Here’s how Hasan Piker starts each day: working out, shooting the shit. It’s Monday at 8:30 a.m., and we’re in the backyard of a house in West Hollywood, where there’s a makeshift private gym with benches, pull-down machines, and dumbbells galore. This is where the 34-year-old political influencer keeps his thirsted-after body fit, joined by a few other neighborhood characters, including a guy who works on Pod Save America. His Bernese beefcake Kaya tussles with a few other golden-brown dogs. As Piker burns through his 70-minute workout, exhausting himself in the process, he strips his shirt off. An army of girls and gays—not to mention admiring looksmaxxers—would kill to be where I am now, next to Piker, as he pants in a pair of neon shorts with black Calvin Klein boxers poking out and sunlight glinting off the sweat beaded on his chest hairs.
Piker’s trainers fib to me about how much he’s bench-pressing (300 pounds?) before the real number comes out: 175. (His personal best is 285.) The conversation among the seven men and women grows increasingly unhinged, jokes about semen-retention exercises morphing into a discussion about which Hollywood plastic surgeon is least likely to kill you. “The new meta is ballerina cups—women only going for A to B to C cup, max,” Piker muses at one point (“meta” is a gamer-derived term for “state of the art”). “Nick Fuentes is gay,” he says at another, echoing a common attack on the far-right streamer. (“He definitely likes catboy porn,” he adds, referring to an infamous incident on one of Fuentes’s streams, which we will not detail here.) Groans, gossip, and athletic guidance fly from all angles: “Good, Has, get taller!” “Face down, ass up!” Toward the end, Piker starts describing how a chicken wrap he’s been loving recently is very fibrous and “bottom-friendly,” leading another gymgoer to tease him about his diet. “Have I been having anal sex? No,” Piker responds. “I’ve always had nice poops.”
Piker has no filter. That’s one reason he’s the hottest left-wing political commentator online. His “management team” consists of a single guy named David, so he basically has no leash and answers to no one. Every day, tens of thousands of people watch him dissect the news for seven hours on Twitch. A typical stream involves him scrolling frenetically while clicking on links sent by fans in his chat, reacting to the latest viral clips and headlines, dishing with his viewers, and viciously sparring with haters. “America deserved 9/11” is one of his most infamous wisecracks; when Rush Limbaugh died, Piker played a clip of a dancing crab in celebration and vigorously bounced around his room. Piker’s one of a new breed of streamers, like Adin Ross and Sneako, who are shaping the worldview of kids who never watch MSNBC or read The New York Times. In this online mirror world, Piker is the “himbo gateway drug” introducing a legion of kids to progressive ideals like Medicare for All.
And then there’s Gaza. Young people across America are calling out what they see as Democratic politicians’ complicity in a US-backed war that is more and more widely being called a genocide, as Palestinians starve. (Republican support of the war has been taken as a given, although MAGA congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has broken rank.) Piker has opposed Israel’s offensive since the start. It’s the online arena where the most progressive but also most-right-wing ideologies are taking hold now. In this unshackled world animated by constant beefs, Hasan is hated by both the right and center. He’s a demigod and a demon, a crusader for good and a parasite on society, an empathetic hero and a so-called terrorist sympathizer. He claims the FBI might be surveilling him. Haters say they want him dead. As political experts sound alarms about authoritarianism, he’s fighting back, one expletive and brain rot–filled livestream at a time.
After the gym sessions, Piker, Kaya, and I load back into his black Mercedes-Benz and drive to his place, a large townhouse with a Suzuki motorcycle in the front and a slender pool in the backyard. Piker dips for a second to freshen up, leaving me to explore the house. Fan art litters the walls, and TVs, hats (TRUMP PENCE 2020; JESUS IS MY BOSS; KOREA VETERAN), and Zyn containers are scattered around. A set of shelves contains a slew of books including Noam Chomsky’s Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, Tony Tulathimutte’s incel epic Rejection, and numerous volumes of Marvel, Naruto, and Death Note manga and comics. He isn’t beating the socialist-who-owns-commodities allegations, but his house feels more like the product of a nerd who would write “Anime, Swords, and Free Public Transportation” in his Hinge bio than it does someone obsessed with luxury excess.
Piker suggests we chill in his studio, which is even more chaotically cluttered than the rest of the house: There’s a shelf stacked with rare World of Warcraft collectibles, a basketball, and a vinyl record of rapper OsamaSon’s Jump Out. One corner contains a colossal Labubu doll encased in plastic; behind it, there’s a cutout of Bernie Sanders’s classic diva pose at the inauguration and a poster of Barack Obama with Queen Elizabeth II. Cameras and mics flank an intricate recording setup that could pass for the bank of security devices at a Westfield mall. Piker, who’s put on a black merch T-shirt for the streamer Vakyrae, sits across from me and slurps on an iced coffee.
As we talk, I sense that Piker wanted to hold the interview here so he could keep an eye on his screens. His stream doesn’t start for an hour, but the chat’s buzzing with fans impatiently waiting for him to log on. He’s remarkably energized for a guy who just finished a punishing workout and spent the previous day playing basketball with influencer Ludwig Ahgren and other friends. His team lost the first game but came in clutch later on. “I had to show these nerds what’s up,” he says with a laugh.
By the way, for anyone looking to get buff and clutch games like him, here’s Piker’s supplement stack:
- 1 espresso shot (pre-workout)
- Four creatine pills
- Fish oil (“I don’t eat seafood”)
- Zinc
- Ashwagandha (“I don’t know if it works; I just take it”)
- Minoxidil and Finasteride (“I am technically on HRT [Hormone Replacement Therapy]. I have DHT blockers [for hair loss] that I’ve been taking for years now at this point.”)
Piker grew up in Turkey, developing his leftist worldview against the backdrop of Prime Minister and eventual President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime. He moved to America, rushed a frat at Rutgers University to impress girls, and nepo baby’d himself into working for his uncle, Cenk Uygur, who owned the left-wing news network The Young Turks. Piker went full-time streaming in 2020, and has since become the most popular political creator on Twitch, with over 2.9 million followers. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and numerous other celebs have hopped on his stream. His work ethic is terrifying; in 2020, he claims, he spent 42% of his time on camera—more than 10 hours a day. “I’m an addict,” he says. “I’ve been an addict my whole life, so everything I do, I get addicted: Twitch streaming, working out, eating healthy.”
Piker describes his career as a protracted and so far largely unsuccessful effort to “pull the Democrats to be more radical, to be actually progressive.” While he’s beloved by many leftists, he’s often reviled by liberals—the centrists whose views are largely reflected by the party leadership. This became especially clear after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. “You have a guy like me, name is Hasan, and I’m saying, ‘No, you don’t understand, Israel is still very much the responsible party for October 7, for like 75 years of brutal occupation and apartheid.’ And people were like, ‘Oh, you’re a terrorist.’ And that really hasn’t gone away.”
Last year, Democrats first invited him to and then ejected him from the Democratic National Convention after he interviewed some delegates who were part of the “Undecided” group protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. “I just eat it from both ends on that issue,” he says. “You’re getting [hate] from the far-right, and you’re getting it from the liberals and the centrists and the institutions. So you just have nothing. You only have your community. You only have your grassroots backing.”
But in recent weeks, with videos of starving Palestinian children flooding social media, more Democrats are speaking out about the war. Piker won’t give them credit for that just yet. “I’m used to Democrats operating in this incredibly cynical way,” he says. “So I’m not surprised by this about-face, if you can even call it that. Many people aren’t even doing an about-face. They’re mostly just ass-covering.”
Piker is also quick to call out his peers in the manosphere, saying that social media has putrified into a hate-filled hellscape worse than the subculture that gave rise to GamerGate, the coordinated misogynistic attack on women in the video game world that was an ignition point for the modern reactionary right. This rage chamber is thronged by far-right figures like Andrew Tate, white supremacists like Fuentes, and outwardly apolitical podcasters and streamers, like NELK and Adin Ross, who fawningly interviewed Trump ahead of the election in 2024. “I call it ‘vice signaling’—these guys, whether they’re real villains or not, are presenting themselves as bad people, and people like it,” Piker says. “Nobody likes cancel culture, but goddamn, that shit was keeping motherfuckers in check.”
Of course, Piker himself is an edgelord, too, eager to breach taboos—just on behalf of progressivism. For example, he proposes “Nuremberg”-style trials for those in the media who he sees as taking part in a “propaganda apparatus for the state.” He says he told the NELK boys “straight up” that they should be “tried.”
“But,” Piker continues, “there are far more consequential, far more noteworthy, figures that deserve [to be put on trial] than, like, the fucking NELK boys.” Specifically, he says, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. Piker may be the product of an often irony-poisoned online space, but his defense of the Palestinians is pure and deeply felt, as it is among large swaths of Gen Z. So he was incensed when Stephens recently wrote that “there is no genocide” being committed by Israel. “Literally three days after, like, a Jewish Israeli Holocaust scholar wrote a New York Times [editorial] saying it's definitely a genocide,” Piker says, “Bret Stephens came in hot and was like, No, actually, listen to me instead.” (On July 15, Dr. Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, wrote a Times opinion piece headlined “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”; a Stephens column, “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza,” followed one week later.)
Piker may see mainstream media as propaganda, but he blames prominent online figures for actively suppressing criticism. He says many creators keep silent to avoid retribution: “They’re fearful of the mass doxing and hate-raids they’ll incur from some of the top content creators in the space right now.”
Piker is, for that reason, paranoid—and justifiably so. Sinking back into his chair, he says that years ago during a livestream, he was SWATTED (someone had anonymously sent a SWAT team to his house). He was “arrested, handcuffed, had a gun pulled on me, helicopters,” he recalls. “I heard something outside, and I was like, what the fuck’s going on? It’s dudes with AR-15s going, ‘Get the fuck out!’”
Piker, it was widely reported, was also recently detained by border control when he returned to America from France. He says he was interrogated about his politics, especially as they relate to President Trump and Gaza. The incident led him to cancel a trip to Cuba, fearing that it could be used as an example of him visiting a “state sponsor of terror.” He’s certain he’s being surveilled by government entities. “I’ve had brushes with federal law enforcement, mostly around the death threats that I receive,” Piker says. “But in those conversations, they elaborate further that they’re very knowledgeable about who I am and what I do.” Is it the FBI? “I cannot confirm nor deny,” he demurs.
While he’s unfiltered and earnest while streaming, Piker has managed to keep his off-stream activities secret, refusing to air out his private life with friends or paramours the way that many of his peers do. So when I first arrived at his home in the morning, I was surprised to find his mom, Ülker, an art scholar, just chilling in the living room. She complimented me on my shirt and asked what it referenced; when I told her “Drain Gang” (the experimental Swedish music collective), Piker went into hysterics.
During our interview, I try to squeeze out whatever intel I can about Piker’s romantic life, which is feverishly gossiped about on Reddit. I ask point-blank if he’s dating Valkyrae, the massively popular gaming streamer, and he looks freaked out. “Oh come on, please don’t put that in the article,” Piker says. “I just want to keep certain things private. I don’t wanna even fuel speculations. Think of me as an asexual being.” He plans on settling down eventually, shielding his family from the noise generated by his fame as much as possible. “It’s definitely something that I want. I would just keep it private. I would keep my child, potentially if I were to have one, offline.”
The desire to safeguard his inner sanctum makes sense, given how many influencer overlords have Piker in their crosshairs. Maybe his most deranged “beef” this year was with Ethan Klein, the popular creator and former cohost of their old joint podcast, Leftovers. The feud started over Gaza—both call it a genocide, but Klein has called Piker a terrorist sympathizer and Piker, in turn, has called Klein racist. The spat spiraled into online mayhem, sucking everyone in these creators’ orbit into a vortex of toxicity. Klein “will call you a token Jew after this interview comes out,” Piker warns me. “I did pay you $7 million to do this interview.”
Some have accused Klein of having a “psychosexual obsession” with Piker. “He talks about my body and the way I look a lot,” Piker says. “I don’t know why—maybe it’s low-hanging fruit for him. He was always a funny guy, he was never a big looker or anything. It wasn’t part of his brand. So I never thought he cared about that sort of thing, but maybe after he lost the weight, his personality changed a bit. I genuinely don’t know. Last time I talked to Ethan, he was fat. I mean he still had his issues…but at least he was seemingly more empathetic.”
The Klein fight reveals just how insular and incestuous the world of streaming is. These beefs and online personae are the substrate from which Piker, the streamer and person, springs. He texts with AOC sometimes, sure, but his close friends aren’t campaign strategists and professional politicians. They’re the creators he plays basketball with, like Ludwig, Buddha, and video game speedrunners like PointCrow; and the influencers who cohost his podcast: QTCinderella, Will Neff, and AustinShow. You could visualize the streaming world as a series of lunch tables or loose clusters of collaborators, like the AMP collective and the FaZe clan. This world of influencers is its own Hollywood, with a distinct cast of A-listers and cult faves. Piker recently attended creator Tarayummy’s birthday party at the Roosevelt Hotel, a weird collision between old- and new-school celebrity where FaZe Adapt and JasonTheWeen sidled up next to Miranda Sings and Love Island contestants. Indie sleaze documenter Cobrasnake shot the photos.
In LA, Piker likes to hang out with the Roomies, a gamer-lifestyle streamer house run by people like Valkyrae, Fueslie, and Tinakitten. When he’s in New York, he socializes with “professional media world friends” like Adam Friedland and the other cheeky stars of leftist pods Chapo Trap House and True Anon. Piker’s thoughts are so frenetic I can’t help but probe him on anyone and everything, like whacking a piñata to see what falls out. He denigrates Asmongold and Contrapoints; praises iShowSpeed and Joshua Citarella; says that the fact that I watch the surrealist YouTuber JREG means I’m fried. I test him on a scatter-spray of media heroes and villains.
Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel: “Baby-brained, LARPing as educated people. Even William F. Buckley would make mincemeat of these guys.” On one of his three desktop computers, he pulls up a long-winded X thread in which Yarvin called billionaires a censored version of the N word. “He didn’t actually say the N word, which is kind of funny, cause I thought the point of wanting to kill cancel culture was so you could say the N word as a white guy…he tells rich people that they’re fucking gods and rich people love hearing that from a guy who’s maybe read one Nietzsche book or something.”
Red Scare’s Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan: “I don’t think about them at all. But, um, they’re annoying. And kind of dumb. I don’t think they like me too much. Because I’m progressive, and not a shithead.”
Zohran Mamdani: “Big Z’s the man, he’s great. He’s going to implement woke sharia in New York. Very excited about that. All the buildings have to face Mecca. That kind of good stuff.”
Drain Gang: “I can’t believe you told my mom that.”
One of the main things people criticize Piker for—besides the whole Champagne socialist thing, which is overblown—is taking criticism poorly. Piker acknowledges this while also criticizing the criticisms of how he takes criticism. Still, he seems to realize he’s made mistakes in the past; he cites “ReactGate,” the backlash he faced for putting content on stream while stepping away from the camera for extended periods of time. “This is so crazy and so niche to talk about on fucking Gentleman’s Quarterly,” he says with a chuckle. “I did not respond well to that at all. I apologized immediately and said I would never watch [the critics’] videos again. But then people kept hammering it over and over again…after a while I was just like, alright, well, fuck these people.” Now he only watches YouTube videos from people he knows.
As obnoxious as his methods can be, Piker clearly has genuine convictions. Remember what the web was like back in the 2010s, when YouTube was overrun with mini Ben Shapiros and “WRECKING BLUE-HAIRED SWJS” compilations? Now there’s a cluster of progressive influencers who Piker proudly calls “HasanAbi heads”; he cosigns SeanDaBlack, Chris Kunzler, JAAM, and overzealots. He’s also trying to mentor new establishment Dem influencers like Dean Withers and Harry Sisson. “I told Dean personally: One, stop with this liberalism shit. Cut it out. Become more leftist. And two, try to do things that are not just debate-focused,” he says. “They’re not listening to me, so who knows?”
Some would argue that if the Democrats were smart, they’d go all in on leftist populism and subsidize a Piker-led creator bootcamp to help beat back Trump 2.0. But Piker has no faith in liberal politicians; he thinks Kamala Harris, who currently leads in many polls about prospective Democratic presidential candidates, has no shot in 2028. He’s not even convinced there will be elections in 2028. “I mean, it’s moving in that direction pretty hard. All it takes is one big event for Donald Trump, who’s been salivating at this, to be like, It’s martial law time,” Piker says. “First they will take out or erode some of these Constitutional protections, whether it be due process, birthright, citizenship, and the First Amendment. Then they’ll rebuild the legal system to their advantage, in a way that suits their white nativist agenda.”
As he prepares to start up his stream for the day, Piker says, “I wonder what this is doing to my brain.” “This” is a gesture at the many vectors of anguish and evil in his life: the always-on work schedule, the paranoia he feels about his private life being overrun, the doxing and the SWATTING, the volume of vitriol he receives daily from right-wingers “demanding that the government arrest me ‘cause I’m a terrorist and that Twitch ban me.” I wonder to myself if his fitness and diet regimens are attempts to counterbalance the stress he puts on himself. He’s said in the past that he eats exactly “1.1 pounds of roasted chicken breast with low-carb pita, mezze, and sauces” for lunch every day. Still, he thinks the Make America Healthy Again movement is full of “fucking charlatans”: “Medicare for all, TRT for all, Ozempic for all, HRT for all. That’s my argument.”
Piker can’t get lost in thought for long; our interview made him late to start streaming, and his viewers are antsy as fuck. Piker pops a Zyn and attempts to film an Instagram video to announce the stream. “Fuck!” he roars after the app shuts off midway. He shoots it again, then launches the stream, blitzing through the news. Sydney Sweeney white supremacy ad. Texas Democrats fleeing to avoid arrests. White women posting Nazi-salute selfies on X. A viewer sends him a link that turns out to be a Grindr audio clip. “I don’t know if I can show this, what is this,” Piker mumbles. You are fighting for the people in Gaza, who are starving for food, the audio clip begins. But you forgot about me. The need that I have for a cock in my mouth. Piker goes silent for 10 seconds. "That'll be it for today. Some things are better left unwatched!"
Soon I get up to leave. I walk out, and Piker is left alone, rambling at three screens.
