Hasan Piker, the leftist Twitch streamer and GOP 2026 midterms boogeyman, is being dragged again by bad-faith actors, based on a clip going around from his new sit-down interview with Axios. The misleading headline the outlet put on its story was perfectly calibrated to maximize outrage: “Hasan Piker on ‘The Axios Show’: America worse than al-Qaeda ‘pound for pound,’” it reads.
The reaction was swift. Scott Jennings, the right-wing CNN commentator and Donald Trump sycophant, quickly weighed in to try and mock the Democrats. Liberal anti-gun activist Shannon Watts, who has repeatedly condemned Piker, snarked that she was “Excited to find out if this was a joke, satire or hyperbole,” taken “out of context,” or the result of “bad faith clipping.”
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who campaigned with Piker during the primary and has faced repeated media questions about the streamer, clearly felt forced to distance himself from Piker’s latest comments, telling Axios, “I do not agree with this statement… nor do I give much weight to the statements made by a social media streamer.”
At the time of writing, Axios has only released partial clips of the interview, compiled into a 56-second preview. But when Piker agreed that America was worse, “pound for pound,” than al-Qaeda, he was not speaking generally, but specifically in terms of killing people.
“You once said that America is the top dog in terrorism,” Axios’s Alex Thompson said, to which Piker responded, “Yes.” Thompson then asked: “Do you think America then is worse than al-Qaeda?”
“Pound for pound, as far as the number of deaths, yes, we have caused tremendous terror all around the world,” Piker replied.
Piker’s comment, while obviously controversial, is objectively true. The U.S. war in Iraq, launched based on lies, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The total death toll from America’s broader so-called “War on Terror” is staggering: Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that 432,000 civilians were “killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023.” Going beyond the so-called ‘war on terror,’ back to the dark days of the Cold War, the United States also killed at least 300,000 civilians in Vietnam, and up to 150,000 civilians in Laos, and helped the Indonesian military kill as many as 1 million people in anti-Communist massacres.
Terror attacks by al-Qaeda have killed thousands of innocent people over the past three decades, but in terms of “the number of deaths” there is no real comparison to be made.
U.S. terror attacks have increased on Donald Trump’s watch. In the clips released by Axios, Piker also pointed to what the U.S. under Trump “did in Minab,” where the U.S. military is believed to be responsible for airstrikes on a school that killed 150 people, including more than 100 children, on the first day of the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. “If you’re killing 140 schoolgirls, that is an act of terror,” Piker said.
Piker’s Axios interview comes as the mainstream media, right-wingers, and pro-Israel Democrats lead an aggressive cancellation campaign against him, seeking to make the streamer the top campaign issue in the 2026 midterm elections – rather than, say, Trump’s failed, pointless, and absurdly costly war in Iran, which continues to send energy prices soaring and is threatening to wreck the global economy.
Unlike many media outlets obsessed with Piker, Axios, to its credit, actually interviewed him and let him defend himself. But the outlet clearly wanted to stoke the controversy around Piker further.
However, Piker’s comments aren’t so different from what President Donald Trump has said about the U.S.
In 2017, during Trump’s first term, Bill O’Reilly questioned him about his respect for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
When O’Reilly said, “Putin’s a killer,” Trump responded: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”
Yes, Trump lies all the time, but his point there was correct.
So was Piker’s.
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In germany we know that the US is the biggest threat to the world 🤣. The US is far worse than Alqaida, its a fact.
They are so many real issues going on in this country to focus on Hasan Piker, over and over, like a punching bag! It doesn’t matter if Piker is controversial or not, because it doesn’t bring the gas prices down. I understand Piker is speaking about subjects that no one has the balls to talk about, about the actions and involvement of the USA. in all the atrocities around the world, stamped and funded by this country! At the end of the day, vote in November. Focus. The goal is to flip the tables. Vote for Progressives, but vote. Don’t stay on the sidelines if you don’t like what we see everyday since Trump took office.