WARNING/PSA/RED ALERT/NOT A PAYWALL:
The subject of today’s Substack is perhaps one of the most profane humans to walk the planet. I’ve sanitized his words here out of respect for delicate eyeballs, but do not click any links to this man’s quotes unless you’re prepared to hear language that would raise eyebrows in federal prison. #YouWereWarned
If you don’t spend eight hours a day trolling MSNBC, TikTok, Twitch, and the darkest corners of progressive social media—first of all, God bless you—you may have no idea who Hasan Piker is.
Allow me to ruin your morning.
Piker is a 35-year-old self-described Marxist who makes his living streaming political commentary to some three million Twitch followers and saying the sorts of things that would get a normal person escorted out of brunch before the mimosas even showed up. He is, depending on who you ask, the Left’s Joe Rogan, the socialist Andrew Tate, or what would happen if Howard Stern and Andrew Dice Clay had a baby, sent him to communist summer camp, and gave him a webcam.
Except that last bit is wildly unfair to Stern and Clay, both of whom look like lovely gentlemen you might invite to Sunday supper at Grandma’s in comparison.
Piker was born in New Jersey in 1991, but his family moved almost immediately back to Turkey, where he grew up in Ankara and Istanbul. (Today he calls himself a “cultural Muslim,” which is the religious equivalent of a sober drunk or part-time cannibal.) He returned to the U.S. for college, then moved to LA to work for The Young Turks, a progressive media company co-founded by his uncle, Cenk Uygur. Eventually Piker struck it out on his own, built an enormous audience on Twitch, and became fabulously wealthy explaining to young Americans why capitalism sucks.
No, really.
According to a nauseatingly fawning recent profile in Rolling Stone, a subscription to Piker’s Twitch channel costs six bucks a month. Which means that with nearly 50,000 subscribers, he’s pulling in somewhere north of $2 million a year. He lives in LA, drives a Mercedes, and has an assistant. The magazine notes—with no detectable irony—that “for a Marxist, Piker’s job is about as pure capitalist as it gets.”
“Piker started his Twitch channel in 2018,” Rolling Stone explained. “His first broadcast had a whopping 35 viewers. But gradually he built an audience, and by 2020 he was successful enough to stream full time. Then the pandemic hit, and Piker was stuck in his one-bedroom apartment, depressed and alone. He’d stream for 14 hours a day just to have some connection; he spent 42 percent of the entire year on camera [emphasis theirs; poor, poor Piker].”
Despite Rolling Stone’s tender portrait, Piker has called Mao Zedong “one of the great leaders of this world.” He believes there is “a lot we can learn” from the Chinese Communist Party. During one particularly colorful monologue, he fantasized about seeing American streets soaked in “red capitalist blood.” He’s stated that he is “pro stealing from big corporations because they steal from their workers.” He told his livestream followers, “if you cared about Medicare fraud, you would kill Rick Scott.” He’s called Hezbollah’s flag his favorite flag (can we be done yet?) and argued that if the murderous militant group qualifies as a terrorist organization, then “America is the “top terrorist organization.”
For a guy who openly hates this country, Piker seems remarkably uninterested in a one-way ticket back to Turkey, unfortunately.
And then there’s the Middle East. Piker has declared that “it doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th” and insisted that “Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel.” When former Obama speechwriter and Pod Save America host Jon Favreau confronted him with that incendiary statement, Piker was presented with the perfect opportunity to clarify, contextualize, reconsider, retreat, moonwalk, fake his own death, or otherwise put some distance between himself and his partiality toward the terrorist organization responsible for the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
“I stand by that,” he said.
Which, okay. If you make your money by saying inflammatory things, I suppose doubling down is sort of like asking for a Ko-Fi donation.
You might assume that a millionaire Marxist who’s said America deserved 9/11, gushes over Mao, waxes poetic about Hamas and Hezbollah, and swoons at the thought of rivers of capitalist blood would occupy some distant, embarrassing fringe of American politics.
Oh, you lovable little optimist.
Piker has appeared alongside AOC, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ro Khanna. More recently, he moved beyond internet rabble-rousing and into actual electoral politics, campaigning for socialist and progressive candidates around the country. Then came Michigan, where he stumped repeatedly for Abdul El-Sayed, the Muslim Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.
This wasn’t Piker randomly wandering into a campaign rally and photobombing the candidate. El-Sayed aggressively courted Piker’s enormous, loyal young audience. Piker campaigned with him at Michigan State and the University of Michigan and attended a Detroit pool party for content creators just before the primary. El-Sayed’s calculation was clear: Piker has three million followers—and those are people Dems need to reach.
It worked. El-Sayed won the primary. Thanks to Hasan Piker, who would very much like you to know—with Rolling Stone’s generous help—that he’s just a hardworking dude who, surely just like you, occasionally sticks his designer-clad foot in his very foul mouth.
“I stream for eight hours a day, seven days a week,” Piker told Rolling Stone, reportedly with a shrug. “I’m gonna say some dumb sh*t. But at the end of the day, we’re talking about more than 10,000 hours of content, and they’ve got like four quotes they keep hammering on to be like, ‘This guy’s a dangerous radical.’ It’s very silly.”
Okay, fine. Let’s not make a big deal out of that whole “America deserved 9/11” thing. Or the “9/11 2 is going to be so sick” comment. Or the suggestion that someone give Saudi Arabia a nuke to “wipe America off the map.” Or the delightful “we’re going to keep bringing immigrants into the country, on purpose, just so they can BLEEP your sister and then maybe even your daughter.” Or the fact that he’s advocated for killing landlords in cold, angry blood for the grave sin of property ownership.
Obviously, it’s the unhinged right-wingers jumping on a handful of harmless “dumb sh*t” quotes—unfairly cherry-picked from 10,000 hours of perfectly normal Marxist content—that’s the real problem here. Don’t I feel silly.
The mind-blowing part of this story is that none of those things caused his high-profile left-wing pals to clutch even a single pearl—until he finally found the thing that would turn him into political plutonium.
“If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action,” Piker said during an August 20 livestream. “Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”
And just like that, Democrats discovered standards. If distancing yourself from a politically radioactive shock jock were a competitive sport, Piker’s former bureaucratic buddies just formed their own pro team.
Hakeem Jeffries called Piker’s remarks “dangerous and antisemitic.” Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who is Jewish, announced that he would “not be lectured by a California podcaster” about what Michigan’s Jewish community should believe. Michigan Rep. Hillary Scholten called him a “hack who thrives on hate, shock, and awe” and said she won’t campaign with El-Sayed as long as he continues to associate with Piker. And El-Sayed himself—who practically stapled himself to Piker on the campaign trail—now says there are no plans for the two to team up again.
Suddenly, the Left’s Joe Rogan is the Left’s drunk uncle nobody remembers inviting to Thanksgiving.
After rape threats, making googly eyes at Hezbollah, and “America deserved 9/11,” evidently this was the bridge too far. Folks will say it’s because Israel is untouchable, but Piker had already called Orthodox Jews “inbred,” compared Israelis to the KKK, and described Zionism as a “mental illness.” He’s been accused of antisemitism for years. Was it because his warning sounded suspiciously like a threat—stop supporting Israel or somebody’s coming for you? Or maybe it was the fact that he’d basically just told his millions of followers that violence against American Jews wasn’t just inevitable—but that when the day comes, they’ll only have themselves to blame.
Whatever unspoken line Piker finally crossed (I’m pretty sure it was that last one), Rolling Stone clearly did not see it coming. The rag’s positively Hallmarkian profile of the guy—published all of three weeks ago—has already aged in dog years.
“Unlike his alpha-bro online persona, in real life [Piker] is gentle, reserved, and a little bit awkward,” Rolling Stone gushed. “He has a tendency to fiddle nervously with his fingernails and lapels. He spends a minute by the bar chatting with Hacks star and fan of the podcast Hannah Einbinder, then grabs a Sapporo and hits the back patio to talk to a friend about Graham Platner’s implosion. After the screening, he congratulates the guys and takes a few selfies with fans. But when everyone else heads for the afterparty, he bows out. ‘I gotta head home,’ he says, checking his watch. ‘It’s almost my bedtime. I have to stream in the morning.’”
ROLLING STONE: Meet Hasan: the bashful, misunderstood millionaire Marxist who loves his mom, fiddles adorably in interviews, and is diligent about sleep hygiene!
It would all be precious if Piker were just another internet loudmouth screaming into the void. He isn’t. Millions of young people tune in to hear him explain the world, and Democrat politicians have spent years legitimizing him in exchange for access to those eyeballs. They can backpedal all they want now, but dumping the guy at this stage in the game is like kicking someone out of the wedding after he’s punched the groom, robbed the bartender at knifepoint, slept with the mother-of-the-bride, and eaten the cake with his hands.
The man is an anti-capitalist radical. An America-hating terrorist fanboy. A walking grab bag of every alt-left position Democrats used to pretend only existed on Fox News. And apparently, I’m silly for noticing.
What bothers me most is not Piker’s statements, they are reprehensible, but not surprising; it’s that he has millions of morons listening to and agreeing with them. And many of them get to vote. Frightening.
One objection: please don’t associate Piker with Rogan. I get the “they’re both popular podcasters” angle, but Rogan has never said shit like Piker.
Your brain operates on a totally different level than the rest of us, mere mortals. And I mean that as a sincere complement... "It's what would happen if Howard Stern and Andrew Dice Clay had a baby, sent him to communist summer camp, and gave him a webcam." I'm just glad I did not have a mouthful of coffee!