A Pro-Israel Congressman Just Became Hasan Piker's Unlikely Defender. The Week Gets Weirder From There.
Rep. Ritchie Torres says the UK ban goes too far. Also, one of Piker's endorsed candidates just lost. Darlings, it's a lot.
The man cannot have a boring week.
Darlings, Rep. Ritchie Torres, one of Congress's most outspoken pro-Israel Democrats, apparently told TMZ DC that the United Kingdom's decision to ban Hasan Piker goes too far. That Ritchie Torres. Defending that Hasan Piker. The same Hasan Piker who, per the known record, told Charlamagne that Israel has no right to exist in its current formation roughly eleven days ago.
The audacity of political irony is truly undefeated.
To be clear, according to the signal, Torres is not endorsing Piker's politics. He is, per the clip, making a free-speech and proportionality argument about the UK entry ban. But the image of it, a Zionist Democrat going to bat for a guy whose Israel commentary set conservative media on fire for two weeks straight, is the kind of thing that short-circuits every tidy narrative anyone has built about who Piker's enemies are supposed to be.
Meanwhile, not everything is going Piker's way on the endorsement front. The Daily Wire is reporting, with considerable glee, that an outspoken pro-Israel incumbent Democrat defeated a Piker-backed primary challenger this week. After the Mamdani win in NYC had everyone calling him a kingmaker, this is a useful reminder that endorsements are not a cheat code. Townhall is already running pieces framing his "price" as going up regardless, because nothing sells a conservative op-ed like treating a Twitch streamer as a Soros-level puppet master.
And if this feels familiar, it's because the cycle is now fully institutionalized: Piker does something, the right declares civilizational collapse, a Democrat quietly thanks him, another Democrat quietly blames him, and Bloomberg writes a profile. Repeat.
Torres's defense will get clipped, decontextualized, and used by both sides before Tuesday. The loss will get amplified by everyone who needs the kingmaker myth punctured. My loves, none of this slows him down. It just adds more people to the story.
We wish Rep. Torres strength in explaining this one at his next AIPAC dinner.
