Hasan Piker is about to prove his point.
For weeks, the wildly popular Twitch streamer and leftist commentator has been following the online discourse surrounding the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The topic is personal for Piker, who was scheduled to debate Kirk at Dartmouth College 15 days after the right-wing political activist was gunned down on a Utah campus. Authorities charged college student Tyler Robinson with the crime, but lately, a civil war has erupted among conservatives over conspiratorial claims that the Mossad had a hand in the murder. “You would be surprised at how many people believe that stuff,” he says as he mulls the menu options at a crowded Chelsea restaurant on a brisk October morning.
When our waiter arrives, Piker turns to the 20-something hipster. “Can I ask you a question? Who is the most likely person that killed Charlie Kirk?” he asks. “I think it was Israel. It seems like an inside job,” the server replies hesitantly before heading back to the kitchen for Piker’s cold brew.
The answer comes as a shock to me. But it’s no surprise to the extremely online millennial who acknowledges that he is fascinated by conspiracy theories.
“I watch every Candace Owens,” Piker says, referring to the new-media star of the far right who has fanned the flames of the Israel theory. He nods in the direction of our waiter: “It’s the reason why I know exactly where he is coming from with the Charlie-Israel thing. For me, no matter how far-fetched the conspiracy is, if it is getting 2 million views in 24 hours, that means a lot of people are tuning in to it. That means a lot of people are paying attention to it. And in this day and age, I think a lot of people are believing it.”
Piker feels no allyship with Owens even if they share the belief that Israel is a malignant force. He is merely a student of the attention economy, a space in which he is thriving. With nearly 3 million followers on Twitch and 1.75 million YouTube subscribers, the 34-year-old influencer seems like a possible answer to the question of when the left will find its own Joe Rogan. As the next generation turns more conservative and alpha males like Andrew Tate ascend, Piker offers an alternative vision and the rare ability to sway an election. As an early and enthusiastic supporter of Zohran Mamdani, Piker played a key role in helping catapult the New York mayoral candidate to Gracie Mansion by spreading the Democrat’s socialist message to his legion of fans.
With our waiter out of earshot, Piker drops his voice discreetly. “Israel did not kill Charlie Kirk. That is insane!” he says. “I did that for you because you were shocked.” When the waiter returns with our order, he tells Piker that he is comping the cold brew. “Wait, why?” Piker asks. “I just like your vibe,” the server says.
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A lot of people like Piker’s vibe. His brand — a two-fold critique of Israel and the billionaire class — has made him a multimillionaire. And a foil. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has accused him of using his platform to promote “toxic anti-Zionism.” Andrew Cuomo invoked Piker’s name repeatedly along the campaign trail in an effort to smear Mamdani.
On this morning, Piker has just arrived via red-eye from his home in Los Angeles for an appearance at the New Yorker Festival; his inclusion in the lineup already sparked a wave of outrage. Wearing a no-logo sweatshirt, sweatpants, a “Free Palestine” wristband and an Apple watch and carrying a small Gucci bag that holds his Zyn supply, Piker signals a cross between conspicuous consumption and Bernie bro. Lurking beneath a camo hat emblazoned with the word “Thieves” is a mind that poses one of the biggest PR threats to the pro-Israel set. The Jersey-born, Istanbul-raised, Rutgers-educated provocateur has no plans to back down.
“These last two years, I’ve been called antisemitic. I abhor antisemitism, and I’ve spent my entire professional media career combating it. I just happen to be anti-Israel, and that makes me a far greater threat than the likes of Nick Fuentes because they know he’s a Nazi,” he says, referring to yet another polarizing figure in the ongoing schism within the far right. “I don’t find kinship with the right because I think there are some on the right that just use Israel as a new opportunity to cut through the noise.”
His voice, famous from 2,674 livestreams — or 18,624 hours in front of a camera — since he started on Twitch in 2018, is steady and evokes the East Coast liberal arts poli sci education he received. “Maybe they see kinship with me, but I’ve been there for decades,” he says. “Because this is a problem that predates Oct. 7. That’s why a lot of people in the know shortly after Oct. 7, myself included, were like, ‘This is horrifying.’ But the reasons as to why this is happening is because of 75 years of apartheid at that point, the genocide that was the inception of the Israeli nation-state. And most people were just so oblivious to that reality. They were like, ‘How dare you say something so barbaric? How dare you say something instead of just sitting there silently and mourning?’ But there has never been a moment in my life where I ever considered Israel to be anything but a criminal enterprise.”
Hanging with Hasan plays out a bit like one of his marathon streams on Twitch, a hybrid of live television and social media that allows creators to interact with fans via chat. The hours float by as he flits from one topic to the next, a mix of politics and pop culture.
He’s disgusted by Hollywood’s treatment of pro-Palestinian voices who have lost career opportunities, such as “Scream” actress Melissa Barrera (whose firing from the franchise happened, he says, at “the peak of the panic”). Some have been dropped by their agencies, including Susan Sarandon (“Love her”) by UTA, or their labels, like Roger Waters (“He’s awesome”), over their Israel critiques. More recently, British punk rap duo Bob Vylan was cut by UTA for leading chants of “Death to the IDF” during a performance at Glastonbury Festival.
“I don’t think that is necessarily going too far,” Piker says of Bob Vylan’s actions. “I think the moment that you start talking about Jewish control or the Talmud is when people go too far. As a Muslim who sees so much Islamophobia, I’m very tuned in to that dog whistle, like the overemphasis on sharia.” (The notion that Mamdani would impose sharia law on New York was indicative of the tenor of the final stretch of the mayoral race.) “They do it to Jewish people as well in a similar vein. I think that’s when people go too far.”
From Piker’s perspective, Amy Schumer should have been canceled for social media posts she made in the wake of Oct. 7. “Amy was going crazy — and no punishments there. She was just straight-up being like, ‘They’re all rapists, barbaric monsters. They’re head choppers. We got to deal with them.’” (Piker appears to be referencing an illustration Schumer shared and then deleted on Instagram that depicted pro-Palestinian supporters holding signs with such slogans as “Gazans rape Jewish girls only in self defense” and “Proud of our rapist martyrs.”)
Despite calls for his cancellation for his criticism of Israel, Piker has withstood the heat. “WME didn’t drop me, which I think is very interesting,” he says.
He was told to tone it down, but he’s vague about exactly who told him.
“‘He’s getting a little too hot’ is what I heard,” he says. Did he heed that warning? “No, because I’m very stubborn, and if something is wrong, I’m going to call it out, and if I can’t call it out, then I can’t do my job. That’s my job. That’s what I do. So yes, I’ve gotten warnings, and I’m not oblivious.”
Journalist Taylor Lorenz, a friend of Piker’s who has covered the subject of internet harassment for 15 years, says that he is unique in the breadth of his haters, from Vice President JD Vance to Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres.
“Hasan has a very particular strain of politics, which is leftism that is attacked by both mainstream centrist Democrats, bad-faith left-wing actors, the right wing and just internet trolls,” Lorenz says. “And he’s on the most dramatic platform possible, Twitch, which has the most parasocial fan base of any platform. He gets the entire internet weaponized against him. He is the only straight man I’ve ever seen that has been Gamergated.”
Earlier this year, Mamdani’s mother, director Mira Nair, signed a petition calling for the Academy to rescind its invitation to Gal Gadot to appear at the Oscars for “her support for Israel’s military actions against Palestinians.” Given that Gadot’s comments throughout the conflict have centered on releasing the hostages, I ask Piker if such a campaign was fair.
“I think she should be banned from the Oscars for being a dogshit actress. I think she has no business being there for the crime of what she has done to not only the DC franchise, but really any movie she’s been a part of,” he says of the “Wonder Woman” star. “All jokes aside, Gal Gadot serves an important role in normalizing Israel as not a fascist ethno-state, but instead a place where a lot of beautiful women come from. And those beautiful women happen to serve in the IDF, because there’s also this weird sexualization of the forces as well that takes place, and it plays another role in normalizing Israel and its activities and actions, and whitewashing it.”
By contrast, Piker appreciates the work of Natalie Portman, who is Israeli but never served in the IDF like Gadot.
“If Gal Gadot could act like Natalie Portman, there’re probably less people yelling at her. Natalie Portman has made statements about Israel that are middle of the road, but ultimately nobody holds that against her. Because she can act her freaking face off, all the way back when she was like a teenager. Oh my God, ‘Léon: The Professional.’”
Gadot may have ruined the DC franchise for Piker, but James Gunn is redeeming it. When “Superman” opened on July 11, Piker made viral the idea that the fictional nation of Boravia is a stand-in for Israel. In the film, Boravia, backed by U.S.-made weaponry, drops bombs on and oppresses its desert neighbor, prompting Superman to intercede. Gunn has since denied that the plotline has “anything to do with the Middle East.”
“James Gunn is a lot more woke than he lets on. And he lets on how woke he is all the time,” Piker says, still certain of the director and DC chief’s intention all these months later. “Come on, man, you made the [Boravian leader] look like David Ben-Gurion. He just straight-up looks one-to-one like the first prime minister of Israel. We don’t even care what you say about this. We know exactly what we’re looking at.”
To take the allegory a step further, Palantir, BlackRock and Raytheon are LuthorCorp.
“Lex Luthor is cutting a direct contract with Boravia to extract natural resources and then also have a testing ground for their weapons,” Piker says. “I mean, that’s literally what we do. Gaza is a weapons laboratory. That’s how imperialism works.”
Apropos of something, Piker then gives a thumbs-up to the actor who suited up as the latest Man of Steel. “David Corenswet, from what I understand, is Jewish, and he’s very cool. He’s not like pro-Israel or anything like that either, as far as I’ve seen,” he notes.
With that, Piker is ready to move on to cross-Burbank superhero rival Marvel. But there’s little for him to mine on that front. “I’ve always been a Marvel fan growing up, but I cannot stand the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” he says.
Piker’s intensity is palpable as he chases a double espresso with a 6 mg Zyn pouch. All that’s missing is the scroll of chat comments accompanying his musings. Instead, swooning fans enter the real-life frame to express their gratitude. A woman dining with her son approaches our table. “No, no, it’s impossible. He lives in L.A.,” she says, beaming. “And then I kept looking and looking and … it’s him! I absolutely love your work.”
“Being a Twitch streamer is a lot of that,” he says of his exchange with the server. “I have my ear to the ground all the time. A lot of people in legacy media, traditional journalists, are so out of step with the average person around them, even in their immediate vicinity.”
Still, Piker allows the rich and powerful to occupy plenty of space in his head. Bari Weiss, the recently installed editor-in-chief of CBS News, gets a bashing. “Bari Weiss is everything that I despise about access journalism brown-nosing to institutionally powerful people and a major advocate for Israel as well. A person that has spent her entire career decrying woke or identity politics while simultaneously using her identity as a shield,” he says. “Like, ‘I’m a lesbian woman. I can’t be intolerant.’ And also even using your identity as a Jewish woman to say, ‘Identity politics sucks unless we’re talking about Jewish people.’”
Piker scoffs at the idea that CBS News was biased before Weiss arrived.
“There’s not enough pro-Israel voices in major news? Come on. That’s ridiculous,” he says. “Yet she’s been rewarded handsomely for it — $150 million for her shitty Substack that no one cares about or knows about. It’s very obvious why that happened. The Redstones [the seller] and the Ellisons [the buyer] wanted to make CBS more pro-Israel. Shari Redstone was willing to hand off CBS to the Ellisons because she thought they would do a better job of making it more pro-Israel.” (When the Paramount deal was announced in August, Redstone said Ellison “has a clear strategic vision and the resources to take [the studio] to its next stage of growth.”)
Since the deal closed, the studio has made a series of moves that bolster Piker’s contention that Paramount is now more Israel-friendly. In September, it denounced a petition signed by celebrities including Emma Stone and Javier Bardem that called for a boycott of Israeli film institutions implicated in “genocide and apartheid” against Palestinians. Last month, “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv.
“Bari Weiss was being packaged as someone who could bring top talent. Wow,” Piker says. “Benjamin Netanyahu never gives interviews anymore to American news? He talks to American news more than he does the Israeli news.”
Perhaps it’s Piker’s complete lack of filter that makes him so attractive to his growing fan base. Most influencers with a red-hot career are careful not to bite a Hollywood hand that could feed them. As a result, these aspiring stars tend to punch down. Piker is willing to punch way up. All the way up to Larry Ellison, the second-richest person on the planet, who backed his son David’s successful bid to buy Paramount and also has a stake in TikTok. Piker is trying to explain the craven flip of the once-liberal tech titan to the Republican side.
“When Larry Ellison first made that big donation to Marco Rubio [for his presidential run in 2016], people were actually a bit confused. I think he’s gay. Maybe in the closet. I don’t know. I hope he doesn’t laser me down for speculating,” he says with a laugh about the Oracle co-founder. (Larry Ellison has been married to six women and is currently wed to Jolin Zhu.) “But there are [hacked] emails that show Larry Ellison vetted Marco Rubio for fealty to Israel. And as secretary of state, Rubio played a role in the TikTok talks and steered the company towards Ellison.”
Piker doesn’t seem too concerned about the prospect of getting “lasered down” by any vengeful oligarch.
“I’m also not a stranger to super powerful social media platform-owning billionaires directly hating me and making it a personal vendetta and their life’s mission to destroy me somehow,” he says.
In the wake of the Kirk assassination, Elon Musk took to his X to call for Piker’s cancellation, dredging up past comments that walked up to the line. Musk even tagged Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (Amazon owns Twitch). Piker notes the irony that he’s not even banned on X, never mind Twitch, because he’s a power user and drives engagement.
“A lot of these guys are very thin-skinned, and I think the gravest mistake of my career was when I had [Musk’s ex-partner] Grimes on my show and she talked about how buff I was, and then I talked about how Tesla was shit,” Piker says. “That man has never lived it down.”
Grimes wasn’t exaggerating. Piker is hard to miss with his muscular 6-foot-4 frame. He works out one to two hours a day, a regimen that includes playing basketball. If he ingratiated himself better with the oligarchs, he would be courted by mainstream Hollywood. He’s already heard the siren call and turned it down. His manager, former WME agent David Huntzinger, fielded a $1 million offer from one popular betting platform to run a ticker ad during just one stream on election night 2024. Piker said no.
“I’m not the easiest client. And not even because I get into trouble,” Piker explains. “I say no all the time to a lot of deals, like a lot of money. And that’s why I really respect David, because throughout our entire professional relationship, he has probably said no to tens of millions of dollars. Starting number was $1 million, which means they could have probably gone up.”
He’s happier helping the Mamdanis of the Democratic Party and sticking a thorn in the side of the Cuomo types.
“He brought up my name next to Hamas. He said [during a debate with Mamdani], ‘Why don’t you denounce Hamas? Why don’t you denounce Hasan Piker?’” Piker says of the former Democratic governor turned Independent mayoral candidate. “I’m very similar to Zohran in many respects, and the same reasons why they would be resentful of Zohran or fearful of Zohran is the same reason why they despise me.”
With the election just 10 days away, Piker is keeping a low profile with the Mamdani campaign. “I’m in a holding pattern right now” he says, a hint of sadness creeping into his voice. “I don’t want to be too prominent in and around the Zohran stuff at the moment because I don’t want them to use it as a line of attack over and over again.”
What the Cuomo campaign used was a sound bite of Piker saying, “America deserved 9/11” during a 2019 stream. “I was talking about blowback, a theory that has academic consensus at this point, that our meddling in the affairs of the Middle East has led to the blowback of 9/11,” he explains. “This wasn’t to say 9/11 is good. It’s a horrifying act of terror where 3,000 New Yorkers were slaughtered and even many more with the first responders that tried to save as many people as possible. Yet it was, of course, weaponized against me.”
But as election night swung Mamdani’s way, Piker wasn’t keeping a low profile but toasting the millennial mayor-elect with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Brooklyn Paramount victory party. There he offered no mercy for Cuomo.
“What happened? I thought the ‘Hasan loves 9/11’ was a successful campaign strategy?” he said in a video that ran on his YouTube channel. “Andrew Cuomo, fuck you. Suck my dick.”
Before the Mamdani win becomes a reality, however, Piker can only hope the polls are accurate. But he’s feeling confident as we walk along a busy stretch of 10th Avenue. An older man wearing a bandanna and hoop earrings stops in his tracks and claps as he recognizes Piker. It’s a sign that the streamer’s message about Mamdani and/or Israel is resonating. Then, it hits me that Piker has no security detail as he mingles with the masses. Post-Kirk, that seems unwise.
“I make it a point not to have bodyguards when I’m around the people,” he says. “I think it was, was it Fidel Castro or Che Guevara who said, ‘I have a moral vest’?”
It was Castro.
From Variety US