The week before an election, a man who told his audience to kill landlords and let the streets soak in capitalist blood shared a stage in Minneapolis with a congresswoman and a state senator on Monday. Not as a protester. As a guest. On a podcast.
Hasan Piker's 2019 rant is on video. "Kill them. Kill those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the street. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood." When Axios read it back to him on camera and asked if he was concerned about inciting violence, he said no. He has since called it hyperbole, messing around with a friend. But the pattern doesn't stop at landlords. He said America deserved 9/11. He said if you cared about Medicare fraud you'd kill Rick Scott. He called videos of federal agents getting hurt during Operation Metro Surge "funny compilations" and said a lot of hip bones were broken. He called those same agents extra racist.
This isn't a man with a bad tweet. This is a man with a body of work. And the Democrat Party's answer to it was to put him in a theater in Minneapolis. My legislative colleague, state senator Omar Fateh hosted. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar sat beside him. Omar's office defended the booking by citing low youth turnout... because apparently the leftist kids are into murder these days. That's the strategy.
A few Minnesota Democrat state senators put out a statement objecting to Piker's appearance. But most of them are retiring. They have no race to protect, so their courage is cheap. On the other end of the spectrum, you have statewide candidates in close races with something to lose suddenly pretending to be decent human beings — Amy Klobuchar running for governor, and Peggy Flanagan running for U.S. Senate. But both stayed quiet through years of Piker's prominence, through the 9/11 comment, through the Rick Scott remark, through the landlord rant. They found their voices only when the political calendar forced it. That's not principle surfacing. That's self-preservation doing what self-preservation does. Six Minnesota Democrat senators led by Ron Latz called him a nationally known Jew-hater, homophobe, and misogynist. Angie Craig called his rhetoric polarizing and dangerous. The Jewish Community Relations Council called platforming him a betrayal of Jewish Minnesotans. All of it surfaced in October. In an election year. Too little. Too late.
Omar herself never mentioned the federal raid on her Washington home. Not once, across twenty minutes on stage. She did boast that a DHS attorney told her Minnesota is the only state with a network hard to penetrate. She joked that the media fixates on her because she and Piker look really good on their screens. The tone was warm. The omissions were total.
And while the elected officials talked, Piker spent the afternoon driving around the University of Minnesota campus giving students rides to vote early. That's not commentary. That's infrastructure. A turnout operation, funded by a man whose explicit content includes instructions to murder people for owning property, escorted by a sitting member of Congress. They're literally running on killing fellow Americans.
Republicans control the White House, the Senate, and the House. Trump was indicted four times for conduct that predates his presidency. Piker tells millions of people that conservatives deserve to die, and the institutional response is a podcast and a shrug. You don't have to believe the 'Brandenburg' Supreme Court standard should bend to get angry about that. You just have to notice it was never tested.
This is what happens when the people who hold power treat malevolence as a rounding error. A man tells millions of followers that landlords, capitalists, and conservatives deserve to die, and the response from the party he supports is a podcast taping and a shrug. If you are a Republican seeking office — any office — the voters deserve to know whether you will use every ounce of legal and civil authority at your disposal to make this explicit criminal intent cost something. Not because it's politically convenient. Because it is the job. Piker should have been defunded and arrested by now.
The fact that he hasn't may cost Republicans the election, because patriots are sick and tired of putting up with this. It's not a game. It's not politics. It's a matter of justice and national security. If Republicans fail to hold people like Piker accountable with every legal tool at their disposal... well, what comes next is going to be a lot less orderly.
