A high aide on Vice President Harris’ failed presidential marketing campaign not too long ago known as for extra cultural voices just like the vocal anti-America and anti-Israel Twitch star, Hasan Piker, who beforehand confronted backlash for saying that “America deserved 9/11.”
Harris’ former deputy marketing campaign supervisor, Rob Flaherty, stated throughout a current interview that Democrats are “losing hold of culture” and laid out a method for them to develop a “whole thriving system” forward of future elections.
“We need a whole thriving ecosystem,” Flaherty advised Semafor. “It’s not just Pod Save America, though I think we should have more of them. It’s not just Hasan Piker. We should have more Hasan Pikers. It’s also the cultural creators, the folks who are one rung out who influence the nonpartisan audience. Those things all need to happen together.”
“The reality is it’s not going to be big media organizations. It’s going to be a network and a constellation of individual personalities, because that’s how people get their information now,” he added.
Flaherty, who beforehand served because the director of digital technique for the Biden White Home, is prone to face backlash for calling for “more Hasan Pikers” because of Piker’s previous controversial feedback. Piker, who beforehand raised greater than $1 million for Palestinian support, has used his platform with hundreds of thousands of followers to downplay and justify terrorist assaults similar to Oct. 7 and 9/11 as acts of resistance lately.
Throughout a 2019 livestream, Piker praised the “brave f—ing soldier” who wounded conservative U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, whereas he was deployed to Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL, asking, “Didn’t he go to war and, like, literally lose his eye because some mujahideen, a brave f—ing soldier, f—ed his eyehole with their d—?”
He went on to say that “America deserved 9/11, I’m saying it,” earlier than later strolling it again and saying it was “inappropriate.” Nonetheless, in one other stream this yr, Piker joked about 9/11 once more, saying, “Oh my god, 9/11 2 is going to be so sick” and “give Saudi Arabia a nuke so they can do 9/11 2.”
In one other stream, Piker broadcast propaganda from the Houthis, an Iranian-backed group in Yemen that has been designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group. As a substitute of explicitly addressing the supplies as questionable propaganda, the streamer as an alternative expressed sympathy and admiration for the group.
“They do musicals about, like, their f—ing actions all the time,” Piker stated of the terrorist propaganda. “They love walking over like the American flag and the Israeli flag, side by side.”
“They do not care about the heavy missiles … they will literally take the war to them no matter what. … For them, it’s an act of resistance. You know what I mean?” he added.
“It doesn’t matter if f—ing rapes happened on Oct. 7,” Piker stated in a Might 22 stream. “It doesn’t change the dynamic [of Palestinians and Israelis] for me.”
Throughout an April 18 stream, Piker additionally expressed that Hamas was the “lesser evil” subsequent to the Israeli army.
Whereas Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and others have been on Piker’s platform, Dem Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York wrote a letter this yr to high executives at Twitch and Amazon expressing “alarm about the amplification of antisemitism on Twitch at the hands of Hasan Piker” and stated Piker has “emerged as the poster child for the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism in America.”
“Outside the context of October 7th, Mr. Piker has even joked and mused about men date-raping women on a college campus and has posted an image of a handgun on top of a United States Senator in what appears to be open invitation to gun violence against a sitting elected official,” Torres stated. “Inviting one’s followers to shoot an elected official, whether it be done in earnest or in jest, is the kind of threat that warrants serious attention from federal law enforcement.”
Piker’s Twitch streams commonly hit greater than one million views and infrequently have as many as 30,000 viewers at a given time.
Fox Information Digital reached out to Flaherty for remark however didn’t obtain a response.
Fox Information’ Andrea Margolis contributed reporting.
