Socialist Hasan Piker sues his conservative counterpart for “violent racist” portrait | US News

Prominent political commentator and socialist influencer Hasan Piker is suing his conservative counterpart Scott Jennings for $72.5 million over comments on a podcast that he says portrayed him as “a violent racist” who advocated the lynching of black people.

Piker’s defamation lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, says Jennings misrepresented his comments in a podcast and subsequent social media post in August.

“He falsely told his listeners that Mr. Piker had a ‘plan to return our country to lynchings.’ And then he falsely told his social media followers that Mr. Piker ‘says the United States should resume lynching against black people,'” the document states.

Piker, a popular California-based streamer on the Twitch platform, said Jennings, a political commentator for CNN who hosts his own independent podcast, the Scott Jennings Show, deliberately misrepresented the remarks to make them appear to be his true opinions.

In truth, according to the lawsuit, Piker was “clearly ridiculing” the extremist position of a commenter on a previous Twitch broadcast, who said “woke” prosecutors deserved blame for policies believed to harm Black Americans.

The episode took place in August 2024, according to the lawsuit, and centered around a “cropped, shortened and re-arranged” 42-second video that initially circulated on conservative social media accounts and consisted of a mix of comments from Piker on various topics.

It included a clip of what the lawsuit called “sarcastic mockery” by Piker during his own broadcast of the position of one of the two black commentators, but which he said was edited to remove crucial context and make it appear as though they were his own views.

According to the lawsuit, Piker, on his show, summarized what the commentator had said. “He said, ‘We need more Klansmen, okay? Can we go back to a better time when lynchings happened? That’s what I love as a black man,'” the court document says.

But the “manipulated” video, which Jennings released on his podcast on Aug. 11, omitted the words “he said” and other contextual clues, such as Piker’s obvious ridicule of the commentator’s position, he said.

Jennings, according to the filing, “added his own caption to the video, presented as a direct quote from Mr. Piker: ‘Let’s go back to a better time when lynchings happened.’

“Mr. Piker never uttered these words. The original broadcast did not contain this statement. Neither did the manipulated video that Mr. Jennings chose to broadcast.

“Mr. Jennings turned a sarcastic question, expressly attributed to and addressed to someone else, into a blatantly false first-person statement of Mr. Piker’s purported beliefs, and then relayed that false statement to his viewers.”

The lawsuit also says Jennings was publicly known to be in the running to become Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary at the time, providing “further reason to attack a prominent left-wing commentator that the president himself had criticized.”

Piker is demanding a jury trial and seeking $27.5 million in compensatory damages, plus an additional $45 million in punitive damages.

Jennings has not commented publicly on the lawsuit. In an Aug. 11 article on

“Abdul El-Sayed’s best friend and campaign partner believes the United States should resume lynching against black people.

“Listen for yourself and understand what socialists have in store for the black community. »

The Guardian has contacted Jennings for comment.