Hasan Piker Did UT Austin. Now a Los Angeles Mayor Is Defending Him to Jewish Voters. Also Jesse Watters Said 'Here Kitty Kitty.'

Jesse Watters cooed "here kitty kitty" at what Advocate.com describes as an image of Hasan Piker in a maid outfit and cat ears, live on Fox News primetime. The audacity of conservative media to make Piker look like the weird one in this scenario is, frankly, a journey. And yet here we are.

Darlings, a lot happened while you were sleeping. Pull up a chair.

Texas Actually Happened

The UT Austin event, which has been threatened, venue-swapped, condemned by state legislators, and breathlessly tracked by Fox News under the headline "University of Texas Braces for Hasan Piker," occurred. Per Fox News and the Daily Texan, Piker spoke to students about free speech and the future of the Democratic and Socialist parties in Texas, following what the Daily Texan describes as significant backlash from Texas lawmakers. The bracing, apparently, was not sufficient to stop anything.

The Daily Texan covered it as a campus political event. Fox News covered it as a menace. Both of them covered it, which is the part Piker's camp presumably cares about.

And if this feels familiar, it is because Cornell sold out, generated a lawsuit and a Jesse Watters field trip, and handed Piker a week of national press. UT had the venue drama, the Republican outrage cycle, the silence from Texas Democrats who apparently decided that saying absolutely nothing was a safer play. The tour keeps touring. Remarkable, genuinely.

Per Houston Public Media, the event was scheduled for Wednesday. Per Fox News, it happened and Piker spoke to students. Per the Texas Democrats, no comment. Keep receipts on that silence, because Texas is a state those folks theoretically want to compete in someday.

The Los Angeles Mayor's Race Now Has a Piker Problem

Here is a sentence that would have sounded like satire eight months ago: a major Los Angeles mayoral candidate spent part of her week defending her decision to meet with a Twitch streamer, to Jewish voters, at a Jewish Federation forum, on the record.

Per USA Today and the LA Times, Nithya Raman appeared alongside incumbent Karen Bass at a Jewish Angelenos mayoral forum. Raman defended her association with Piker, according to coverage. The Times of Israel framed its piece as: "Leftist LA mayoral candidate defends genocide charge, Hasan Piker meeting in Jewish forum." Bass and Raman reportedly split on whether the word "genocide" applies to Gaza. Piker's name came up in the room. A moment.

This is not a minor footnote. LA mayoral races involve serious money, serious community organizing, and serious attention from Jewish institutional voters who showed up specifically to ask these questions. Raman having to answer for a Twitch streamer at a Jewish Federation event is precisely the downstream consequence that the Matsui campaign was gesturing at when it publicly attacked Mai Vang over a planned Piker fundraiser, which we covered last week. That was a Sacramento House race. This is the second-largest city in the country.

The California down-ballot situation is now a map. Vang in Sacramento, Raman in Los Angeles. The Piker association has become a question candidates have to prepare answers for, whether they want it or not. We love growth, but this particular kind is more of a weed.

Kittygate and the Op-Ed That Stings More

Back to Watters.

Per Advocate.com, the Fox News host cooed "here kitty kitty" at the screen while apparently displaying the image in question. Per a thread on r/LivestreamFail submitted by a user called Hasansnumber1fan, Piker addressed "kittygate" on stream. The specifics of his response are not detailed in the coverage we can cite, but the community appeared to find it satisfying. Piker's relationship with conservative media mockery has historically followed a predictable arc: Fox does a bit, Piker clips the bit, his audience laughs, the clip circulates, more people learn his name. Darling that is not a counter-programming strategy, that is free advertising.

The more pointed challenge this week came not from Watters but from The National News, which published a piece arguing that Piker's politics risk setting Arab and Muslim Americans back. That framing, coming from a source his audience cannot dismiss as Fox-adjacent, is a different kind of pressure than cat-ear mockery. It is the critique that actually requires a substantive answer, and it is the one least likely to generate a satisfying clip.

Piker has, in the span of a week, spoken at a major university over the objections of state Republicans, become a named factor in a Los Angeles mayoral debate, and had his fashion choices discussed on national television by a man who took a field trip to Cornell to cover him. My loves, the Guardian reported last week that most Americans still do not know who he is. Imagine what happens when they find out.