MORNING GLORY: Hasan Piker’s radical rhetoric is becoming Democrats’ 2026 brand

At least Marx, Lenin and Mao were well read.

Social media influencer Hasan Piker wears his Mao jacket and hoses his Twitch audience down with absurd political takes that do not betray any evidence that Rutgers University obliged him to read even a book or two of serious history before he graduated in 2013.

Rutgers is a fine school and anyone can get a great education there, but Piker’s "body of work" shows us that serious study there is quite obviously not obligatory.

Piker uses social media to monetize the worst impulses of the extremes in American politics.

In the course of doing so, he has become the face of the Democratic Party in the 2026 midterms, and has personally carried the most radical major-party candidate in memory — Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed — to his party’s nomination for United States Senate.

HASAN PIKER SINGS MOCKING 'WE ARE CHARLIE KIRK' SONG AT LIVE PODCAST SHOW Piker has now gone so "supernova radical" that some Democratic leaders and elected officials have had to rebuke him without naming him — including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Sen.

Elissa Slotkin — and others, like New Jersey Sen.

Cory Booker, have slapped Piker down by name.

This past weekend, Piker exploited the assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10 of last year — to the great disgust of the vast majority of Americans who saw the mocking performance as it went viral.

The exploitation of the suffering of Charlie’s family, friends and colleagues is despicable, but the need to make himself outrageous and at the center of attention for a deranged circle of followers — and thus contagious online — has overwhelmed any sense of decency in Piker.

EL-SAYED DISAVOWS HASAN PIKER'S 9/11 COMMENTS BUT DECRIES 'CANCEL CULTURE' Piker is from the extreme left, and the record is full of his inanities and his outrages.

He is best and most infamously known for blurting out years ago that "America deserved 9/11," but as recently as last week, his comments about American Jews endangering themselves because of their support of Israel pushed the alarm buttons for Democrats across the spectrum.

What seemed to some to be a warning of a looming Kristallnacht may have finally obliged most Democrats to explicitly exile Piker from their tribe. (One exception though is still El-Sayed, who shimmies from ambiguous statement to ambiguous statement about Piker but won’t disown the radical who is now effectively the Michigan Democrat's running mate.) After graduating from Rutgers, Piker learned his trade from his uncle Cenk Uygur, co-founder and host of "The Young Turks," a sprawling digital media operation.