Progressives this week have grown increasingly frustrated with the oxygen that Democratic lawmakers are wasting invoking the name of left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, warning that too many in the party are falling for a trap that so obviously favors President Donald Trump and Republicans with midterm elections just slightly more than two months away.

“Democrats need to get their shit together. I’m tired of hearing about Hasan,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said in a social media post on Thursday.

“Whatever 3D chess you think you’re playing is only pushing away real people,” Mitchell added. “Stop obsessing over a streamer. We’re fighting authoritarianism here.”

Chuck Idelson, a progressive Democratic voter and retired union official based in California, agreed.

“Exactly,” Idelson said in response to Mitchell’s declaration. “The obsession with Piker is the rabbit hole the GOP is counting on to focus the Democrats on anything other than the horror show of what Trump is doing to this nation. Every Democrat talking about Piker is handing the midterms to Trump.”

As The Independent reports: “All of this is occurring under the spectacle of a national media frenzy surrounding Piker and the Democratic Socialists of America, whom journalists have made the focus of their questions to Democrats of all stripes. And some Democrats are beginning to air publicly their resentment over party leaders like Jeffries falling into what they call a Republican trap.”

While much of the discourse around Piker is taking place on the airwaves and social media, Newsweek reported this week on an Echelon Insights poll conducted in April that “found that Piker remains largely unknown among Democratic voters,” results that underscore “the gap between his enormous online following and his reach with the broader electorate.”

Common Dreams reported earlier this week how critics have viewed the obsession with Piker on the part of establishment Democrats and certain members of the corporate media as a “mass psychosis event.”

“I am begging everybody to spend less time arguing about Hasan Piker and more time attacking Republicans,” said Mike Nellis, a City Councilman in Chicago representing the city’s 32nd Ward, on Friday.

“The election is in about two month,” added Nellis. “Lock the fuck in.”

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