Bulwark Publisher Reveals ‘Next Level’ Harassment From Hasan Piker Fans. ‘Designed to Intimidate Critics Into Silence.’
- April 3, 2026 on the Bulwark Takes podcast, Sarah Longwell breaks publicly with colleague Tim Miller over whether Hasan Piker belongs in the Democratic “big tent” — The Bulwark
- Aug. 20, 2026 Piker singles out Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss (D) on a livestream over Israel support, drawing condemnation from six sitting Democrats in Congress — Newsweek
- Sept. 1, 2026 Longwell reveals the harassment she says followed her Piker comments, calling it “really next level and clearly designed to intimidate critics into silence” — X, via Mediaite
- 3.1M / 1.94M Piker's Twitch and YouTube followings, respectively — a combined audience that has generated more than 1.2 billion total views — Wikipedia, as of Aug. 22, 2026
On September 1, 2026, Sarah Longwell, Publisher of The Bulwark and President and CEO of Longwell Partners, revealed on X that she had spent months absorbing a harassment campaign from fans of leftist streamer Hasan Piker after she said publicly that an alliance with him would hurt Democrats. What followed, she wrote, was “really next level and clearly designed to intimidate critics into silence.”
For a strategist who has spent a decade fighting Trump-aligned trolls as a co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, the comparison was itself the story: harassment from the left, she said, had matched or exceeded anything MAGA world had thrown at her. “I’m pretty used to it after fighting with MAGA psychos all these years,” she wrote — which is precisely what made her calling this campaign “next level” notable.
Longwell’s post came one day after Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts publicly asked why no “male podcasters, pundits or politicians” would call out Piker’s fans for doxxing and harassing women inside the Democratic coalition. It also capped a five-month rift that started not on cable news but inside The Bulwark’s own podcast studio — an argument over whether the party should let Piker anywhere near its tent at all.
The dispute became public on April 3, 2026, when Bulwark writer-at-large Tim Miller and Longwell recorded an episode of their Bulwark Takes podcast titled “Even Tim and Sarah Disagree on Hasan Piker.” Miller argued for a “big tent” strategy that could bring in Piker’s millions of young, anti-war viewers. Longwell wasn’t having it. She called Piker “a China, Russia sympathizer who hates women, hates Israel” and told Miller flatly that he was “soft-selling who this guy is.”
Piker answered the next day on his own stream, in a clip circulated by Drop Site News. “She’s worried that she might not have space in the party,” he said of Longwell. “A party that has me in the tent is going to not cater to her — it’s going to cater to us.” Two days later, Bulwark contributor Mona Charen sharpened the case in a column headlined “Why Democrats Should Shun Hasan Piker,” citing his past comment that America “deserved” the September 11 attacks, his mockery of Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s combat wound, and his description of Israel as “packed to the fucking gills with the most inbred, uneducated, ultranationalist” people.
The immediate trigger sat further back, on August 20, 2026. During a livestream, Piker displayed a photo of Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss (D) and warned that Jewish Americans expressing “singular support” for Israel would invite violence “against American Jews.” The remark drew swift condemnation from inside Piker’s own political coalition: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) called it “dangerous, malicious and antisemitic,” and Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), and Cory Booker (D-NJ), along with Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), each condemned it separately.
Eleven days later, on August 31, Watts posted her challenge on X, asking why no male voices on the left would confront Piker’s fans directly.
Any male podcasters, pundits or politicians going to speak out against how Hasan Piker doxes and harasses women in our party or nah?
Longwell answered the next morning. Her reply is a long-form X “note tweet” that truncates through the platform’s own API, so what follows reproduces only the fragments made publicly visible — not a claim to the complete post. Longwell wrote that when she said on a podcast “that an affiliation with Piker would hurt Democrats (fact check: true) the deluge of [threats, lies, and attacks]…” that came back at her was “really next level and clearly designed to intimidate critics into silence,” adding that she was “pretty used to it after fighting with MAGA psychos all these years.”
...when I said on a pod a while back that an affiliation with Piker would hurt Democrats (fact check: true) the deluge of [threats, lies, and attacks]... was really next level and clearly designed to intimidate critics into silence... I'm pretty used to it after fighting with MAGA psychos all these years.
Mediaite built a story around Longwell’s reply the same week. Longwell did not itemize what the “threats, lies, and attacks” specifically contained, and as of publication neither Piker nor any other Bulwark staffer had issued a further public statement about the exchange.
Piker, 35, streams under the handle HasanAbi to roughly 3.1 million Twitch followers and 1.94 million YouTube subscribers — a combined audience that had generated more than 1.2 billion total views as of August 22, 2026. He is the nephew of Cenk Uygur, founder of The Young Turks, where Piker got his start before going independent in January 2020. He describes himself as a leftist and a socialist commentator.
The Democratic Socialists of America has publicly claimed him — defending him by name against an April 2026 House resolution condemning his rhetoric — though Piker has never confirmed formal DSA membership himself. He has campaigned for DSA-aligned candidates, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s 2026 Democratic Senate primary, which El-Sayed won. That relationship is exactly what the Longwell-Miller argument in April was about: whether a candidate who accepts Piker’s help pays a political price, and whether the party should discourage the association at all.
Fox News hosts have treated the Democratic Party’s Piker problem as a running joke at the party’s expense. “This is the bed the Democrats made,” one Fox segment argued, while another predicted “karma will catch up with this guy.” That commentary sits alongside a separate, distinct claim: on August 17, 2026, Piker said he is “lawyering up” to sue Fox contributor Scott Jennings, Salem Media, and potentially Fox News for defamation, arguing a viral “lynchings” clip of him was deceptively edited. Piker said the fallout has left him “getting inundated with death threats, so much more than ever before.” That is Piker claiming to be a target himself — a different and unresolved allegation from the harassment Longwell says she experienced, and this piece does not treat one as proof of the other.
Longwell’s account is also not the first time Piker’s fanbase has faced this specific accusation. A 2022 incident, documented by KnowYourMeme, involved a different online critic who said Piker’s audience harassed her after a public disagreement — a separate case from years earlier, cited here only as prior context, not as corroboration of the Longwell claim. Congress, meanwhile, has weighed in formally: Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Mike Lawler (R-NY) co-sponsored an April 29, 2026 bipartisan House resolution condemning both Piker and commentator Candace Owens by name for antisemitic rhetoric, and Rep. Torres separately sent Twitch’s parent company, Amazon, a 2024 letter calling Piker “dangerous.”
Piker has also given his own account of the pressure campaign he says he is under, describing what he calls a coordinated harassment effort aimed at silencing him — the inverse of the claim Longwell has now made about his fans.
Nothing about this dispute has been resolved. Longwell has not detailed the specific threats she says she received, has not said whether she reported any of them to platforms or law enforcement, and has not walked back her April assessment of Piker. Piker has not responded directly to Longwell’s Sept. 1 post, and The Bulwark has not issued an institutional statement beyond Longwell’s own account and Charen’s April column. The underlying argument — whether the Democratic Party can or should keep Piker at arm’s length while he commands nearly five million combined followers — remains exactly where it was in April: unsettled, and now with a harassment allegation layered on top of it.
Sarah Longwell, Publisher of The Bulwark, says that after she publicly warned Democrats against affiliating with streamer Hasan Piker in April 2026, she absorbed a wave of threats and attacks from his fans she calls “really next level.” The claim followed an August 20 livestream in which Piker warned Jewish Americans that visible Israel support would invite violence — a remark six sitting Democrats condemned by name — and a public challenge from Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts asking why no one on the left would confront Piker’s fanbase. Piker has separately claimed he himself is the target of a defamation-driven harassment and death-threat campaign tied to Fox contributor Scott Jennings. Both claims are documented, on-the-record statements by the people making them; neither has been independently adjudicated, and this piece treats them as distinct.
