T he first time I meet Hasan Piker, he’s meant to be 5,000 miles away.
“Dude, I’m supposed to be in London right now,” says Piker, the leftist political commentator and controversy magnet, sitting on the back patio of his Los Angeles townhouse. He’s dressed in his standard work uniform of blazer and tie, having just clocked out after another shift in the content mines, gabbing about news and politics for his 3 million followers on Twitch. “I genuinely did not expect this to happen,” he says. “It’s very shitty.”
Months earlier, Piker had planned a trip to Britain that included a panel at SXSW London and a speech at the Oxford Union. But 48 hours before his flight, he got a text from his uncle, Cenk Uygur, a fellow commentator who was also going on the trip. “I’m at the airport,” Piker remembers Uygur telling him. “They said my visa’s been revoked.” Piker checked his email. Sure enough, his had been canceled too.
He read the message live on his stream to 30,000 viewers. “Dear Hasan Doğan Piker. Your U.K. [Electronic Travel Authorization] has been canceled.… This is because your presence in the U.K. is not considered to be conducive to the public good.” Just like that, he’d been travel-banned.
Piker, 35, is no stranger to brouhahas. A self-described Marxist with an NSF MS NOW vocabulary, he’s become famous as a peddler of incendiary takes — not so much moving the Overton window as throwing a brick through it. Among his greatest hits: “America deserved 9/11.” “There’s a lot we can learn from” the Chinese Communist Party. “Let the streets soak in … red capitalist blood.” Most he’d later walk back (if not apologize for). But he’s still been suspended from Twitch more times than he can count.
“I stream for eight hours a day, seven days a week,” Piker says, shrugging. “I’m gonna say some dumb shit. 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.”
Editor’s picks
The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far
The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
100 Best Movies of the 21st Century
Since Oct. 7, however, Piker’s number-one issue by far has been Gaza. He’s a relentless critic of Israel, and he’s garnered hundreds of headlines with quotes like “Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel.” Naturally, this has also led to accusations of antisemitism, which Piker calls ridiculous. “I’ve spent my whole life fighting antisemitism,” he says, referring to his history battling neo-Nazis online. Instead, he calls himself a proud anti-Zionist. “And, unfortunately, the way many Zionist institutions defend Israel is by calling their opposition antisemitic.”
Piker and his dog, Kaya. DANIEL DORSA Still, the U.K. ban surprised him. Piker has visited Britain several times, including just last year. But in the weeks leading up to this trip, several Jewish groups spoke out against him, calling him a terrorist sympathizer. For Piker, there’s no doubt what happened. “If you criticize Israel, your travel will be restricted,” he says. “It’s straight-up fascism.”
The whole episode is pure Piker. To his fans and allies — including left-populist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the mostly young, mostly straight men who get their news from him every day — Piker is a matinee-handsome progressive icon who’s uniquely talented at translating radical-left politics for the kind of Gen Z bros who think “hegemony” has something to do with Equinox: a Eugene Debs who dead lifts, Abbie Hoffman with abs. Recently, he’s also been putting his materialist framework into praxis, moving from promoting causes to promoting candidates — and winning. But to his legions of enemies — from MAGA reactionaries to the Anti-Defamation League to mere centrist Democrats — Piker is a loudmouth extremist who’s actively harming the country.
Related Content
The Rise and Fall of the QAnon Queen of Canada
‘A Soulless Demon’: D4vd’s Path From Pop Star to Accused Killer
Gracie Abrams Built a Career on Honesty. She’s Going Even Deeper Now
A Hawaii Politician Breaks Bad
Piker says he isn’t too worried about the U.K. ban. “I’m not, like, dying to go to the U.K.,” he says, laughing. “I don’t really care. But my question is: Who else is gonna get barred? Is Ilhan Omar allowed into the country? Is AOC? What are the standards now?
“I think liberal democracy,” he says, “is cooked.”
That said, if he’s being honest, it’s not great for him, either. “I mean, the U.K. ban is not the only government-related issue I have,” he says. He’s alluding to the fact that in May, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control reportedly began investigating a trip he took to Cuba — ostensibly a humanitarian mission, but potentially a violation of U.S. sanctions, punishable by 20 years in prison. And for Donald Trump’s Justice Department, a millionaire California socialist offers a pretty tempting target.
Piker’s job title is “live streamer,” but if you were born before, say, the year 2000, that might not fully explain what he does. “I yap for a living,” he says. A typical show features a deep dive on the day’s headlines with his commentary interspersed, an interview or two with a newsmaker or expert, long-form cable-news reports that he pauses for reactions, fun segments on sports or memes or pop culture, and whatever random jokes or TikToks people send to the chat. It’s AM talk radio for the ADHD generation — or as Piker jokes, “Rush Limbaugh for Zoomers.”
His day starts around 6 a.m., when he rolls out of bed and starts scrolling: Twitter, Democracy Now, Fox News. He drinks an espresso and takes his supplements (zinc, fish oil, ashwagandha) in a kitchen full of Build bars and a bumper sticker on the oven that says “I [heart] being mad online.” He drafts a rough outline for the show, then spends a couple of hours walking his dog and working out. (“Gotta maintain that muscle mass,” he says. “Thirty-five is when your testosterone levels start declining.”) Then he showers and puts on a suit, downs an iced coffee or two, snaps a fit pic for Instagram, and sits down for another stream.
“I’m like the new transgender or the war on Christmas.”
The suits are a new development. It’s partly because he’s getting older, he says, and partly because he just thinks it looks cool. “Now that I’m getting blasted into audiences that have never heard of me, there’s some value in respectability politics.” In other words, “the Debras and the Karens” who encounter him as a Fox News bogeyman might be more receptive if he’s dressed like a grown-up.
One morning, I watch him from just off-camera. His office walls are full of samurai swords and revolutionary art, and his desk is littered with Zyn cans and sugar-free Dr Peppers. He pulls up a New York Times article on one of his three monitors and screen-shares it to the stream. His assistant, Hannah, sits working on a laptop one room over, while his 110-pound Saint Bernard mix, Kaya, lies next to him drooling. Piker — six feet four and jacked, with Moscot glasses and a thick brown beard that’s graying at the corners — starts riffing on the Iran ceasefire and the housing bill while simultaneously juggling clips and keeping one eye on the infinitely scrolling chat. To the uninitiated, it’s brain-melting sensory overload. Piker thrives on it. “When I go live, everything else goes quiet,” he says. “I’m just locked in.”
Piker says he’s had lots of offers from legacy-media networks, but he has no interest in giving up his independence. He got an assistant only a year ago, and he’s just starting to let her help produce the stream. Recently, they got a second camera so they can change angles, “and it was a big thing to let me be in charge of it,” Hannah says. “Afterward, he sat me down and showed me a Charlie Rose interview. Like, ‘I have notes for you.’”
For a Marxist, Piker’s job is about as pure capitalist as it gets. He controls the means of production, and his profits are based entirely on the market. A subscription to his channel runs $6 per month; with nearly 50,000 subscribers, minus Twitch’s 30 percent cut, that’s somewhere north of $2 million per year. (His only business expenses are travel and Hannah.) He doesn’t run ads or do brand partnerships, though many have tried. (“I tell them to fuck off.”) On the other hand, a lot of advertisers might not want to partner with a guy who’s said his favorite flag is Hezbollah’s.
The beauty of streaming is that Piker can set his own hours. The irony is he works all the fucking time. It’s been months since he took a day off, and even that was to do a photo shoot and record his weekly podcast, Fear&. He says he feels an obligation to show up for his fans, who rely on him for their news the way other people do CNN or NPR. “I view that as a very important responsibility,” he says.
“When I go live, everything else goes quiet,” Piker says. “I’m just locked in.” DANIEL DORSA As Piker’s audience has grown, he’s also become a target. The New York Post sent a drone to photograph his house; he says Fox News has someone whose sole job is to watch his stream and take notes. (“I’m like the new transgender or the War Against Christmas,” he jokes.) He claims to get hundreds of death threats a day, and he’s been swatted multiple times, including one raid that ended with Hannah in handcuffs. He worries about his safety — especially after the murder of Charlie Kirk, an acquaintance whom he was scheduled to debate just days after he was killed. “I try not to think about it,” Piker says. “I do take measures, though. I will not elaborate on them.”
At the end of a stream, Piker is pretty wiped. He calls this time “the dead zone” — usually he just eats dinner and crashes. But one night I tag along on a rare evening out, to a party for the premiere of a film from his buddies at the dirtbag-left podcast Chapo Trap House.
Piker could dominate a scene like this. But unlike his alpha-bro online persona, in real life he’s gentle, reserved, and a little bit awkward. 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.”
The next day, Piker’s family is over. His mom lives nearby in an apartment he got for her, and his little brother, Murat, and sister-in-law live close, as well. His dad, meanwhile, just flew in from Turkey, and they’re all going on vacation to an undisclosed island. When Piker walks in, they’re having breakfast on the patio, talking over one another in Turkish. “It could be a sitcom,” Hannah says. “They annoy him, but he loves them so much.”
Piker disappears upstairs to shower, and his dad — a retired corporate executive with a Ph.D. in economics who’s written four books about European Union antitrust law — quickly makes himself scarce. But his mom sticks around. An architectural historian who specializes in 19th-century Turkish interiors, Sedef Piker is a supporting character on the stream — occasionally popping up in the background with some mezze or motherly wisdom. The chat calls her Anne — Turkish for “Mom.”
Sedef says she shares Piker’s politics, with a few exceptions. (“I’m not in love with China like he is,” she tells me.) Sometimes she wishes he would tone it down or not joke so much. “I worry about him,” she says. “The internet is a very savage place.” But mostly she’s happy he stopped posting so many shirtless pics in the bathtub. “I’m glad we moved from naked pictures to suits,” she says.
“I admire Joe Rogan’s unbelievable autonomy. I want that.”
Piker’s Twitch username is Hasanabi, from the Turkish for “big brother,” because he’s like a big brother to his young fans. But he was Murat’s abi first. At one point, Piker overhears his brother telling me about his old job as an aerospace engineer at Boeing. “I actually worked on VC-25B a little bit,” Murat says — the technical name for the new Air Force One. “Yeah,” Piker butts in, “on the toilet. Don’t let him act like he did anything cool.”
Piker was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1991. But the family immediately moved back to Turkey, and he grew up in Ankara and Istanbul. (His accent, though, is 100 percent American.) A shy, “chunky” kid who loved World of Warcraft and anime, he got bullied often. “I was very timid, a lot of social anxiety, hyper aware of being perceived,” he says. “I just kept to myself and drew a lot.”
Piker’s mom wanted to keep him connected to America, so she brought him to stay with his grandparents in Central New Jersey every summer. (“You can learn a language,” she explains, “but you can’t learn a culture.”) He went to basketball camp and the YMCA, watched Adult Swim and played PlayStation 2, and spent hours reading comics at Borders and Barnes & Noble. “When you’re growing up in a different country, American consumerism is incredible,” Piker says. “Free refills. Thirty different flavors of Oreos. Silly simple things like that I still really love about America.”
He started getting into politics as a preteen. It was the early 2000s, and repression was on the rise worldwide — George W. Bush in the U.S. and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. Piker fell in love with Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Turkish satirical newspapers and cartoons. He remembers being 12 and racing to the bakkal — the Turkish bodega — every week to get the latest issues when they came out. “I was a huge fucking nerd for sure.”
Piker’s dual upbringing gave him a complex view of America. He had a front-row seat to the consequences of American foreign policy — the refugee crises and “senseless bloodshed.” Still, he always dreamed of coming back. “When people would ask, ‘What do you want to be?’ I’d always say, ‘I want to go to college in America,’” he says. “It’s actually the most common attitude around the planet. People love the culture and promise of America. But they fucking hate the government.”
In 2009, Piker enrolled at the University of Miami. He lost weight, got a job as a nightclub promoter, started partying with football players, and had sex for the first time. At the end of his freshman year, he had a 2.9 GPA, and his parents made him transfer to Rutgers. “I think he still blames me for it,” his mom says. “But I was like, ‘This cannot go anywhere good.’”
Piker recently had to cancel an appearance because of death threats. “We decided it wasn’t safe for me,” he says. DANIEL DORSA After graduation, Piker moved to L.A. and took a job with his uncle’s media startup, the Young Turks. He worked in ad sales, but talked his way on-camera whenever he could. “At first I was terrible,” he says. “People would pull me aside, like, ‘Bro, you’re embarrassing yourself.’ But I knew if I kept doing it, I’m eventually gonna be good.”
One of his big influences was, surprisingly, Joe Rogan. Piker used to be a huge Rogan fan, back before the Islamophobia and ivermectin. “This is like 2014 — before he started interviewing every white supremacist in the world,” Piker says. “I always admired that he had this unbelievable autonomy. This guy says whatever the fuck he wants, interview who he wants, and there’s no editorial control. I want that.”
Piker started his Twitch channel in 2018. 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.
In the beginning, Piker wanted to show young men that leftists could be fun — not just woke social-justice warriors and PC scolds. He played Fortnite, posed with swords and guns, posted thirst-traps, and — as he readily admits — trafficked in his share of gross and fratty sexism, like when he called Hannah Montana “a little slut.” (He later dubbed it “a desperate attempt to try to be funny” and apologized.) By 2023, he had 2 million followers. His dad finally stopped asking when he was going back to grad school.
Then came Oct. 7. Piker immediately declared Hamas’ attack Israel’s fault, costing him a third of his viewers. “People were just not ready for it,” he says. Critics called him a terrorist, or worse. He felt discouraged and thought seriously about quitting the stream.
A recent poll found significantly more Democrats had a favorable view of the Palestinian people than the Israeli people, and the Israeli government clocked in only three points better than Hamas. Whether or not you think Piker is antisemitic, his fundamental stance on Israel isn’t far from the mainstream left. Piker calls it “this three-year shit show I’ve had to withstand for having the correct position too early.”
Still, even his allies admit he can go too far while making a point. Piker cops to having “emotional outbursts” and occasional hyperbole, but he swears he isn’t trying to rage-bait, and that nothing he says is “fake or phony.” “In some ways it is a performance. But existence is a performance,” he says. “I could speak in sanitized, academic language all day — but that wouldn’t be as entertaining or reach as many people. So, I speak in a way that people understand. And sometimes I push buttons.”
Consider his infamous line about Hamas being 1,000 times better than Israel — which Piker has acknowledged is “intentionally provocative.” “I say that on purpose,” he says. “I want to force people to really think about what I’m saying. I want to challenge them to think about it a little bit.” He could alienate a lot fewer people by simply inverting the formulation: Hamas is bad, but Israel is worse. But that’s not his style.
“First of all, everyone says that,” he says. “I’m not interested in the many bad things Hamas has done. I’m trying to get people to understand why someone becomes Hamas. Do I agree with everything they do? Of course not. I’ve called out their war crimes myself. But the point is to make people identify from their perspective. Palestinians have lived under this brutal occupation for 75 years. Put yourself in their shoes.
“There’s an entire ecosystem designed to filter everything I say in the most negative way possible,” he continues. “I definitely don’t think it’s good that the first interaction the average person has with me is that I’m an antisemitic terrorist.”
But an outrage-machine player can’t hate the attention-economy game. “It is what it is,” he says. “I can’t really do anything but keep pushing, and hope some people will at least scratch the surface and try to find out what my actual position is. I know I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. But hopefully more people will pay attention, and hopefully they’ll be charitable. Hopefully they’ll think, ‘I’ve heard a lot about this guy. But I kinda understand what he’s saying.’”
One morning in June, Piker flies to Denver to appear at a rally for Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old lawyer turned barista running for Congress. Kiros is challenging Rep. Diana DeGette, a 69-year-old Democrat who first got elected to the House the year before Kiros was born. The local Democratic Socialists of America chapter helped organize the event. It’s already been moved twice to larger venues. The theme of the rally is “Young, Bold, & Unbought.”
“When even the boomer class is frustrated, I thought it was a good opportunity for me to get involved.”
Piker lands around 10 a.m. and heads to his hotel to stream for a bit, wearing a new green Mao suit and a DSA pin. “I’ve got a banger of a speech for the commie rally later,” he tells the chat. This is the new frontier for Piker — grassroots electoral politics, rubber meeting road. He says he started thinking about it some time last year. He went to the L.A. ICE protests and No Kings march and observed that — unlike at the student encampments he was used to — there were a lot of, well, old people. “When even the boomer class is frustrated, I thought it was a good opportunity for me to get involved.”
Piker sees himself as a populist megaphone — using his platform to amplify candidates and mobilizing his fans to phone-bank or door-knock for them. “I try to convert my audience from disillusioned, angry teenagers into diligent organizers for these campaigns,” he says. His record so far is pretty good: Though his chosen candidates have lost races in California, he was one of the earliest backers of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and in the recent New York primaries, his slate went three-for-three — including Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old pro-Palestine activist who ousted a five-term congressman. As California Rep. Ro Khanna — a 2028 hopeful and another Piker favorite — tells him on the stream one day, “Basically the pattern is: You go and support them, the establishment attacks you, and the candidate ends up winning.”
Piker doesn’t love having candidates on the stream. He finds it boring. But he’s more than happy to stump for someone he believes in. He says he’s fielded requests from “hundreds” of campaigns — not just in deep-blue races, but in swingy places, too. So far, he’s mostly lent his support to Democrats who are DSA or DSA-adjacent — basically anyone who supports Medicare for All and is willing to call Gaza a genocide. “I have my vision for the future,” he says, “and I’m just pushing towards that with a little pickax. Mining away in my cave.”
Piker says the ire from Democrats started ramping up during Mamdani’s race and has only intensified since. But despite the complaints, he’s not interested in building coalitions or pivoting to the center. His mission is to drag the party to the left. He also disputes the notion that electing socialists will hurt the party in the rest of the country. “I don’t think it’s a sincere fear,” he says.
It’s hard to gauge Piker’s impact in terms of vote margin or turnout. But there are data points. Kiros says that in the 48 hours after she appeared on his stream, her campaign raked in $40,000 in donations — “significantly more” than a normal two-day period — as well as “a huge influx of new volunteers.” But Piker can also complicate things, as Kiros would soon find out.
On the day of the Denver rally, the venue’s owners tell the campaign they’re canceling the contract. Two previous venues canceled as well. They all make reference to “pushback from the community.” But organizers get the clear impression that it’s about Piker.
Piker learns about the cancellation live on stream. “The venue owners blacklisted us?” he says. It’s the U.K. ban all over again. “It’s discouraging, I’ll be honest,” Piker says. “I had a whole speech. Ugh. This sucks, man.”
The Kiros campaign quickly pivots to a protest at the state capitol instead. By 4 p.m., a few hundred people have amassed on the capitol steps. Kiros gets on the mic and gives a fiery stump speech about billionaires and corporations trying to silence their movement. Piker tells the chat he’s heading over soon. But as the rally wraps up, he’s still at his hotel, streaming alone in his room.
Later, Piker tells me he skipped the event because of security concerns. “We decided it wasn’t safe for me,” he says. And therein lies the rub of Piker. On one hand, he can fire up the base like no one else. But on the other — is the drama that follows him more trouble than it’s worth?
For Kiros, the calculus is easy. “Do I agree with everything Hasan says? Of course not,” she says. “But I don’t believe he’s hateful. And I think a lot of this pearl-clutching and cherry-picking of his statements is not helping our cause. If we’re fighting the oligarchy, we’ve got to have a big tent. Hasan is on the side of working people getting power back.”
Sure enough, two weeks later, Piker flies back to Denver unannounced to give a pep talk to some Kiros canvassers and tag along for last-minute door-knocking. That night, when she spots him at her victory party — having trounced the incumbent by 13 points — Kiros gives him a big hug.
ON A SUNNY SUNDAY morning in July, Piker parks his Mercedes at a park in West Hollywood and hops out wearing short-shorts and high tops. It’s time to touch grass. He drops Kaya at the dog park and joins a pickup basketball game he plays in semiregularly. “It’s a good group,” he says. “Some guys are ass, some are decent. Everybody’s a ball hog.”
They shoot around for a while, then someone puts Drake on the boom box and the game starts. It’s far from intense — think knee braces and air balls. No one seems to give a shit who Piker is, which is probably the point.
Piker is an unselfish teammate. He shoots a brick from the top of the key, then another from the paint; after he misses an open layup, he sticks to passing. From each according to his ability.
After the game, Piker goes home to stream. “Usually Sundays are a little more chill,” he says. But today, he’s in a lively mood. He fires up a YouTube video featuring a bunch of computer-animated crabs dancing on a beach to a techno song. This is “crab rave” — the clip he breaks out to commemorate a joyous event. The chat knows what’s coming and starts going nuts: “oh shit crab!!!” “[Crab emoji][Crab emoji]” “BRING OUT THE CRABS!”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Piker begins, “Lindsey Olin Graham … is dead.”
The chat flips out. “Lindsey Graham is pro-life,” continues Piker, “and yet, Lindsey Graham has died.”
A thousand crab emojis bloom. At least for a day, Piker takes another swing of his pickax.
