Right Problem, Wrong Savior

On Sunday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC’s This Week and was asked about Hasan Piker. She answered: “Much hay was made about the fact that we lost young men in the last election. Many of the same consultants that are wringing their hands today were the same ones talking about how we have to go on Joe Rogan and not be so willing to engage in cancel culture.”

AOC appeared to throw up her hands, abandoning her usual idealism. It’s not as though she agrees with Piker, the thoughtful monologue implied, but that is what the kids are watching these days. What to do?

It’s amazing how the Democratic Socialists’ political imagination dries up the moment they are asked to think of an alternative to wholesale endorsement of a man who has repeatedly pronounced his support for China, Russia, terror groups and recently claimed that liberal Zionists (read: Jewish Democrats) are actually “liberal Nazis.”

She’s right about the problem. Democrats did lose young men, badly. The consultant class that spent a decade lecturing everyone about tone has no standing to clutch pearls now. That’s the right problem. But we need to talk about the wrong solution being pushed right now.

Start by asking which young men? AOC left that part vague. The collapse she described was concentrated among young white men. CIRCLE, the youth-vote research center at Tufts, found that young white men broke for Trump 63 to 35 in 2024 after favoring Biden by six points in 2020, a thirty-four point swing in a single cycle. Young women moved the other way, backing Harris by seventeen points. Some of that swing is about media diets. Some of it, and this deserves saying out loud, is about how young white men responded to a Black woman at the top of the ticket. The Piker theory answers neither. His audience already leans white, male, and progressive, and no booking strategy on any stream addresses sexism.

The word “incendiary” is doing a lot of work in the coverage of Piker, so his record is worth quoting . Piker said America “deserved” 9/11, then called it satire, then stood by it again. He told Dan Crenshaw, a Navy SEAL who lost an eye in Afghanistan, that service doesn’t earn respect. For the past two years he has explained away the men who filmed themselves murdering families in their homes, because those families were Israeli. His charisma was never in doubt. Father Coughlin had charisma too, and thirty million radio listeners a week in the 1930s. What Democrats keep dodging is the question of what they legitimize when they sit in the chair.

Exposure carries values whether the guest intends it or not. When a sitting congresswoman treats a streamer as the indispensable bridge to young voters, she places him inside the Overton window. Every Democrat who books the stream tells young men that this counts as serious politics.

Here is what makes the bargain truly absurd: the messenger doesn’t even deliver. Democrats lost one group of young men, and Piker supplies a different one. His audience is self-selected for agreement; he shed a third of his viewers the moment his takes on October 7 got uncomfortable, and the ones who stayed ranked Bernie Sanders as their favorite politician, according to research on his base. The Rogan and Theo Von voters who drifted right are somewhere else entirely. As for the fabled Hasan bump: the three candidates he championed in California all lost, and in Michigan, the state where he was crowned kingmaker this week, eighty percent of voters had not heard enough about him to form an opinion. El-Sayed won on the strength of young, college-educated progressives, the coalition Democrats already own. Sixty percent of American voters have never heard of Piker at all. The party is trading its oldest moral commitment for an audience it mostly already had.

The generation absorbing all that borrowed legitimacy makes the gamble worse. The ADL’s tracking survey, which has measured antisemitic attitudes since 1964, found for the first time that the youngest Americans hold the most anti-Jewish views: Gen Z and Millennials now agree with more classic antisemitic tropes than Gen X or Boomers. More than half of Gen Z told the ADL it would be at least somewhat acceptable for a close friend to support Hamas. In a survey published this year, only 52 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 said Israel has a right to exist, and nearly a third of adults under 45 called Jews a threat to the unity of American society. The most antisemitic generation in modern American polling is the one Democrats propose to reach through a man who presents terror apologia as anti-establishment candor.

So what’s the alternative? Because “right problem, wrong solution” is a cheap line unless I offer one.

The consultants frame the choice as Piker or silence, and I know that framing is false because disproving it is my job. For years, I have convened creators and influencers with combined audiences in the tens of millions, most of whom had never touched the subjects we brought them into. Gaming streamers, Broadway actors, comedians, fitness creators, food writers. What that work taught me is that young audiences follow individual people they trust, and that those people are everywhere once the fixation on a single savior ends. The reach Democrats believe only Piker can deliver is scattered across dozens of platforms. None of them has ever legitimized hostage taking as political protest.

Democrats already know how to do this, because they’ve done it. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg both sat for hours on Flagrant, Andrew Schulz’s comedy podcast with millions of young male listeners, and Buttigieg’s appearance was widely judged a grand slam. Kamala Harris went on Club Shay Shay to talk directly to young Black men, a group who gave her 63% of their votes. Gavin Newsom spent four hours on the Shawn Ryan Show debating guns and lockdowns with a veteran host who openly disagrees with him. Those are the mainstream shows the lost voters actually watch, and none of those hosts required the party to swallow terror apologia as the price of admission.

AOC is right that the hand-wringing consultants failed, and she’s right that the party has to show up where young people actually are. Where she loses me is the premise that showing up requires Hasan Piker. It doesn’t require him strategically, because most of his American audience was voting blue anyway. And it can’t require him morally, because a party that claims moral clarity cannot treat hatred of Jews as the cost of doing business with young voters.