This story originally appeared on Them.
Jesse Watters is extremely interested in leftist streamer Hasan Piker wearing a maid outfit. In fact, Fox News itself noted in a social post that the host “can’t resist” the alluring image of a musclebound Piker prancing around in cat ears and an apron during a January 2025 trip to Japan.
Due to his affiliations with progressive Democratic candidates, Piker, a political content creator with millions of followers on Twitch, has become a fixation for the right-wing news network in recent months, and is now mentioned by name with a frequency that rivals transgender people. Specifically, the streamer’s support for Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has put him squarely in the Fox News radar, prompting conservative media to highlight controversial remarks he has made about 9/11, one of which Piker himself called “inappropriate.”
But not content to end there, Watters has continued poring through Piker’s personal history on his show Primetime, dredging up anything his producers think might embarrass Piker — and by extension, Dr. El-Sayed. On the September 29 episode of Primetime, Watters aired footage of Piker pawing and prancing around in a kitty-themed French maid outfit, cleaning his ears.
“That’s the Twitch streamer from California who’s leading the communist bloc through the midterms? That’s Abdul's boy,” Watters says, after airing the footage. “Does Abdul like when he wears a little French maid outfit like that? Whatever floats his boat. All I know, when I was in Paris, maids didn’t dress like that.”
And then, like he’s filling in conservative Mad Libs, Watters concludes, “Although, Barack Obama says the future is female.”
But it’s the start of the clip that’s especially striking. Try not to detect the hint of a smile on Watters’ heavily made-up face as he coos out, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty,” before airing the footage.
The footage itself came from a trip to Japan that Piker undertook with fellow online content creators early last year. In the segment that Watters pulled from, Piker and his friends dress up like maids to work in a maid café — a type of restaurant in which waitresses serve customers in costume that have spread across Japan over the last 25 years. Footage of the playful stunt remains widely available on YouTube. It’s a bit of harmless fun and, at the risk of editorializing, Piker can rock a skirt and some cat ears.
The real story here is Watters’ continuing fixation on Piker, and his pathetic attempt to do some hacky “isn’t a man in woman’s clothes funny?” humor.
But perhaps we should expect no less from a man who can’t talk about Supergirl without airing weird thoughts about bisexual women or who thinks eating fudge makes you gay. The inside of Jesse Watters’ mind must be a strange and terrifying place, but it sure seems to get caught on any form of queer expression that it stumbles across.
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