Hasan Piker went on Axios this week and said it plainly: America is worse than al-Qaeda.
Not close. Worse.
“Pound-for-pound as far as the number of deaths, yes,” he told host Alex Thompson, who asked him to compare his country to the group that flew planes into the World Trade Center.
This wasn’t a slip. He’s been building to it for years. “America is the top dog in terrorism,” he’d said before. This was him doubling down. On camera. Straight face.
“We have caused tremendous terror all around the world,” he said. Then further still — framing it as terror we inflict on ourselves, too. An “act of terror,” he called it. One that demands “accountability.”
Sit with that for a second. Al-Qaeda murdered nearly three thousand people on a Tuesday morning. Decades of organized, deliberate slaughter of civilians for being American, for being Western, for being present.
Piker looked at that record, then at the country that defeated it, and called the ledger even. Worse than even.
He did add a caveat. There’s always a caveat. “This doesn’t mean that all Americans are terrorists.”
How generous of him.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Piker campaigned with Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan. Republicans have spent nearly $3 million tying the two together, built on Piker’s old line that America “deserved” 9/11.
El-Sayed didn’t try to defend the new remarks.
“I do not agree with this statement,” he told Axios — adding he doesn’t “give much weight to the statements made by a social media streamer.” Then he pivoted to gas prices.
That’s the tell. Not the pivot. The distancing. Even his allies won’t touch this one.
Piker has 2.8 million followers on Twitch. Mostly young. Mostly male. He was kicked off the platform once already, for calling a fatal attack on two Israeli embassy staffers a possible “false flag.”
He’s called Israelis “inbred.” Said he has “no issue” with Hezbollah.
The New York Times ran a fawning profile not long ago — called him “very handsome,” dwelt on his workout, his diet, his Zyn habit. Soft focus on a man who thinks his own country is more dangerous than the men who brought down the towers.
2.8 million followers is a lot of people shaping their view of their own country around this tripe.
