Hasan Piker insists Abdul El-Sayed asked him to 'stump' for Michigan campaign amid backlash

"He asked me to stump for him, and I had not considered that ever before," Piker said. "I'd never really delivered a speech like that before."

Piker added that he had previously decided to get more involved with politics through New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's campaign but did not face significant backlash for that effort compared to campaigning for El-Sayed. He explained that after campaigning for El-Sayed, establishment Democrats and think tanks like Third Way came out to attack him.

"I'll admit I didn't realize how much the media would think that this is different," he continued. "I had no idea that in the mindset of, you know, people in D.C., in the mindset of like, establishment media, doing a rally with a politician was apparently far more consequential than flying out to Dearborn and, like, working out with him, doing profiles, fundraising for him. I didn't realize that it was a very different thing," Piker said.

He continued, "I did not realize that people would get so mad about it because, from my perspective, who cares if I'm doing a rally with a politician? I'm like, I've already had the guy on, like, a hundred times on the broadcast. You know, I've fundraised for him. I like him a lot. I have my disagreements with him, too, of course. But that was when the onslaught came in."

"I am not interested in a conversation about a social media person in California. And to folks who want to make this about a social media person in California, let's not forget what actually matters in our politics, what our politics are really about," El-Sayed told reporters during Saturday's state Democratic Party Nominating Convention. 

He added, "I don't ever want my comments to hurt anybody's feelings. It's important to me that people understand that I take serious [sic] the pain of all communities in this state. But I don't want to have a conversation about a Twitch streamer in California. This is not a serious conversation."

In a comment to Fox News Digital, El-Sayed also apologized for his past comments made in response to an attack on a Michigan synagogue in March, where he remarked, "Hurt people, hurt people."

"To anybody who feels like my comments may have been hurtful, I'm really sorry. That was not my intention. We condemned that terrorist attack. We condemned it outright," El-Sayed told Fox News Digital. "What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn't the time for context and you don't ever want to trample somebody's pain."