Debbie Dingell Told Hasan Piker to 'Go Away.' The Opinion Pages Agreed. Nobody Is Actually Stopping Anything.

Debbie Dingell said "Go Away" out loud, on camera, about Hasan Piker. The opinion pages then wrote 500 words each to say the same thing. El-Sayed is still nodding along.

Darlings, the Democratic establishment has officially stopped whispering.

The Michigan congresswoman reportedly savaged Piker for hurting the El-Sayed Senate campaign, per Mediaite. "Go Away!" Not a think-piece. Not a carefully hedged statement of concern. Two words, aimed at a man with roughly four million Twitch followers and a genuinely unshakeable commitment to being the story.

The print consensus has now formed around her. The Grand Haven Tribune called Piker "deadweight" El-Sayed is "failing to shed." A Yahoo opinion column agreed El-Sayed is "making a mistake." The Chronicle of Higher Education, which does not normally weigh in on streamer drama, declared Piker "the latest test of college speech." The Austin American-Statesman published an op-ed arguing UT students should answer his allegedly hateful comments with more speech rather than cancellation attempts.

Here is where this column takes a position: all of this is correct about Piker and almost entirely useless as political strategy.

Every "El-Sayed must disavow" segment on Fox News, every Marc Thiessen appearance noting that El-Sayed has "never disavowed" Piker, every Pritzker dodge, every Dingell clip, every Grand Haven Tribune editorial: Piker posts it, his chat loses their minds, and he gains another thirty thousand concurrent viewers. Martha MacCallum said, per Fox News, that Piker "loves being in the middle of this discussion." She is describing the mechanism precisely.

El-Sayed did not create Hasan Piker. He cannot uncreate him. The structural ask is broken from the start. And if this feels familiar, it is because the UT Democrats already proved that a cancelled event generates better press than a quiet one. "More speech" is correct in principle. It also produces more clips, which produce more segments, which produce more Dingell soundbites, which produce more streams. Around we go.

We wish El-Sayed genuine strength in this particular trap of other people's making.

My loves, when Debbie Dingell and the Chronicle of Higher Education and a Fox panel and a Michigan local paper all agree something is a problem, the something is not panicking. The something is scheduling a stream about it.

He hung the albatross there himself. The audacity of thriving.