Conservative commentator Scott Jennings is facing a legal threat over a bogus racism claim made against a popular left-wing streamer.
During his nationally syndicated radio show last Tuesday, Jennings, 48, aired a compilation of clips from Twitch influencer Hasan Piker, during a segment he called an “exploration of the radical socialist streamer.”
Piker, 35, has over 3 million followers on Twitch, and live-streams on the platform for up to eight hours each day.
After playing the spliced-together clips, Jennings said, “Now [Abdul] El-Sayed’s best friend is out there calling for Black voters to be lynched”—referring to the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee.
“Beneath all the smiles and dancing videos, there’s nothing but hate and violence in the heart of these communists,” Jennings added.
Jennings, who is also regularly on CNN and has been talked of as the potential new White House press secretary, posted the clip on his radio show’s social media channel, saying “Here [sic] him in his OWN WORDS.”
On Aug. 11, Jennings also shared a video where Piker appears to say “I don’t give a f— what Black people care about,” and mentions going “back to a better time when lynchings were happening.”
But an investigation by Snopes found that the video Jennings shared, including the derogatory remarks about Black people and him claiming he wishes the U.S. would return to a time of lynchings, is “heavily edited and presents Piker’s spoken words without full context, and in some cases out of order.”
“As such, it is misleading,” Snopes found.
Snopes found that videos had fragments of Piker’s words “stitched together out of context and out of order to twist their original import.”
They added, “A full review of Piker’s unedited remarks confirms Jennings falsely claimed Piker said he was in favor of bringing back lynchings. In the original stream, Piker’s remarks on lynchings were sarcastic reactions to a user’s chat comment and opinions expressed by someone else in a separate video.”
Piker is now planning legal action over what he considers to be defamatory comments saying the filing “seems unavoidable.”
“This kind of defamation is completely unacceptable,” Piker told Status. “It’s exactly how normal people perceive mainstream media to operate, and it’s a real crisis of credibility. I think someone has to push back against it at some point.”
The Daily Beast has contacted reps for Piker and Jennings for comment.
Piker noted that the viral clips, taken from his lengthy Twitch streams, have become increasingly “deceptive” and have been deliberately stripped of their original context.
The self-described Marxist has previously courted controversy with quotes that still haunt him, including saying “America deserved 9/11,” “There’s a lot we can learn from” the Chinese Communist Party, and “Let the streets soak in … red capitalist blood.”
“I stream for eight hours a day, seven days a week,” Piker told Rolling Stone this month. “I’m gonna say some dumb s–t. But at the end of the day, we’re talking about more than 10,000 hours of content, and they’ve got like four quotes they keep hammering on to be like, ‘This guy’s a dangerous radical.’ It’s very silly.”
Piker also told Status that many traditional media broadcasters do not comprehend the dynamics of streaming, where creators can read extreme viewer comments and react to them in real time. When they are clipped and shared on social media, the context is often removed.
“Even like the 10 seconds prior they don’t watch. Or 10 seconds after, from these heavily edited” clips, Piker told Status. “I think a lot of people don’t understand the medium, which I don’t even fault them for.”
While he said there are some people “who understand the medium and are cynically weaponizing it,” he did not lump Jennings in that category, saying he did not believe he did not know what Twitch is.
“I don’t think he understands the format that I occupy,” Piker said, believing he was simply handed content by Republican political operatives to fire up dissent ahead of the midterms.
Piker told Status he had been forced to cut back on public appearances and tighten security, adding, “I am getting inundated with death threats, so much more than ever before. It’s nothing I haven’t grown accustomed to.”
