Hasan Piker marvels at ‘white dude bros’ supporting far-left candidate Abdul El-Sayed on eve of Michigan Senate primary

Hasan Piker marveling at "white dude bros" showing up for Abdul El-Sayed says more about the moment than anything El-Sayed himself has said this cycle. Here's a guy who told his audience America "deserved" 9/11, standing on a stage the night before a Senate primary, treating the crowd like a curiosity he's studying rather than voters he respects. That's not a coincidence. That's who El-Sayed decided to campaign with when the cameras were on.

Democrats have spent years telling us their coalition is the moral one, the serious one, the one that doesn't traffic in fringe rhetoric. Then a candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan brings out a streamer whose most famous line is essentially blaming his own country for the worst terrorist attack on American soil. Nobody made El-Sayed do that. He chose it, presumably because Piker draws views and energizes a slice of the online left that the campaign wants turning out.

What's telling is the framing Piker himself used, this fascination that "bros" would back El-Sayed, as if regular guys showing up for a far-left candidate is the man-bites-dog story here rather than the fact that a Senate hopeful is sharing a stage with someone who's said what he's said. The bar for who gets treated as a mainstream surrogate has moved a long way, and it moved without much pushback from the people who usually police this stuff closely.

Michigan voters can draw their own conclusions about what it means when a Senate candidate's closing argument includes a guest spot from someone who thinks the country had 9/11 coming. We'd just ask that anyone tempted to write this off as a nothing story imagine the coverage if the ideological arrow pointed the other direction.