy Kimmel’s temporary removal from ABC in September 2025 following a joke about Charlie Kirk, a removal that FCC chairman Brendan Carr openly encouraged and applauded. During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in December, Democrats spent hours taking Carr to task for trampling the First Amendment. Republicans have now redoubled their targeting of ABC and efforts to get Kimmel fired following a joke about Trump’s health during a pre-White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner segment.
Despite ostensibly being in favor of the First Amendment, prominent Democrats have repeatedly called for Piker to be punished and even outright censored for speech that criticizes both major US political parties and, of course, Israel. Now Gottheimer joins that chorus.
“Hatred is hatred, period. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from the far right or the far left,” he said today when introducing the resolution. “We cannot be selective in calling out antisemitism. When influential voices spread conspiracy theories, promote terrorism, or dehumanize Jewish people, it fuels real-world violence and intimidation. We must stand up and speak out.”
It is doubly difficult to view Gottheimer and Lawler’s resolution as anything more than laughably disingenuous considering that it was proposed on the same day as numerous events that pose an actual threat to Americans of all stripes, such as the Supreme Court’s latest attack on the Voting Rights Act—a nakedly partisan effort to permanently consolidate power in the hands of the right. The Twitch streamer is definitely the real problem, though.
For his part, Piker believes he knows what all of the furor around him from both Democrats and Republicans is actually about.
"I am the danger. We are the danger. I need them to understand this: We're dangerous to the corporate bottom line. We're dangerous to profit seekers,” Piker said during an interview with Joy Reid today. “That's the only thing that our politicians and many in the media care about right now, so in some respects [Republicans who call my rhetoric 'dangerous'] are correct. … I don't mean divine retribution or punishment of any sort; I mean the worst punishment of all, where they can no longer justify multi-million dollar salaries. I am a danger to those who seek profit and put the interests of profit over the interests of people. And that's precisely the reason why they attack people like myself. Because I'm beholden to no one but my own community. I'm beholden to no one but the American working class, which as Zohran [Mamdani] also says, is the majority in this country."
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Nathan Grayson
