After nearly a decade of marathon streaming — seven to eight hours a day, seven days a week — this year Hasan Piker, hailed as “one of the most influential left-wing commentators in America,” has been spending less time in his home studio in Los Angeles and more on the campaign trail stumping for progressive Democratic candidates around the country.
Those candidates include Rep. Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, who is up for reelection; Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, who is running for the U.S. Senate; Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives; and Cori Bush in Missouri, who is seeking to reclaim her seat in the House after serving from 2021 to 2025.
Piker has become the “go-to surrogate” for such insurgent progressive candidates, who hope he can mobilize his massive online following — a combined 4.5 million followers on Twitch and YouTube — behind them. But the megastreamer’s growing prominence in the electoral arena is also causing a serious freak-out within the Democratic Party establishment.
In March, Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way — a think tank that tries to steer Democrats toward centrist positions and messaging — co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed warning that Democrats were getting “too cozy” with Piker and must “draw a line in the sand” against him.
Congress has even gotten in on the action. In April, two House members — Democrat Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Republican Mike Lawler of New York — introduced a resolution denouncing “the rise of antisemitic, hate-filled rhetoric disseminated by prominent online personalities, including Hasan Piker and Candace Owens.”
In an April article in The Nation, Daniel Denvir, host of the popular leftist podcast The Dig, denounced this fusillade against Piker and rejected the accusations of antisemitism against him.
Ezra Klein of The New York Times likewise rejected the antisemitism charges against Piker, pointing to multiple instances of Piker forcefully condemning antisemitism and his support for various Jewish politicians in the U.S. “It is an unusual form of Jew hatred that calls out antisemitism and promotes Jewish Americans for the presidency,” Klein wrote in April.
What’s actually behind the “attempt by the Democratic establishment and Israel lobby to drive Piker from the public square,” Denvir wrote, is the fact that he is “a trenchant critic of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, of U.S. warmongering and of a Democratic establishment that supports both.”
For many, though, the real problem with Piker has to do with his views on China, which he visited in November 2025. As one commentator put it, Piker “has downplayed the genocide in Xinjiang, recasting the concentration camps there as ‘reeducation’ centers. He has described Chinese colonialism in Tibet as a good thing, using arguments reminiscent of ‘civilize the savages’ justifications for Western imperialism. He has deemed the idea of a politically free Hong Kong ‘ridiculous.'”
Piker has also said that China is the closest embodiment of his vision of socialism.
These views don’t merely raise the hackles of centrist Democrats. They are anathema to Chinese leftists like Kevin Lin, a labor activist and researcher from China, co-author of “China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry” (2024) and the managing editor of Asian Labour Review, a publication about workers’ struggles across Asia.
When Americans like Piker praise Beijing as a counterweight to U.S. hegemony, “this is often done in the name of anti-imperialism and countering U.S. state propaganda on China,” Lin told New Lines. Piker “explains away capitalist exploitation and repression in China using arguments that wouldn’t hold up if used to explain away the same exploitation and repression in the U.S.,” Lin said.
Lin finds Piker’s reverence for China as a model of socialism problematic. “At the heart of the Chinese system,” he said, “is labor exploitation by foreign capital, Chinese domestic private capital and state capital via state-owned enterprises, where independent trade unions and workers’ organizations are banned and where workers have next to no say in the management of their workplaces, just like in any capitalist economy.”
For Brian Hioe, one of the founding editors of New Bloom, a magazine covering progressive activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific, Piker’s pronouncements on China “marshall the cliches of Western leftist Orientalism” and reflect “the narrow horizons and parochialism of western leftists,” as he wrote in December 2025.
Actual Chinese people, Hioe wrote, “are merely shadow puppets through which to construct a grandiose fantasy that is juxtaposed with Western contexts.”
Such critiques from the left are largely absent in the current debate over Piker and the Democratic Party. It’s understandable that progressives are defending Piker against attacks from establishment centrists and pushing back against their unfounded accusations of antisemitism, but sweeping Piker’s views on China under the rug won’t make them disappear.