It is frustrating and unjust that Abdul El-Sayed's relationship with leftist influencer Hasan Piker has become a discourse bonanza, while Donald Trump's relationship with right-wing influencer Laura Loomer is treated as old news. Loomer is, by any rational measure, the more influential figure. Administration officials she targeted were purged from the National Security Council, and on Friday, she claimed credit for the deportation of British right-wing troll Milo Yiannopoulos, who'd become her enemy. Loomer is also openly bigoted in a way that outstrips the most offensive things Piker has ever said. Over the weekend, she called Angie Nixon, the Democratic Senate nominee in Florida, a 'ghetto bitch' who speaks 'Ebonics.'

But noting this unfairness, as many progressives are now doing, is not going to make El-Sayed's Piker problem go away. We can and should denounce double standards, but successful candidates must also navigate them. And right now, El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, is letting this one trip him up. Piker is novel because he's the left-wing incarnation of a type that, until recently, mainly existed on the right: the shock jock. Stomping on liberal taboos seems to energize him, whether that means praising the Houthis in Yemen, defending the Chinese occupation of Tibet, or calling for 'Marxist-Leninist' discipline in the Democratic Party.

The debate over Piker isn't just about tactics—it's about control of the party's future. Piker, an avatar of the Democratic Party's insurgent left, is hostile to other parts of the Democratic coalition. He doesn't just want to make room for anti-Zionism in the Democratic Party—he wants to make Zionism anathema. He once said that any 'Zionist tendency' should be treated the same way as 'rabid' neo-Nazism, and that no one who's ever expressed 'positive feelings about the State of Israel' belongs in public office. For most American Jews, the land of Israel is bound up with their faith. That alone doesn't give them the right to any particular piece of real estate; the Bible is not a land deed. But many are deeply threatened by what they see as a left-wing drive to drum Zionists out of public life.