Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:31 on 25 August 2026

I think the best way to think of the guy is as the Rush Limbaugh of the left. Or perhaps the Joe Rogan of the left. Both things that many Democrats have wished for, for many years. And now that they have it, they are complaining.

Of course he says things that sometimes don’t play well in Peoria. He’s an entertainer, out to entertain his audience. He’s not a politician, out to win office. And yes, he’s an entertainer, not a serious political analyst. Just like Limbaugh and Rogan.

He spends a huge chunk of most days, on average about seven hours, streaming on Twitch. He doesn’t have a script; it’s just one long stream-of-consciousness rant. So of course sometimes some things come out of his mouth that he probably shouldn’t have said. The only surprise is that it doesn’t happen even more often.

So far as the quote that is causing all the recent brouhaha, here it is:

If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.

I don’t know how people don’t recognize how dangerous this predicament is, how dangerous this is for Jews.

You’re running around basically tying your entire identity to a country that inevitably will be seen as Jewish Isis, and you’re saying, as Jews, this is all we care about. You’re making antisemitism worse.

Not, overall, an explicit call for violence against Jews. Sure, if you parse it out and think about it, it does carry the at least the whiff of an assertion that if Jews stand by Israel, they deserve what is coming to them. But, critically, it stops short of explicitly saying that.

And yes, there is a bad history behind such insinuations. Hitler once said:

If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

Still, if you leave a bundle of $100 bills on the dash of an unlocked car parked in a questionable neighbourhood, and come back some hours later to find it missing, saying that it was only to be expected that your money vanished is not the same thing as saying that you deserved it and the thief did nothing wrong.

This is, in other words, consistent with my thesis above that he is an entertainer who streams for a huge chunk of his waking hours and who sometimes (and inevitably) lets loose something that looks bad out of rhetorical context, and this case bad in historical context. Not so consistent with the one that he’s a left-wing extremist slavering for the blood of his adversaries, a latter-day Pol Pot or Mao Zedong.

Which is not to say that Abdul El-Sayed is wrong for distancing himself from Piker. The two are in entirely different businesses. Piker only has to sustain a loyal audience, and audiences need not represent the population as a whole. El-Sayed has to appeal to a swing state electorate, and, as Ronald Reagan (whatever you or I think of his politics, a highly successful politician) once observed: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Publicly distancing himself, is, in other words, probably the optimal course of action for El-Sayed.