Turn on cable news. Pick up a newspaper. Log on to Twitter. It doesn’t seem to matter where you get your political news: for the past month, the leftist Twitch streamer has become one of the dominant subjects of coverage, conversation and controversy surrounding the crucial Michigan Senate race between the Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and the Republican Mike Rogers.

“I can’t stop talking about him,” conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt recently admitted on Fox, the rightwing network that also can’t stop talking about Piker, day after day, from morning until night.

And it isn’t just Fox. Media analysis platform Ground News aggregated 242 separate stories mentioning Piker from across the political spectrum over the past three months – almost three stories a day.

Piker doesn’t live in Michigan. He isn’t running for office. He isn’t a member of El-Sayed’s campaign. Most Americans have probably never heard of him.

Yet the political press is obsessed. The incessant, relentless coverage of him is bad enough. Worse is the gaslighting – including from Democrats and liberal commentators – over why Piker has attracted so much attention, and why El-Sayed is apparently expected to spend his campaign answering for every provocative thing the streamer has ever said.

“You can’t deploy Hasan Piker aggressively in factional primaries and then turn around after you win and say ‘why is everyone talking about Hasan Piker,’” influential liberal pundit Matt Yglesias posted on Twitter/X. “If you don’t want people to talk about him, don’t campaign with him!!”

There is just one rather large problem with that argument.

Mike Rogers isn’t merely campaigning alongside a controversial supporter. His campaign gave a Michigan-based extremist and religious bigot a leadership title in its faith outreach operation.

His........

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