When Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed announced that Hasan Piker would join him at campaign rallies this spring, the Democratic establishment reacted as if someone had lit a cigarette inside a Whole Foods.

Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois, who chairs the moderate New Democratic Coalition and cochairs the Congressional Jewish Caucus, called Piker “an unapologetic antisemite.” Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Senate candidate Rep. Haley Stevens piled on with their own condemnations. Meanwhile, Mallory McMorrow, El-Sayed’s Democratic primary opponent, compared Piker to Nick Fuentes, the far-right influencer and leader of the so-called “groyper” movement. “[Piker] is a provocateur, to put it lightly, who says things that are misogynistic and antisemitic,” said McMorrow. Senators Cory Booker and Ruben Gallego both told Politico they wouldn’t go on Piker’s stream.

Third Way, the milquetoast centrist think tank where left-wing energy goes to be euthanized, published a Wall Street Journal op-ed demanding that no Democrat engage with Piker, calling him a bigot whose association is “morally repugnant and strategically self-defeating.” On Wednesday, they sent El-Sayed a letter saying he owed it to Michigan voters to distance himself from Piker’s “hateful views.” You will not be shocked to learn that Piker’s “antisemitism” boils down to criticism of Israel; unlike Fuentes, Piker never hints at any dislike of Jewish people, only a hard-line distaste for the state of Israel and its partner in crime, America.

No one, including Piker, is beyond reproach or criticism — but this campaign against him is telling. Republicans are naturally seeking to make Piker a symbol of left-wing extremism by dredging up every inflammatory remark he’s ever made over the course of a career that has involved talking off the cuff about politics for hours in public every day. But Republicans’ behavior is hardly surprising. What’s more revealing is how eager mainstream Democrats are to take that ball and run it to the end zone. In the last week, Democrats have made it their mission to destroy him.

That’s ironic because just eighteen months ago, in the postmortem of Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, Democrats and their allies were wringing their hands about the fact that young men had veered sharply right, thanks in part to a sprawling media ecosystem of male comedians and influencers that included Theo Von, Adin Ross, and the Nelk Boys. All liberals had was Pod Save America, a kind of group chat for former Barack Obama staffers that escaped containment and became a wonky media brand. Suddenly party operatives, consultants, and aligned media figures all began asking the same question: Where was the “Joe Rogan of the Left”?

Enter Piker, who is one of the very few left-wing media figures who actually has the kind of large, young, mostly male audience Democrats claimed to desperately need. With 3.1 million Twitch followers, he describes what he does as “basically AM radio, but for Zoomers.” He plays video games and offers political commentary on the day’s news to an audience of mostly young men.

When Zohran Mamdani ran for New York City mayor last year, Piker supported him vociferously and hosted Mamdani on his stream. But ultimately, Piker’s socialist politics and independent persona are more alarming to Democratic operatives than losing an entire generation of young men. They said they wanted a Joe Rogan of their own, yet they reject anyone who isn’t a focus-tested, stick-to-the-talking-points media figure. They actually wanted a branded content asset.

Democrats have been trying to engineer one in a lab of sorts. One $20 million plan put forward, titled “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan,” promised to study the “syntax, language, and content” popular among young men online, then develop content spreading “an aspirational vision of manhood that aligns with Democratic values.”

Last year, they tried to actualize this plan with Jaime Harrison. The fifty-year-old former Democratic National Committee chair launched a supposedly BS-free podcast and YouTube show called At Our Table. The Democrats are throwing all their “stars” at it — Kamala Harris, Rachel Maddow, Hakeem Jeffries — and even tossing in mild profanities once in a while (“Send Lindsey Graham’s ass home!”).

But no one’s watching or listening, almost literally. Most of the recent episodes have hundreds, not thousands, of views, a tiny fraction of Piker’s viewership. As of Wednesday, Harrison’s new episode, in which he calls speaker of the House Mike Johnson “feckless” (oh, snap!), had twenty-four views.

Piker’s own diagnosis is blunt. “The Democrats have no story,” he told Newsweek. “Right-wing influencers like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro reach young men by meeting them where they are, while Democrats ask those voters to meet the party on its terms.” Piker himself has the same juice, but at the same time, he represents everything the Democratic establishment fears: genuinely popular, outside the donor class’s orbit, and impossible to manufacture.

That gets to the heart of the problem. The party’s response to Piker isn’t hypocrisy exactly so much as part of a bigger structural problem. The party’s culture is deeply hostile to the kind of spontaneity, ideological syncretism, intellectual flexibility, and raw independence that make someone like Theo Von a fun listen. The moment a personality becomes too unruly or provocative, the knives come out. What they actually seem to want is not a Joe Rogan of the Left, but a housebroken imitation. And that is why they never had one.