The Proud Boys Love Cancel Culture Now and are grouping to get Hasan Piker removed from Twitch

In recent days, Tarrio told me, he and the rest of the Proud Boys have been mostly focused on targeting employees in government and higher education, but his white whale is far more prominent: the left-wing influencer Hasan Piker. Tarrio told me that his campaign to get Piker kicked off Twitch wasn’t about anything “in reference to Charlie.” As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber recently wrote, Piker condemned the shooting and anyone who attempted to justify it, though he has at times used his own violent rhetoric in the past. Piker was temporarily banned from Twitch earlier this year, when he said people who truly oppose Medicare fraud should “kill” Senator Rick Scott. Still, Tarrio seemed to sense that the post-assassination cultural climate would be friendly to an attempt to go after Piker. “I was banned” from Twitch, he told me, “and I didn’t say half the shit he did.”

Tarrio told me that he and other Proud Boys have teamed up in a group chat with other right-wingers who all want to get Piker kicked off Twitch by running a bigger and more sustained version of their other active mass-firing campaign. They have been circulating Piker’s past controversial statements to companies that advertise on Twitch, in an attempt to pressure the streaming platform, he told me.

“That’s one more federal agent that’s coming after me,” Piker told me over the phone late on Tuesday night, joking about Tarrio’s reported history as a federal informant. (Tarrio previously told Reuters that he did not “recall” ever having worked undercover in this way, but today he told me that he “never denied it.” He added: “As a matter of fact, I said it on my podcast.”) In May, Customs and Border Protection briefly detained Piker, a natural-born U.S. citizen, when he returned to the country from an overseas trip. He did not seem particularly concerned by the Proud Boys’ campaign against him. Piker said he has weathered attacks from groups with “a lot more institutional persuasive power than the fucking Proud Boys.” (I also asked him about the comments that got him booted from Twitch earlier this year. “It wasn’t a call to assassination,” Piker said. It was an attempt to say that Rick Scott shows that Republicans “don’t actually care about Medicare fraud.”)