Every Democrat With a Microphone Is Now Weighing In on Hasan Piker, and None of Them Are Happy

Darlings, the pile has become a mountain. Hasan Piker's remarks about Jewish Americans and Israel have now dragged in enough Democratic voices, Republican operatives, and legacy media takes to fill a mid-size convention center, and the consensus, from left to right, is that nobody knows what to do with him except yell.

The most quotable entry came from Congressman Josh Gottheimer, who told CNN, according to the outlet, that Piker should be "put outside and not welcomed into any kind of tent." The tent. Darling, he named the tent. Gottheimer urged every Democrat to cut ties, which is a sentence that is going to appear in a lot of opposition research decks.

On Fox News, former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer reportedly weighed in with his own call for Democratic disavowal, adding one more establishment Republican voice to a chorus that is frankly running out of new notes to hit. Meanwhile, a former Bernie Sanders staffer, per Fox News's coverage, also urged Democrats to sever ties, which means the demand is now bipartisan in the loosest possible sense and intra-left in a way that should alarm the people who thought Piker was building a coalition.

Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Senate candidate who has been Piker's most prominent Democratic association, issued what The Hill described as a distancing, then appended the word "kind of" to that description in their own headline. A kind of distancing. The Washington Examiner reported he is now being slammed from both the right and the left for refusing to staunchly disavow, which is the worst position in politics: too much for the centrists, not enough for the critics. Bloomberg framed it as a pivot toward Michigan centrists. Semafor reported, exclusively, that a Michigan state senator had been in talks to endorse El-Sayed before the Piker flap surfaced. Those talks, the implication is clear, did not survive the news cycle.

Over on CNN, a panel reportedly erupted when Charles Blow pushed back on the right's Piker fury by pointing at Trump and the Epstein files, per AOL's account of the clip, which is the kind of argument that generates a lot of television heat without resolving anything. Ralph Norman, on Fox Business, argued that Democratic attempts to distance themselves from Piker simply "don't work," and he may be correct in the narrow sense that a "kind of" distancing does not register as a full severance.

New York Magazine declared the Michigan mess is not going away. Politico asked how you solve a problem like Piker. Haaretz ran an opinion piece arguing that the fact he is not hiding anything is precisely what makes him dangerous. The Forward noted he is causing particular turbulence in what could be a key Senate race.

My loves, when Politico is asking the Sound of Music question about your streaming career, you have become a political problem with its own gravitational field. The endorsements are evaporating. The tent metaphor is live. And El-Sayed's "kind of" is doing a lot of very heavy lifting.