Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar hopped on a Twitch livestream with Hasan Piker — a left-wing streamer with 3.1 million followers who once said, and we quote, “America deserved 9/11, dude. F— it, I’m saying it.”
They played a video game together. To encourage young people to vote. Heartwarming stuff.
Now, in fairness, Piker later walked back the 9/11 comments, calling them “inappropriate” and claiming he was using “imprecise language” and that he meant America as a “political entity” deserved the attacks, not actual Americans. Oh, well that changes everything! He only meant the country deserved it. Not the people in the buildings. Totally different. Thanks for clearing that up, Hasan.
(Twitch suspended him for the comments at the time, which tells you something — when a platform that hosts people screaming at video games for twelve hours thinks you’ve gone too far, you’ve gone too far.)
But here’s the part that really makes your head spin: Ilhan Omar — the congresswoman who famously described the September 11th attacks as “some people did something” — is now doing collaborative content with a guy who thought “some people did something” didn’t go far enough.
When your political allies make Ilhan Omar look moderate on 9/11, maybe it’s time to audit your contact list. https://twitter.com/canarymission/status/2043380223551414775
AOC praised the “amazing lineup” of gamers on the stream. Amazing! She’s sitting next to a woman who downplayed the worst terrorist attack in American history and a man who said we had it coming, and the word she reaches for is “amazing.” Vocabulary isn’t her strong suit, but that’s a new low even for sugar-pants.
The game they played was “Among Us” — which, if you’re not familiar, is a game where you try to figure out who in your group is secretly working against everyone else. The jokes write themselves. We don’t even need to be here.
Piker, by the way, isn’t just a 9/11 truther with a gaming chair. He’s a former contributor to The Young Turks — that progressive media outlet named after the group that committed the Armenian Genocide, because the Left has never met a branding decision they couldn’t botch. In 2020, videos surfaced of Piker launching profanity-filled attacks against Bach Hac, a Vietnamese refugee. Real champion of the marginalized, this guy.
Rep. Ro Khanna also appeared with Piker, and when Fox News contributor Joe Concha confronted him about it, Khanna refused to apologize. Wouldn’t even acknowledge that maybe — just maybe — cozying up to a guy who celebrated the murder of 3,000 Americans was a bad look.
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani also joined the Piker orbit. Because of course he did. These people travel in packs.
Here’s what drives us crazy about this: imagine — just imagine — if a Republican congressman hopped on a livestream with someone who said “Pearl Harbor was justified” or “the Challenger explosion was karma.” CNN would run a 72-hour special. MSNBC would interrupt their regularly scheduled Trump panic to have a secondary panic. The New York Times editorial board would need therapy.
But AOC and Omar team up with a guy who said America deserved 9/11 and the mainstream media response is… crickets. A couple of Fox segments and that’s it. No outrage cycle. No wall-to-wall coverage. No calls for censure.
Because when Democrats do it, it’s “building bridges with young voters.” When Republicans do anything within a hundred miles of it, it’s “a threat to our democracy.” https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2044402489034768427
We have sitting members of Congress collaborating with a man who publicly cheered the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans, and their party leadership hasn’t said a single word. Not Hakeem Jeffries. Not Chuck Schumer. Nobody.
Silence is violence, right? Isn’t that what they taught us? Funny how that only applies in one direction.
Remember their names next time they lecture us about “tone” and “civility” in politics. AOC. Omar. Piker. Playing video games and laughing it up while the families of 9/11 victims get to watch the whole thing on Twitch.
Amazing lineup indeed.