GOP Boogeyman. LDS Ally. Trump Foil. The Internet Cannot Decide What Hasan Piker Is Today.

Darlings, it is October 6 and the Hasan Piker discourse has fractured into at least four distinct and contradictory realities before noon. Slate is calling him a manufactured boogeyman. A Mormon newspaper is calling him a fellow traveler on gambling. A Zeteo writer would like everyone to please look at Donald Trump instead.

Slate's "Meet the GOP Boogeymen" piece, out today, frames Piker's Republican-villain status as a deliberate political strategy rather than an organic cultural panic. The argument, per the piece: the GOP needs faces to run against, and Piker's face is available and useful. Convenient for everyone, really.

Fox News, running its own separate timeline, published a report on Maya Regev, an October 7 survivor, pushing back against Piker in the wake of his UT Austin appearance, according to the outlet. Fox has now extracted several additional news cycles from a campus event that drew 300 people to a 2,400-person RSVP list, and if this feels familiar, it is because the network has been running this particular play since September.

Then there is the Salt Lake Tribune, which published a piece noting that Piker was among the many voices publicly praising an LDS Church leader's sermon against gambling, per the paper. A socialist Twitch streamer and a leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, finding common ground. We are not going to pretend this is not the best sentence of the week.

Zeteo published a piece headlined "Forget Hasan Piker, Donald Trump Is America's Worst Campaign Surrogate," which argues, per the outlet, that the obsessive focus on Piker as a Democratic liability has functionally let Trump's own campaign damage go unexamined. A case could be made. Whether anyone making Piker content for their newsletter right now wants to hear it is a separate question.

TheWrap covered Piker weighing in on the Ms. Rachel controversy, defending the children's entertainer after Fox News issued parental warnings about her content, according to the outlet. Piker, who was already Tomi Lahren's Ms. Rachel comparison point this week, apparently decided to lean into it.

And Fox News quoted a former Biden press office advisor calling El-Sayed's Piker association a "continuous threat" to the Michigan Senate candidate's electability, per the outlet. El-Sayed has now distanced himself from Piker on at least two separate occasions on record. A Democrat explaining this on Fox News is, my loves, a journey.

He will have opinions about something else by sundown. Keep receipts.