Dem Senate Candidate Rips Primary Opponent’s Hasan Piker Rally, Compares Influencer to Nick Fuentes

Screenshot via social media

Mallory McMorrow, the popular Michigan state senator running in the Democratic Party primary for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, pulled no punches this week in blasting her primary opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, for hosting a rally with Hasan Piker.

Piker has long been a lightning rod of controversy on the left, stemming from his past comments arguing that the U.S. “deserved” 9/11 and his more recent trips to China and Cuba, where he praised the brutal communist regimes in charge of those countries.

“It is somebody who says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks and views and followers, which is not entirely different from somebody like Nick Fuentes,” McMorrow told Jewish Insider Thursday, comparing Piker to the far-right, vehemently anti-Semitic podcaster.

“[Piker] is a provocateur, to put it lightly, who says things that are misogynistic and antisemitic, and said that the United States deserved 9/11,” McMorrow continued, adding:

That is not somebody that you should be campaigning with at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state. How do you bring everybody together, especially when there are difficult conversations, where there aren’t easy answers? You don’t fan the flames and stoke division just to get attention.

I had made a statement back in 2023 after the Oct. 7 attacks that my biggest fear was that events in the Middle East tear us apart at home, and this was an example of that coming to life in a really visceral and terrifying way.

However you feel about what is happening in the Middle East, the response is never to take it out on people at home. The 140 kids who were at preschool that day bear no responsibility at all for anything that’s happening in the Middle East. And the rhetoric [is] being ratcheted up.

El-Sayed grabbed headlines earlier in the week when Punchbowl News reported that he warned it was a “risk” to condemn the recent synagogue and preschool attack in Michigan, which McMorrow referenced in her remarks.

El-Sayed released a statement condemning the synagogue attack earlier in the month, connecting the attack to the perpetator losing family in an Israeli airstrike. “A week earlier, an airstrike killed his niece and nephew. Imagine if that had never happened. Imagine there was no war in Iran. Imagine if there were no airstrikes in Lebanon. Imagine if his family had never died,” El-Sayed said in his statement, adding, “We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.”

Punchbowl reported on Tuesday that while “reflecting on the statement during an organizing call on March 18, El-Sayed admitted his take was controversial.” The report added:

“It was a risk,” El-Sayed said. “All of our team was really worried about saying something, but leadership is being willing to say the thing if you believe it to be true that nobody else is going to say.”

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), the third major candidate in the Democratic Senate primary, echoed McMorrow’s feelings and told Jewish Insider that Piker is “the exact opposite of someone I’d be campaigning with.”

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