WASHINGTON — Florida Sen. Rick Scott admonished Democrats for the vile rhetoric of left-wing livestreamer Hasan Piker, who suggested the lawmaker needs to be killed.
During a recent livestream, Piker declared that “if you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott.”
Scott (R-Fla.) has since pushed for Yale University to lose funding for allowing Piker to speak at an event.
“He wants me killed. He wants every capitalist murdered,” Scott bemoaned matter-of-factly on “Fox News Sunday.” “He said that we deserve 9/11. He’s clearly antisemitic. Democrats are campaigning with this guy.”
“The Democrat Party supports this stuff,” he added. “Yale, if they want to go support somebody that wants to be a capitalist murdered in this country, right, so I don’t want them to get any federal funding. I mean, it’s pretty simple to me. They shouldn’t be doing this.”
Scott also stressed that “these universities can do whatever they want,” but they can’t expect federal funding if “they want to support people that want to murder me and murder capitalists and are antisemitic and say that Americans deserve 9/11.”
“There’s no way my taxpayer money from Florida should be going to these places,” he further argued.
Prior to his rise to fame in politics, Scott made a fortune co-founding the Columbia Hospital Corporation. Under his watch, the company was fined $1.7 billion and faced over a dozen convictions for defrauding Medicare, Medicaid, and other social benefits programs.
At the time, it was described as the largest healthcare fraud case in the country.
Publicly, Scott has denied knowledge of the fraud that took place during his tenure, but has taken responsibility for it, describing it as “hard lessons” he learned.
He had invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination numerous times during a deposition in the matter.
The feds never charged Scott with criminal wrongdoing. Ultimately, after getting pressured to step down by the board, Scott got stock options of over $300 million and a $10 million severance package.
Scott is the second-wealthiest member of the Senate, after Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV), with a fortune of over half a billion dollars, according to Quiver Quantitative.
Piker, a nephew of “Young Turks” Cenk Uygur, is infamous for his incendiary and, at times, cruel rhetoric.
In a 2019 stream, Piker declared that “America deserved 9/11″ and later said that the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack was a “direct consequence” of Israeli actions, adding that if the terror group engaged in rape, it “doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”
Piker has also defended the US-designated terrorist group Hezbollah and the use of the slur “cracker.” He also despicably gushed over the “brave mujahideen” for injuring Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas).
Eventually, he conceded that some of those remarks were wrong.
Democrats have been divided over how to deal with Piker, given his clout within the progressive movement and concerns about cancel culture.
Recently, Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed campaigned with him, and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) argued that pols who don’t engage with people like Piker “will cost us future elections.”
