Hasan Piker Found His Best Talking Point Yet. Fox News Built It for Him.

Fox News just handed Hasan Piker a gift, and he is not putting it down.

Per TheWrap, Piker went after the network this week for its habit of insisting Donald Trump is always, perpetually, cosmically misunderstood, pointing out, accurately, that this same panel has spent months treating his own remarks as open-and-shut proof of radicalism. His words, per the clip: "This same panel has done this to me." Darlings, that is not a bad line. That is, frankly, a great line.

And if this feels familiar, it's because the 9/11 comment has been the anchor around Piker's neck since before the UT Austin tour even got off the ground. But per the Washington Examiner, Piker is now arguing his old remark is "far less damaging" than Trump's recent comments about "taking out" Los Angeles and San Diego. Whether you find that comparison convincing or opportunistic, the mechanics of it are undeniable: he is no longer just absorbing the hit. He is throwing it back.

A journey.

Meanwhile, a fact-check that surfaced this week found that a viral video did NOT show Senator Katie Britt saying she believes "America deserved 9/11." According to the fact-checkers, she was reading someone else's words, not her own. Whose words were those? Take a wild guess. So the quote has now traveled far enough that a U.S. Senator is getting fact-checked for allegedly saying it. Keep receipts, because the lifecycle of this particular comment has become its own separate media event.

The audacity of the whole situation is that Fox News built the double-standard argument in real time, on camera, and Piker had the clips. You cannot claim the "context matters" defense for one guy and then spend a year insisting context is irrelevant for another. The internet remembers. Piker certainly does.

We wish Fox News strength in this trying time of their own making, my loves.

Piker has been a punching bag, a boogeyman, a Vanity Fair honoree, and a campus tour act, all in the same news cycle. Becoming the guy who caught Fox News in its own hypocrisy on tape is, somehow, the most powerful version of him yet. That should worry someone.