Tom Shillue calls Piker “ridiculous” but rejects the demand that El-Sayed denounce him
Comedian and Fox News contributor, as a co-host of The Five
“Obviously, Hasan Piker is ridiculous. He is a podcaster, he's provocative, he does that, that's his game. But the politicians decided. El-Sayed decided to pal around with him. Why? Because they thought, “I can deal with this controversy because I want his likes, I want his listeners, his viewers.” So he is tied to him. … I don't like that denounce game. You know, I remember we tried that with Obama: “When will you denounce Reverend Wright?” … El-Sayed is on record. He has a terrible record. He's a terrible leftist. So denounce him. Don't say, “When are you going to denounce this other guy?” He's got enough bad things to his name.”
Source and context
Original video
About this source
Fox News' own recording of the twelve-minute opening segment of The Five for 18 September 2026, in which the panel discusses Hasan Piker's Axios Show interview. The segment plays the Axios clips of Piker on Iran's nuclear programme and on Mao Zedong, and the Oval Office exchange in which President Trump called Piker "a terrible liability." This locator carries Shillue's answer, which treats Piker as a provocateur and redirects the dispute to El-Sayed's own record.. Speakers were identified from the broadcast itself: MacCallum names the panel in the opening line and hands to each of them by name, and each speaker was confirmed on camera at their locator. Fox's own @TheFive account attributes the closing lines of this passage to Jones, and Fox's page for the segment attributes "the Democratic Party has allowed itself to be infiltrated by influencers" to Conway.
Archived copy (opens in a new tab)Before the quotation
Conway had just said Piker “goes from vile to violent” and that Democrats should distance themselves from him as they had from Graham Platner. MacCallum turned to Shillue and asked what he thought Joe Biden would make of it all.
After the quotation
Shillue moved on to Reid Hoffman's comments about Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which occupied the rest of the segment. Neither he nor the panel returned to Piker.
How this statement is classified
Case context: Hasan Piker's Axios Show interview claims about terrorism, Iran, China and Israel
The label describes this statement’s response within the context above.
Why this label?
Relative to the case's fixed reference point — the claims Piker made in the Axios Show interview — Shillue minimizes. He grants the criticism in a single word — “ridiculous” — and then reframes the statements as a performer's stock in trade, “he's provocative, he does that, that's his game,” which treats them as predictable rather than serious, and he expressly rejects the demand made elsewhere on this dossier by Mike Rogers and the NRSC that El-Sayed denounce him. The closest competing label is condemns, which loses because “ridiculous” is the whole of his evaluation of the statements; the substance of his answer is that they do not warrant the response they are getting and that El-Sayed's own record is the proper target.
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- Published here
- People and groups discussed
- Hasan Piker, Abdul El-Sayed
Hasan Piker's Axios Show interview claims about terrorism, Iran, China and Israel
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More from this case
Read the full case“So, Harold, respectfully, I know at least one person who's willing to entertain this. His name is Abdul El-Sayed. He's palling around with this guy. He will not disclaim him and the crazy by-the-moment things that he's saying. And I think that Hasan Piker the person is actually even less important than Hasan Piker the performance artist now, because it represents how difficult it is now and will be in 2028 for Democrats to transition from shock-the-conscience crazy talk in the primaries to trying to present themselves as reasonable and semi-capitalist and connected to voters, to everyday voters. The way that some responsible Democrats wanted to distance themselves and their party from Graham Platner and his Nazi tattoo and his abuse of women and his adultery, I think that people should be doing that now with Hasan Piker. Here's the problem with Piker: the Democratic Party has allowed itself to be infiltrated by influencers and streamers and to live online.”Read statement
“These views are so outside the periphery of the most extreme views in either political party in all of politics in America. And the fact — in some ways I'm disappointed we've been giving this nonsense airtime, because he talks about it in ways, I think, to Joey's point, that he almost tries to normalize it. No Democrat, no Republican, no progressive Democrat or liberal Democrat in their right mind subscribes to any of this. I'm a conservative Democrat.”Read statement
“Hasan Piker is going on the podcast and saying the terrible thing … what he said about Mao. And so, you know, like, “Well, Mao did a lot of great things, it was just that cultural revolution part that was a little bit, you know, wasn't good.” And so what it is is you can't talk bad about a communist or a socialist, no matter who they are, because that's what they believe. And so they have to repaint history. Now, Iran being authoritarian, because I guess that's what they believe as well, there are good parts about it. “Let them have a nuclear weapon. It's just, you know, they have a few domestic policies I don't like.” At the end of the day, Hasan Piker is a poster boy for why we should challenge birthright citizenship. His parents come here from Turkey, they go to college, they have a baby, they take him back to Turkey, they raise him there, and then he comes back here to partake in capitalism and talk bad about it.”Read statement