Sepideh linked to this video of Hasan Piker interviewing Melat Kiros in the comments yesterday. It’s worth a watch, for a couple of reasons. First, Hasan Piker is not the devil. He might have said a few dumb/outrageous things in his streaming career, but this interview shows that he’s smart and capable. Second, Kiros is smart and quick on her feet. She also cares about the right things (housing, healthcare) and has the same views on Israel and Gaza as most twenty-something progressives. Finally, she asked for money, and she’s a good example of how even a good candidate running against a very uninspiring opponent struggles to fundraise. The Kat Abughazalehs of the world, who can raise $4 million for a primary challenge, are few and far between. Kiros has raised $380K so far, which is a good amount, but she thinks she needs more to get the name recognition that she needs to win the primary on June 30. (The video doesn’t embed so you’ll have to click to watch it.)

A little more on Hasan Piker: I don’t hold any brief for the guy. But the outsized effort to paint him as some kind of a horrific crazy leftist is damaging to the Democratic brand, because most of what he believes is believed by a majority of Democrats. And it’s popular stuff that young people care about. Most recently, Josh Gottheimer is dishing to Fox that many of his colleagues secretly have a problem with Piker but won’t say anything about it. I would bet a big pile of money that most of Gottheimer’s colleagues had never heard of Piker until some consultants decided that it was time to get the left wing of the party in line, and chose Piker as a scapegoat. Hasan Piker just isn’t that important — and he’s getting 100X the scrutiny of far more popular and execrable right wing voices, starting with Joe Rogan, who is so “apolitical” that he spends his time kissing Trump’s ass in the oval office.

Moving on to AOC, I’ve cued this video up to the point where she starts to talk about her first orientation meeting after being elected. The meeting was chaired by the guy she beat, Joe Crowley, who was head of the Democratic caucus in his lame duck period. A Congressman at the meeting whispered in her ear, “Man, it’s such a shame that that girl beat him.” Her reply, “You mean me?”

Finally, I saw this on Bluesky and thought it pretty much encapsulated the whole Blue MAGA “if only for the stupid voters” mentality:

Oddly enough, some of those “stupid” voters did make their way to the polling booth, where they voted for Donald Trump for some not deep-seated reasons, starting with the belief that Trump would fix the economy that was obviously broken. Barack Obama has not made any of the kinds of noise that needs to be made to get attention in the current information economy. He’s hewing closely to the norms of the ex-presidency which Trump threw out the window. I don’t know how anyone who doesn’t follow politics closely would know anything about Obama’s current views on any issue. Yet it’s the stupid voters fault that Democrats lose, just like it’s always those meddling kids fault on Scooby-Doo.

(There must be some law that when someone posts something calling some group stupid, their post will inevitably include a misspelling. In this case, it’s “Barack” not “Barrack”.)