Far-Left Streamer Hasan Piker Claims USSR Collapse Was "One of the Greatest Catastrophes" at Yale Event
Michigan Senate candidate campaigns with Hasan Piker despite past comments on Soviet Union, 9/11, and Hamas—testing party's tolerance for controversial surrogates
Republican National Committee researchers and GOP Rep. Randy Fine circulated clips this week showing left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker calling the fall of the Soviet Union “one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century” during a debate at a Yale University event.
The comment came Tuesday during a Yale Political Union debate on the resolution “End the American Empire,” where Piker argued that after the USSR’s collapse, America had “no more big enemies left” to beat and turned “the gun on itself.” The RNC Research account wrote: “This is who Democrats are embracing.”
The remarks have intensified an already heated intra-Democratic fight over whether candidates should campaign alongside the 33-year-old Turkish-American streamer, who commands over three million followers and has become an unlikely surrogate in the 2026 midterms.
Piker has been barnstorming Michigan with Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive running in the state’s Democratic Senate primary. The two drew roughly 1,200 people combined at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan last week. El-Sayed is endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna. He’s also trailing in polls against Rep. Haley Stevens, who has AIPAC backing, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who also opposes Israel’s conduct in Gaza but has condemned El-Sayed’s decision to appear with Piker.
The fight is ostensibly about Piker’s record: he’s said America “deserved 9/11” (later walked back as “inappropriate”), defended Hamas as “a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” of Israel, recently told Pod Save America that “the Republican Party is the biggest domestic terrorist” organization in the country, and said last year that Florida Sen. Rick Scott should be killed over Medicare fraud. The USSR comments add Cold War revisionism to the list.
But the structure underneath is simpler: Democrats are sorting over how much distance candidates need to keep from figures who animate young, left-wing voters but make party moderates and pro-Israel groups recoil.
El-Sayed declined to disavow any of Piker’s statements when pressed by Politico. “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture- I thought we were over it,” he said. The Third Way, a center-left Democratic group, has called Piker a “Jew-hater.” McMorrow compared him to white nationalist Nick Fuentes, saying both “say extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks.”
Piker told the Michigan State crowd that Stevens and McMorrow had spent two weeks “repeat[ing] what corporate donors and foreign lobbyists had told themselves” instead of focusing on Trump’s threats against Iran. (Trump announced a temporary ceasefire hours after threatening that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”)
Michigan is useful terrain for testing this fight. The state has the largest Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian American population in the U.S. Biden won Dearborn—an Arab-majority city—with 69% in 2020. Harris took 36% in 2024. Progressive Rep. Rashida Tlaib and moderate Rep. Debbie Dingell both attended the Ann Arbor event.
Several attendees told CBS News they wouldn’t support candidates taking AIPAC money and appreciated that El-Sayed was willing to appear with someone controversial. Others said the Democratic establishment’s discomfort with Piker, compared to its openness to Democratic candidates appearing on conservative podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, revealed the party’s unwillingness to court its own left flank.
At Yale, the resolution “End the American Empire” passed 54–31. Sen. Rick Scott had called for Yale’s federal funding to be revoked over the invitation. Piker joked from the podium: “I’m especially sad that Senator Rick Scott couldn’t make it.”
What to watch: The August primary will test whether energy around Gaza and anti-establishment politics translates into votes, or whether the blowback from Piker’s associations functions as a ceiling. Either way, the argument isn’t really about Piker—it’s about which coalitional pressures Democrats treat as constraints and which they ignore.