Hasan Piker Thinks America Might Be Cooked

Piker describes his career as a protracted and so far largely unsuccessful effort to “pull the Democrats to be more radical, to be actually progressive.” While he’s beloved by many leftists, he’s often reviled by liberals—the centrists whose views are largely reflected by the party leadership. This became especially clear after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. “You have a guy like me, name is Hasan, and I’m saying, ‘No, you don’t understand, Israel is still very much the responsible party for October 7, for like 75 years of brutal occupation and apartheid.’ And people were like, ‘Oh, you’re a terrorist.’ And that really hasn’t gone away.”

Last year, Democrats first invited him to and then ejected him from the Democratic National Convention after he interviewed some delegates who were part of the “Undecided” group protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. “I just eat it from both ends on that issue,” he says. “You’re getting [hate] from the far-right, and you’re getting it from the liberals and the centrists and the institutions. So you just have nothing. You only have your community. You only have your grassroots backing.”

But in recent weeks, with videos of starving Palestinian children flooding social media, more Democrats are speaking out about the war. Piker won’t give them credit for that just yet. “I’m used to Democrats operating in this incredibly cynical way,” he says. “So I’m not surprised by this about-face, if you can even call it that. Many people aren’t even doing an about-face. They’re mostly just ass-covering.”

Piker is also quick to call out his peers in the manosphere, saying that social media has putrified into a hate-filled hellscape worse than the subculture that gave rise to GamerGate, the coordinated misogynistic attack on women in the video game world that was an ignition point for the modern reactionary right. This rage chamber is thronged by far-right figures like Andrew Tate, white supremacists like Fuentes, and outwardly apolitical podcasters and streamers, like NELK and Adin Ross, who fawningly interviewed Trump ahead of the election in 2024. “I call it ‘vice signaling’—these guys, whether they’re real villains or not, are presenting themselves as bad people, and people like it,” Piker says. “Nobody likes cancel culture, but goddamn, that shit was keeping motherfuckers in check.”

Of course, Piker himself is an edgelord, too, eager to breach taboos—just on behalf of progressivism. For example, he proposes “Nuremberg”-style trials for those in the media who he sees as taking part in a “propaganda apparatus for the state.” He says he told the NELK boys “straight up” that they should be “tried.”

“But,” Piker continues, “there are far more consequential, far more noteworthy, figures that deserve [to be put on trial] than, like, the fucking NELK boys.” Specifically, he says, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. Piker may be the product of an often irony-poisoned online space, but his defense of the Palestinians is pure and deeply felt, as it is among large swaths of Gen Z. So he was incensed when Stephens recently wrote that “there is no genocide” being committed by Israel. “Literally three days after, like, a Jewish Israeli Holocaust scholar wrote a New York Times [editorial] saying it’s definitely a genocide,” Piker says, “Bret Stephens came in hot and was like, No, actually, listen to me instead.” (On July 15, Dr. Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, wrote a Times opinion piece headlined “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”; a Stephens column, “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza,” followed one week later.)