By Jonathan Chait
Monday, October 12, 2026
About a year and a half ago, Hasan Piker, the left-wing
activist and streamer, was hailed as the Democratic Party’s Joe Rogan—an
influencer who can reach young men. A wave of gushy profiles paid more
attention to Piker’s physique than to his habit of making impolitic comments.
The New York Times’ entry in the genre was titled “A Progressive Mind in
a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere.’”
Piker has since been welcomed, with notable holdouts,
into the Democratic Party coalition. He has appeared with multiple Democrats on
the stump, and has boasted that several others privately seek his counsel. Vanity
Fair named Piker one of the 50 most influential people in America. He
sees his influence as extending even to candidates who have not aligned with
him publicly, pledging
to pressure James Talarico to side with the left should Talarico win his Senate
race in Texas. (“We have to remind him that we are the force that backed him
both early on, and we are the force that allowed him to win this seat of power,
and if he wants to maintain it, he’s got to play ball.”)
The predominant Democratic Party view of Piker was
perhaps expressed by the Pod Save America host Jon Lovett, who told him
last month on the liberal podcast, “My view is: I am part of a pro-democracy
coalition in the fight against fascism, and it includes everyone from former
Republicans like Nicolle Wallace and Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell, it includes
establishment politicians, it includes Neera Tanden, it includes Shannon Watts,
it includes AOC and Bernie, and it includes voices on the left like you.”
Piker’s stratospheric ascent—he now earns seven figures
from his Twitch stream—and grandiose ambitions have made him the target of
recriminations from a handful of suspicious Democratic Party moderates, as well
as a recurrent villain for Fox News, which has attempted to turn him into the
party’s face. Those critics have tended to recirculate a handful of Piker’s
most outrageous statements, some of which—saying America deserved 9/11, and
calling Orthodox Jews “inbred”—he has retracted and apologized for. Piker has
complained that the mainstream media cover him but rarely deign to speak with
him. Seeing that as a reasonable grievance, when he invited me on his show, I
invited him to instead do an interview with The Atlantic. He accepted,
before postponing the interview and then ultimately canceling it.
As I prepared for the interview by researching his
commentary, I realized that Piker is right to complain that the handful of
frequently repeated controversial statements fail to accurately represent his
worldview. In fact, it’s much worse than those quotes suggest.
***
The most important problem with inviting Piker to join
the pro-democracy coalition is that, by any reasonable definition of the term,
he does not believe in democracy.
Piker declared at a debate this year, “I say
we put the power back in the hands of the many rather than the power in the
hands of the few. If a dictatorship is inevitable, I’d rather have it be a
dictatorship of the proletariat than one that is designed around the needs of
the bourgeois class.” On his Twitch stream he has said: “I love Lenin. I love
Fidel Castro. And I love Che Guevara. They are genuinely fucking heroes.”
When asked to cite an example of socialism that he
admires, Piker replied, “China is probably the closest,” while conceding that
“there are still plenty of failures within the Chinese system.” Although he
cites China’s economic model, rather than its single-party Communist regime, as
the source of his admiration, other countries have exhibited the same rapid
industrialization without attracting Piker’s fawning praise.
He has dismissed Mao’s campaign of mass terror as mere
mistakes. “Do I believe that it was intentional? No, I don’t believe that it
was intentional.” In fact, as the Brookings scholar Kenneth Lieberthal, who has
taught a course on China under communism at the University of Michigan, told
me, “Mao never shied away from violence among Chinese civilians to achieve his
goals, and he never expressed regret for any deaths that occurred as a result
of his initiatives.”
Piker has extensively praised economic development in
North Korea, a country that he has acknowledged engages in repression, while
maintaining that “it’s certainly not as bad as the way that Western media
presents it.” In one segment marveling at economic development in the Stalinist
kingdom, where even the slightest acts of dissent are met with confinement and
torture, he said, “It is fucking mind-boggling to me that a country so fucking
poor and so distraught, a country that withstood a fucking genocide, could get
to this level, dude. Like, how does this not make you mad as an American
citizen? How does this not fucking piss you off, where you look at this shit
and you’re like, if they can do it, why the fuck can’t we?” Piker concluded by
saying that North Korea’s achievement “shows you that a better future is
possible for all of us.”
Piker does acknowledge shortcomings in the Communist
regimes he defends, but treats their millions of victims as the tragic cost of
progress. This contrasts with his treatment of anti-communists, which is marked
by unsparing contempt. He has proclaimed his hatred for NATO on the grounds
that it opposed communism: “Of course I am anti-NATO. NATO is designed with the
explicit intent of being an anti-Communist institution.”
In one especially revealing episode, he attacked a
refugee from Vietnam. Piker’s stream typically includes snippets of videos that
he and his audience watch together, interspersed with his own commentary. As
the video showed the refugee saying “We have endured suffering under the
Communist regime,” he threw back his head in disbelief and began to rant:
“Okay, fuck you, dude. I mean seriously, fuck you, old lady. Shut the fuck up,
you stupid fucking idiotic old lady with your stupid fucking gamer headest. Who
has fucked you harder, America or fuckin’ Ho Chi Minh? Suck my dick, old lady.
Goddamn, dude. Fuck this refugee.”
Alongside his pro-Marxist-Leninist principles, the second
pillar of Piker’s worldview is anti-Zionism. This does not distinguish him from
other progressives. What does distinguish him is his belief that American Jews
who do not share his position deserve punishment.
“In a totally just world, regardless of your background,
any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being
a fucking rabid neo-Nazi,” he has said. Piker attracted attention when he
recently predicted, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that
they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come
around and take action—not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against
American Jews.”
The two statements in combination have dire implications
for American Jews. A recent
poll found that, while about two-thirds of American Jews oppose the current
Israeli-government policy toward the West Bank and Gaza, more than 70 percent
describe themselves as very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel. Piker’s
argument that “any kind of fucking Zionist tendency”—which includes the many
Zionists who strongly criticize Israeli policy—should be treated as akin to
Nazism, and that American Jewish affinity with the Jewish state invites
anti-Semitism, would justify subjecting Jewish Americans to ostracism and
abuse.
Piker’s second and more recent comment drew predictable
condemnation from several leading Democrats. Piker has depicted this response
as puppetry orchestrated by the Israel lobby.
“Aipac boss call was made,” he wrote on X. When Neera
Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, said that
Piker was not helping the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to win his
campaign in Michigan, Piker replied, “You
should probably stop highlighting and ‘legitimizing’ reactionary framing and
republican attacks against abdul from a ‘nominally liberal’ perspective but i
guess your donors w financial ties to tel aviv don’t want you to stop.” The
notion that any opposition to his ideas must be evidence of hidden control,
exercised by wealthy Jews, is a classic anti-Semitic trope.
***
Some of these comments have largely been taken as
confirmation that Piker is essentially a shock jock. His defenders see these
rude remarks as the unavoidable cost of having a popular media personality to
amplify the Democrats’ message. “Some segments of the Democratic coalition
would find Piker to be edgy, or crass, or even despicable. But, if ‘Rogan of
the left’ is to mean anything, it would surely mean a higher tolerance for
controversy, even at the risk of alienating parts of the base,” a New Yorker
profile
concluded in March 2025.
But unlike Rogan, who is foremost an entertainer and who
lacks grounding in any serious ideology, Piker sees his work as advancing a
long-term political project.
He tends to analyze his work most openly when he gives
interviews about his Twitch stream, rather than on the program itself. When he
is speaking to his audience, he falls into a frat-boy patois laden with
generous helpings of profanity. When he is speaking about his show, he
employs more sophisticated language and concepts.
“I am, at the end of the day, someone who is engaging
in—and this is a Marxist term that a lot of people get mad at, because they
don’t understand that propaganda is supposed to be a neutral term in its
inception—but this is agitative propaganda,” Piker told Vox
last month. Agitative propaganda—or, as it is more commonly known, agitprop—is
a term derived from the department of agitation and propaganda, which the
Soviets created in the 1920s to instill communist thinking in workers and
peasants. The method is not generally known for its faithful adherence to truth
and accuracy.
Piker describes his role as the spearhead of a long-term
persuasion campaign to build power through gradual means. “I want to, through a
system of, at first, modest social democratic reforms, basically claw back
autonomy for the everyday person and hopefully give them more of a voice in
their workplace and in the political process as well, and slowly but surely,
yield more egalitarian outcomes,” he told Ross
Douthat a year ago.
Piker frequently derides liberalism as a failed ideology.
In an interview this past spring with Trevor Noah, he
explained that voters who think they’re liberal are actually suffering
from false consciousness.
“They self-identify as liberals because they don’t really
understand what that means. If you were to pick apart their worldview and offer
them a little bit of political education, you might find that they’re actually
not liberals at all. Maybe they’re socialists, maybe they’re Marxists, maybe
they have a different ideological tendency than liberalism, which is basically
just the monoculture that we’ve taken for granted,” he said.
He considers the Democratic Party essentially a hollow
shell, its governing ideology a kind of mindless vestige to which its voters
have no authentic attachment, one that he and his allies can easily replace.
This strategy requires Piker and his allies to gain a foothold within the party
in order to ultimately capture it. He actively campaigned for several left-wing
Democrats, especially El-Sayed. “During the 10 days I spent in the Midwest
ahead of the primary vote, Piker was everywhere,” my colleague Helen
Lewis reported.
When El-Sayed’s Republican opponent began to tie him to
some of Piker’s more infamous remarks, Piker responded pragmatically to contain
the damage. He apologized for having said that America deserved 9/11, claiming
that the remark was taken out of context. He dismissed comments about hating
the United States: “It’s laughable to say guys like myself, guys like Abdul
El-Sayed, we hate America.” (In fact, Piker has expressed this precise
sentiment, or iterations of it, many,
many times.)
El-Sayed responded by acting as though Piker were simply
a media figure to whom he had given an interview, rather than his campaign
wingman. He described Piker as “a streamer in California,” and said he would
have “a conversation” with any media figure with whom he disagrees, as if
campaigning with someone were just like talking on Fox News.
Piker has cooperated with this message. He has repeatedly
referred to himself as “a Twitch streamer,” mocking his critics for being so
small-minded as to pay any attention to his beliefs. Republicans “centering
their midterm strategy around a twitch streamer no one knows was extra dumb,”
he wrote on
X. His go-to line in response to any important piece of news has been to mock
Democrats for complaining about his influence. In response to a story about
deaths in the Iran war, he posted, “will
the democrats demand accountability and transparency on this issue, or will
they continue crying about a twitch streamer?”
The notable thing about this rhetorical pivot is that it
requires Piker to belittle himself as irrelevant and unworthy of attention.
That depiction hardly comports with the seriousness with which he has
previously described his influence, but it does show a level of message
discipline and commitment to the cause. CNN
reported last week that El-Sayed had recently spoken with Piker and “warned his
rhetoric was costing El-Sayed votes, asking him to stop.”
Do not expect Piker’s reticence to continue after
Election Day. There is little reason to trust his current self-presentation as
a mere Twitch streamer who is too obscure to merit discussion. He sees himself
as a representative voice of a movement that can take control of a major party,
and then the country itself.
Describing the Democratic Party to Noah, Piker said:
“That’s a weak party. That’s a party that you can seize. That’s a party that
you can take advantage of.” Many earnest liberals see Piker as a handy
megaphone who can convey their message to an elusive constituency. Piker,
however, is not so much joining the team as sizing it up as prey.
