On this day in 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat for the national anthem before a preseason game in protest of racist oppression. After a season of protests and media turmoil, including abuse from President-elect Donald Trump, Kaepernick left the 49ers. He never played in the NFL again.
Good morning! Andrew here. Do you ever wonder why it is Donald Trump is wildly unpopular and yet Americans don’t seem very enthused about voting for Democrats? There are plenty of reasons, sure, but we have one more potential explanation for this phenomenon this week.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look at the opposition party’s opposition to Hasan Piker, against whom senior Democrats are expending serious energy just two months out from midterm election day. We also consider Darline Graham’s win in the Republican South Carolina Senate runoff and another insane day in Trump’s stupid trade war with Canada. Time to read on.
Eyes Off the Ball
Donald Trump is leading a deeply corrupt, fascist administration that seeks to punish and imprison his enemies – big and small, real and perceived. The unpopular president and his team are laying the groundwork to try to steal the 2026 midterms, and they’re not even trying to hide it.
Democrats in Washington, meanwhile, are hyper-focused on… condemning a left-wing podcaster, Hasan Piker, and distorting his comments criticizing Zionists as a way to marginalize and block the rise of anti-Israel voices on the left.
With less than 10 weeks to go before the election, the opposition party is using this crucial time to demonstrate their continued fealty to Israel – despite its deep and growing political unpopularity in the U.S., its horrifying genocide in Gaza, and the ruinous Iran war that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dragged America’s idiot president into.
Some Democratic lawmakers have even used the controversy over Piker to try to undermine Abdul El-Sayed, the party’s Senate nominee in Michigan – making clear how little they care about gaining power to incapacitate Trump.
The latest Piker row stemmed from his remarks about how it’s “dangerous” for some Jews to teach “people the idea that Jews are monolithic” in their support for Israel.
“People don’t fuck with Israel any longer,” Piker said. “And 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.”
Piker was responding to a Michigan Democratic congressional candidate’s refusal to back El-Sayed until he makes “some serious outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community” – with El-Sayed’s apparent offenses being his opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and his having won the primary despite $32 million spent against him by the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.
“This media narrative presents Jews as single-minded and singularly invested in the continuation of the Israeli apartheid,” Piker continued, adding: “I don’t know how people don’t recognize how dangerous this predicament is… 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.”
Pro-Israel Democrats have treated these comments as if Piker was calling for violence, when he very obviously wasn’t. Indeed, his argument is a common one: The idea that Jews universally support Israel, its genocide in Gaza, and apartheid encourages antisemitism. Of course it’s dangerous.