I’m A Student At UT Austin. What Inviting Hasan Piker Reveals About Campus Values.

On Wednesday, September 30, University Democrats at the University of Texas at Austin will host Hasan Piker for a discussion of topics “ranging from immigration to genocide, to the future of the Democratic Party.” Piker has an extensive record of expressing support for terrorist organizations, glorifying authoritarian regimes, and treating political violence as entertainment. University Democrats invited him anyway. For them, his history of reprehensible statements is not a bug. It’s a feature.

The demand tells its own story. When University Democrats announced the event, tickets for the roughly 460-seat auditorium sold out within 20 minutes, and more than 2,500 people registered. This is not a fringe booking nobody noticed. Thousands of my peers lined up to attend.

Ask the organizers why, and the answer is candid. University Democrats’ president says the “vast majority” of students are “very supportive” and dismisses critics as “a few online trolls who thrive off of hate,” casting Piker as the voice of students “who believe the status quo of American and Texas politics is simply not good enough.” The theory, on campus and in the radical wing of the Democratic Party, is that Piker reaches millions of young voters Democrats have lost, so his rhetoric is simply the price of admission. But this gets the relationship backward. His audience did not materialize despite his statements. The provocation is the product.

What followed is the debate now consuming our campus. UT approved the event, then UTPD called organizers to say the original venue was no longer recommended due to safety concerns. University Democrats accused the administration of “shadow canceling” the event, and the group’s president claimed death threats have started arriving, while the university says it is applying its speaker policies evenly.

Governor Abbott, Senator Cruz, and Congressman Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, have all condemned the event, and Piker has answered by invoking the First Amendment. The argument has become entirely about process: venues, safety plans, viewpoint discrimination, and who is canceling whom.

That debate is worth having. But the process fight has crowded out the question underneath it: what, exactly, 2,500 of my classmates are lining up to hear.

The record is not subtle. Piker said “America deserved 9/11” in 2019 and told Axios this month that the United States has committed more terrorism than al-Qaeda “pound for pound.” He told viewers, “If you cared about Medicare fraud, or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott.” When asked to disavow his claim that “Hamas is a thousand times better” than Israel, an organization that murdered at least 43 Americans on October 7, he replied, “I do mean it.” He said it “doesn’t matter if f*cking rapes happened on October 7,” though a U.N. mission found reasonable grounds to believe they did. He does “not have a single issue with Hezbollah as a form of militancy,” and praised their founder, Hassan Nasrallah. Piker calls Houthi attacks against both the United States, neighboring countries, and Israel “not only moral, but just,” and has nothing but praise for U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations with American blood on their hands.

Piker’s comments directly target Jewish and Israeli students at UT Austin. Piker compares Zionists to neo-Nazis. Zionism is simply the movement for Jewish self-determination and statehood in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland, a right the international community affirms for every other people, yet contests when Jews assert it.

He has called Jews “inbred,” and warned in August that pro-Israel advocacy by American Jews will provoke someone to “take action… against American Jews” because we are “making antisemitism worse.”

A speaker who blames American Jews in advance for violence against them is about to draw one of the largest political crowds this campus has seen in years, and the loudest argument about his visit concerns room capacity.

The real question for University Democrats is why, knowing all this, they decided to platform him. UT Austin is a public university; Piker has a right to speak, and University Democrats have every right to invite him. After all, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

But freedom of association does not shield a choice from scrutiny. Just because you can host a speaker does not mean that you should. The same free speech that protects his appearance protects UT students’ right to say exactly what this invitation reveals about the values of the organization that extended it.

University Democrats looked at a man who justified 9/11, joked about a hypothetical political assassination of a sitting U.S. senator, cheered for Hamas and several other terrorist organizations, dismissed the rapes of October 7, called Jews inbred, warned that American Jews are bringing violence on themselves, and decided he was the right person to headline their largest political event in years. That is not a booking error. That is a value statement.

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Matan Shapira is a 2nd-year student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Master’s program at UT Austin and a board member of the local chapter of Students Supporting Israel.

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