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Hasan Piker calls it the bus driver test: “You get on a bus and you have 30 seconds to explain whatever online phenomena took place to the bus driver without them looking at you and going, ‘Get off the fucking bus.’” Most online discourse, no matter how heated, fails the test, he says – not least an incident last weekend, when someone on a Dublin street asked to take a picture with Piker, then held up a picture of his dog and shouted “Free Kaya!” Never mind the bus driver; trying to explain the significance of this particular event might well take the rest of this article, but the wider point is that there is a jarring overlap, or more often disconnect, between the online and offline worlds.
Piker finds himself in this in-between space more and more these days. Until fairly recently, the 34-year-old was familiar only to the very online, especially Americans in their 20s and 30s, largely thanks to his presence on the streaming channel Twitch, where he has three million subscribers. But since Donald Trump’s election, Piker has become an in-demand voice in “the real world” for his views on the beleaguered political left, and especially that inordinately fretted-over demographic, young men.
Predictably, this also makes Piker a favourite hate figure of the political right. To his enemies there is plenty to dislike: his outspoken political views; his Turkish, Muslim background; his allegiances with progressive politicians such as Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar (all of whom have appeared on his show). But they also hate the fact that Piker – tall, muscular, fashionable and handsome – is far too alpha to fit lefty stereotypes. He has not been afraid to leverage his henchness in shirtless, sometimes even trouser-less, magazine photoshoots or selfies on his socials, generating articles such as “30 sexy pics of Hasan Piker that prove the only thing that is hotter than his takes is his bod”. He’s regularly called things such as “the Joe Rogan of the left” (yawn), or “the AOC of Twitch” or a “himbo gateway drug to leftist thought”, none of which quite captures him.
“I’ll be honest, I had no idea that this is what I was going to be doing,” says Piker from his Los Angeles studio. “Like, if someone were to ask me, did you ever think that you’d become a Twitch streamer? I’d be like, what is Twitch? The concept of a YouTube influencer didn’t even exist when I was growing up.” It’s the morning and he’s preparing to start his daily 11am show. He usually broadcasts live for seven or eight hours straight, talking off the cuff about current affairs, lifestyle stories, what he’s up to, playing video games, reacting to memes and media clips, and interacting with the constant stream of messages that scroll by in the top left corner of the screen.
It’s a communal experience; a good hang, you might say. It also sounds exhausting. He has estimated that in 2020 he spent 42% of the entire year livestreaming. “I’ve lowered it to seven hours a day, but sometimes I still do eight. And on top of that, I’ll take Sundays off now.” He’s already running late this morning. As we continue talking, his Twitch chatter begins to fill with “where the hell is he?” posts.
Establishing himself on Twitch, which is primarily a platform for livestreaming video games (and has been owned by Amazon since 2014), was a conscious decision, Piker says. His media career started out with The Young Turks, the progressive online news network co-founded by his maternal uncle, Cenk Uygur. Piker’s parents are Turkish immigrants, and he grew up between New Jersey and Istanbul before studying political science and communication studies at Rutgers University. He graduated to hosting his own show on The Young Turks in 2016 – earning the title “Woke Bae” in the process – but in 2018 he decided to go solo on Twitch, to counterbalance what he saw as the overwhelmingly rightwing, often racist, misogynistic and xenophobic views that infested the space. “There’s a lot of ideological diversity amongst the gamers, amongst the developers, amongst the consumers, but unfortunately, the market for political expression in this hobby is so heavily dominated by the right, and that’s the same for pretty much everything,” he says.
Physical fitness, for example. It’s now assumed that any young male who goes to the gym is likely to end up in thrall to Andrew Tate and other manosphere bros. “This creates this weird attitude where a lot of liberal or progressive people look to these spaces and think, ‘Why is everyone such a rightwinger?’” he says. “And I don’t think that’s the case. It’s just that that is what it looks like on the internet.”
This is the problem with the American left in general, says Piker: they’ve conceded so many cultural spaces to the right. “You still have to market your ideas … but they just completely gave up on all notion of marketing or branding. They think these are bourgeois concepts. But unfortunately, it’s actually doubly important to try and engage people and try and make these sorts of politics more appealing, because there is a century of anti-socialist thought that is deeply baked into the American collective consciousness, whether it be the Red Scare propaganda or the modern version of that, which has become basically telling children, ‘Sharing is caring is actually communism.’”
Piker is consistently critical of the Trump administration on his show, especially its foreign and immigration policies, but he is no loyal Democrat. Even before the 2024 presidential election, Piker was not optimistic about their prospects, bemoaning how little Kamala Harris and the Democrats were really offering, how they were losing young men and how much better organised the Trump campaign was online. His own politics are broadly social democrat and “empathy-first”, he explains. “My position is actually the normal position in most of the world, but it’s like a very abnormal position that many Americans have not encountered.”
One of the dangers of Piker’s type of relaxed, relatable, long-form commentary is that he’ll occasionally go too far, which gives his opponents ammunition. He has been suspended from Twitch four times for perceived offensive content, including once for calling a white person a “cracker”. Most notoriously, in 2019, in the context of a broader critique of American foreign policy, he said that “America deserved 9/11”, a comment that was seized upon by Fox News and other outlets. Piker later apologised and said the language was inappropriate, but the “Muslim communist terrorist” association has never gone away. The 9/11 comment resurfaced earlier this year during the New York mayoral race, for instance, as part of an attack ad against Mamdani, of whom Piker was an early supporter.
Likewise, Piker’s vocal support for Palestinians and condemnation of Israel and Zionism have led to accusations of antisemitism (Piker says he has never criticised Jewish people). He has also been ridiculed for expressing admiration for China, after a trip there last month. “Regardless of its flaws, and repressive attitudes towards certain groups and whatnot, they have done a phenomenal achievement in greatly improving the material conditions of the average Chinese person,” he tells me.
Piker isn’t particularly fazed by any of this, it seems. “I have no issues getting vilified by people on the right. I love when my enemies hate me,” he says. “It is what it is: they talk shit; what are you gonna do?”
The hate constantly threatens to spill offline, however. In May, Piker was detained for two hours by US border agents on his return from France (he is an American citizen). They questioned him about his views on Trump and Gaza before letting him go, he said. “I think they did it because they know who the fuck I am, and they wanted to put the fear of God into me.” In September, the Trump ally Laura Loomer posted on X: “Hopefully today President Trump can negotiate the permanent deportation of Hassan [sic] Piker back to Turkey. It’s time for him to go home.” Piker’s reply was succinct: “I was born here dumbass.”
These levels of enmity help explain the “Free Kaya!” incident in Dublin, which may not pass the bus driver test but illustrates the weirdness of Piker’s offline/online reality. It started with a Twitch stream Piker did in October during which his dog Kaya, who is often seen sleeping in the background, suddenly yelped, just as Piker was doing something with his hand off-camera. Conspiracy theorists swiftly concluded that Piker was activating a shock collar on the dog, and that he was therefore a cruel and terrible human being. In reality, Piker explained, Kaya had “clipped her foot” on something while he happened to be reaching for a can of Zyn nicotine pouches. He even held up the dog collar for inspection on camera. This didn’t stop his opponents piling on, combing through previous streams in search of “evidence” of animal cruelty, and making “collargate” a meme. Even People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals put out a statement: “Hasan Piker has denied using a shock collar on his dog, and we hope that’s true …” Hence the ambush by a random person in Dublin.
Piker took that encounter in his stride – people recognise him in the street all the time. He just said “nice to meet you”, and nothing else happened. Online, though, the encounter was clipped from his live stream and disseminated with Piker’s “nice to meet you” reply edited out. “They wanted to make it look like I was, like, shocked, devastated, right? And it didn’t happen in the real world. So they had to manipulate the footage.” Even if it fails the bus driver test, this kind of online outrage is constantly being manufactured, amplified, fed into the anti-Piker feedback loop. “Even us having this conversation is probably going to lead to other people going, ‘Ooh, we got one on him. He’s very shaken by this, so we should do it again.’”
This is the difference between the offline and online worlds in a nutshell, he says: “It’s very difficult to maintain a very negative energy in the real world without coming across as hysterical and odd. Interactions on the internet actually create this environment where you can be as hostile as you want, as ruthless as you want, but in the real world, if you behave like that, most people will look at you and go, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’”
That encounter was relatively low stakes because it happened in Ireland (where Piker was receiving an award from Trinity College). In the US, he feels less safe. The assassination of Charlie Kirk in September was a shocking example of where this online hate can now end up. Piker and Kirk were kind of contemporaries – mirror images, even. The two had debated each other on stage in the past, and were set to do so again in two weeks’ time when Kirk was shot at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University. Piker watched the event unfold in real time on his live stream, his reaction turning from disbelief to horror as his followers sent him updates and video clips (which he did not broadcast).
Piker still does real-life live streams in the US. “I can’t let fear guide my life. I’ve gotten death threats for the last 12 years. It certainly peaked during the Charlie Kirk stuff but at the end of the day, it’s just an unfortunate consequence of being in this space.” Unhealthy parasocial relationships come with the territory, he accepts, “and they can very quickly turn around and create very unhealthy stalker-style relationships. The love can turn into hate very quickly.”
Is there a way to cultivate healthy parasocial relationships, then? “I try to direct people back to doing stuff in the real world, like organising. Just being around other human beings and communicating with them is profoundly important. I can’t believe this is something that we even have to talk about.”
Does he practice what he preaches – the guy who spends all day broadcasting from his room? “I’m broadcasting eight hours a day; you’re absolutely right,” he says. “And yet, every moment that I’m not online, I am out in the real world. I do not shy away from going outside, going to third spaces, whether it be public parks, constantly engaging with my normie friends … people that don’t even have Instagram accounts. That’s how I try to stay as grounded as possible.” He has many allies and friends in the streaming world, too, but largely he keeps his offline life strictly private.
Having been so prescient about the 2024 election, how does Piker feel about the next few years in US politics? “Things change quite rapidly, but if you look at the avenues where there is some semblance of hope, it’s the left candidates that are actually really galvanising the public,” he says. He’s talking about the progressive “left flank”: Mamdani, AOC, Omar – his own generation. “We have to lean into that, because I feel like it’s a matter of life or death at this point, like the death of democracy. So if the Democrats continue getting in the way of the left-flank candidate, I foresee the political environment turning really, really dark. It already has, but it’s going to, most likely, get worse. So I will do everything in my power to try and avoid that alternative.”
The American left could arguably do with someone like Piker – someone who’s genuine, incisive, a skilled communicator with a loyal fanbase, and easy on the eye. But it doesn’t sound as if Piker is tempted. He makes the occasional appearance on panel discussions, podcasts and even television, but he’s not tempted any further into traditional media, he says, partly because he wouldn’t enjoy the levels of editorial control, but also because “the audience is moving in my direction, and away from legacy publishers”. Unless things radically change, he has no plans to do anything different, he says. “I’m just taking everything one day at a time.” Perhaps he’s more useful where he is – fighting it out, cutting through, in what to many is hostile or alien territory.
But on top of that, he still clearly enjoys it: “I find a lot of emotional fulfilment in what I do.” As he’s talking, he’s got one eye on the clock and his message feed. It’s nearly half past 11. “Right now my offline chat is freaking out that I’m not live yet.” Another marathon live stream awaits, and he’s itching to get started.
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