Hasan Piker spends eight hours in a swivel chair every day, dissecting issues like the climate crisis and wealth disparity and advocating for "Medicare for All," LGBTQ rights, gun control, alternatives to capitalism, and other progressive policy-reform ideas.
Piker's monologues, full of unrestrained bouts of laughter, references to inane facets of internet culture, and the latest political news, have attracted 1.5 million followers on Twitch, the livestreaming platform known for its popularity among gamers.
In three years, the 30-year-old leftist pundit has vaulted from working as a miniseries host on a liberal talk show to having a devoted fan base of politically aware teens and 20-somethings across the internet, where he is known as @HasanAbi. He is also helping to revolutionize left-wing political punditry in the process.
"I think all I'm doing is helping people recognize why they feel angry, jaded – why they feel like they have a shittier hand dealt to them than the prior generation," Piker, an ardent critic of former President Donald Trump, told Insider in a recent interview.
Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Politicon
Piker is extremely online, and like countless internet stars and celebrities, his personal life is heavily scrutinized by fans and critics.
This month, he faced backlash for spending nearly $3 million on a house in West Hollywood, California, while pushing socialist politics - Piker supported Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in both the 2016 and the 2020 US Democratic primaries.
In response to the controversy on Twitter, Piker said he donates some of his money. While he didn't specify charitable donations, Piker has donated to Sanders on five occasions, totaling $2,770, according to the Open Secrets database, which tracks political donations. Piker added that his critics misunderstood what socialism is.
In the buttoned-up world of traditional politics, the house debacle could have easily spiraled into scandal. But for the internet star, the controversy has just brought him back into the spotlight.
Piker has a distinctly young audience
In October, Piker helped organize a stream of the video game "Among Us" with US Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, which became the third most viewed Twitch broadcast ever, according to CNET, and reeled in over 400,000 concurrent viewers, according to the data-analytics website Streamlabs.
His stream on election night in November, which lasted over 16 hours and had 225,000 concurrent viewers at its peak, was the sixth most watched election stream on the internet, behind only major news networks, according to Streamlabs.
"You're constantly on," Piker told Insider of how his platform of choice helped him connect with viewers. Twitch "is basically like AM broadcast radio for Zoomers, rather than what Rush Limbaugh was doing to our grandparents," he added.
Screenshot/Twitch, @HasanAbi
Andrew Culp, a media-history and critical-theory professor at the California Institute of the Arts, told Insider that Piker "brings a different style of politics" that is particularly appealing to Gen Z.
According to YouTube data provided by Piker's team, over 35% of his 750,000 YouTube subscribers are 24 years old or younger. Nearly 70% of his followers on the platform are under 30, the data showed.
"Armed with memes and an irreverence to authority, he uses the tools of youth culture," Culp said. "Younger viewers are hungry for" voices like Piker's, Culp added, "that were long shut out of the media."
A lawsuit over a cartoon sparked Piker's political passions
Piker, the son of two academics, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, but grew up in Istanbul. He said a major moment in his political awakening came when he was a teenager in 2004, when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's prime minister at the time, successfully sued the Turkish cartoonist Musa Kart for portraying him as a cat with strands of yarn draped across a feline frame.
"Political cartoons are really important in that side of the world," Piker said, adding that the incident seemed like a "silly" entry point into politics to him now but felt profound at the time.
Piker said he was always fascinated by American culture as a child and jokingly calls himself an "Ameri-boo," a term he says he invented as a play on "weeaboo," a derogatory term for a Western person obsessed with Japanese culture.
Screenshot/Twitch, @HasanAbi
He particularly liked watching "Entourage," a bro-centric TV show about Hollywood. He said it fueled his dreams of living in Los Angeles, where he now resides.
He seized on his desires and moved to the US for college. After graduating from Rutgers University in New Jersey in 2013, Piker dove into political punditry. He began working for the liberal news network The Young Turks (TYT), co-founded by his uncle Cenk Uygur, a co-host of its eponymous primary show. (Uygur has ignited outrage in the past for making sexist and racist comments, including saying the N-word, Variety reported.)
Whenever the opportunity arose, Piker filled in for other hosts on "TYT," which broadcasts on YouTube and streaming platforms. Piker's profile rose enough that in 2016, he launched his own series within the TYT network, "The Breakdown," which aired on Facebook.
He started streaming to tap into a gaming audience
Last year, Piker left "TYT" to focus full time on his Twitch channel, which he launched in 2018 to explore a more casual, unscripted style.
"At The Young Turks, everything I did was prescripted," he said. "I was terrible off the cuff. I could not keep up. I could not keep conversation for extended periods of time."
Joining Twitch gave Piker the freedom to say whatever he wanted.
"Over time, I just stopped caring about choosing a particular type of language, and instead just did what felt normal and natural to me," he said.
He said he also pivoted to Twitch in an attempt to tap into a new audience: gamers.
While roughly half of video-game players identify as female in 2021, according to a study by the Entertainment Software Association, influential segments of the gaming community have long been linked with misogyny and other forms of bigotry.
Piker said he wanted to introduce gamers to leftist politics as a balm for far-right vitriol online.
"I always had an interest in targeting and motivating young and, in a lot of instances, white men on the internet - not motivating, rather introducing them into left-wing politics," he said.
He added: "I wanted to show them that leftist politics are actually cool and the portrayals that you see on the internet by these reactionary essayists on YouTube ... who are obsessed with left-wing politics and vilifying leftists on the internet, were completely wrong."
Screenshot/Twitch, @HasanAbi
About when Piker began streaming in 2018, a network of right-wing commentators - like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Steven Crowder - became quite popular online.
"Everywhere you went on the internet, accelerated by Fox News, the left was seen as hysterical, emotional, blue-haired social justice warriors," Piker told The New York Times last year. "They turned the concept of fighting for social justice into something negative."
Piker wanted to disrupt that narrative.
Piker is known for his takedown-style videos
To meet his audience where they were, Piker took on a confrontational style common in the political sphere of viral content. He became notorious for making explosive remarks, like in 2019 when he said "America deserved 9/11" because of the country's foreign-policy blunders. He later partially recanted the widely condemned comment.
Many of Piker's most popular videos on his YouTube account - where he archives Twitch highlights - are takedowns, in which he reacts to a clip from a right-wing pundit or politician and aggressively picks apart the rationale behind their ideology.
These videos have centered on conservative personalities like the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative activism group Turning Point USA.
In one stream, he reacts to clips in which the gun-rights activist Kaitlin Bennett goes on university campuses to ask students whether colleges should provide tampons for men.
"Zero percent win rate, the L queen," he said. "She keeps taking L's, over and over again." ("Taking L's" means losing repeatedly.) At different points in the video, Piker says people "dumpstered" - a slang term for obliterated - Bennett.
Piker's style is reminiscent of popular right-wing internet personalities like Steven Crowder who split up discussions about culture and politics with segments in which they mock people they don't like.
A casual demeanor sets him apart
Watching Piker react to clips and develop rebuttals in real time feels more like hanging with a friend than listening to a practiced political pundit.
While his arguments are sharp, he has a frantic, spontaneous broadcast style and constantly bursts into snickers. Still, a serious undercurrent always runs beneath that silliness as he offers analyses that contextualize today's news with historical events.
While most pundits across the board - from Carlson to left-wing entertainers like Trevor Noah and John Oliver - read from scripts and often don a suit and tie, Piker wears whatever he wants and chills in his house.
"I don't even see myself as a brand, per se," he said. "I'm just a dude. I'm just a guy who likes to have fun and talk shit."
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