AUSTIN — Hasan Piker slid into the back seat, phone in his hand, as thousands watched in real time.
The student group that invited him had spent weeks sifting through death threats and launched a last-minute fundraiser to cobble together the $25,000 organizers said the university was charging to cover security costs. A Jewish student organization described his rhetoric as “repulsive” and his views as “against our values as Americans and Jews.” Others were planning to protest, maybe in bulletproof vests.
The governor, a U.S. senator and the state attorney general condemned the University of Texas at Austin event.
“Nevertheless, we are still continuing,” Piker said from the car, his eyes fluttering between the camera live-streaming his every move across the world and the gray gloom stretching beyond the windshield as he curved toward campus. He was here, he said, “in spite of the ridiculous campaign to try and stop it.” He looked at his phone. He looked out the window and back to his phone.
“Dare I say we’re doing this speech because of the pushback,” he said.
Not so long ago, the 35-year-old political commentator and Twitch streamer was treated as some kind of wunderkind who could help Democrats reach the elusive young, male vote. In March 2025, the New Yorker positioned Piker as a central figure in “the battle for the bros.” A month later, the New York Times dubbed him “a progressive mind in a MAGA body.”
This year, however, he has emerged as the election cycle’s bogeyman-in-chief; a 6-foot-4 canvas upon which people are projecting their fears and anger, hopes and dreams. He’s lent his megaphone to turbocharge canvassing efforts for leftist political candidates across the country, and in turn their opponents have sought to tie Democratic candidates to his most controversial remarks.
Taking stock of his year in a recent interview with The Washington Post, Piker said that “self-avowed socialists running and winning in primaries and defeating long-term incumbents” across the country has been the most heartening thing he’s seen from his intervention into electoral politics.
“If you were to ask me 10 years ago if we would have openly anti-Zionist, openly anti-capitalistic socialists getting elected into office all across the country, if you were to ask me that in 2016, I’d laugh at you,” Piker said. “Even if you were to ask me two years ago.”
As Piker and his allies tell it, there’s a manufactured outrage effort promoted by Republicans who — in a country saddled by high prices, an unpopular president and an unpopular war — couldn’t find any better midterm message than how awful Piker is. He says establishment Democrats threatened by the party’s insurgent left are more than happy to go along with the GOP attacks.
To his critics, he is an incendiary force, antisemitic and anti-American. Hateful, radical, dangerous.
Many others seem to just wish he would stop talking, so everyone could focus on something else, please.
In the midterm maelstrom, Piker is seemingly everywhere. He is on TV screens in Michigan, described as a “terrorist sympathizer” in a Republican attack ad featuring one of his most inflammatory comments: “America deserved 9/11.” He is mentioned in the Senate debate in Georgia, association with him treated as ammunition. He is in his underwear, his photo splashed onto the jumbotron at the GOP midterm convention last month. President Donald Trump is talking about him. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is talking about him.
He is in Vanity Fair, shot by Annie Leibovitz. He is in Le Monde, the French newspaper. He is in the Wall Street Journal, where a duo of centrist Democratic strategists in March wrote an op-ed arguing that their party is too cozy with him.
If Piker is awake, there is a good chance he is on camera. He streams some seven hours a day, six days a week. He tries to take Sundays off.
He is not, however, on the ballot or, data suggests, on the minds of most Americans. For all the attention, fixation and dissection of his views online, he remains a minor figure who inspires or riles up political obsessives rather than crossing over to the mainstream of the normal voter.
Across three Senate battleground states, for example, 62 percent of likely voters do not know who Piker is, according to a recent New York Times-Siena poll.
Still, the fervor surrounding him amounts to a digital hurricane, and late last month it was swirling toward landfall in Austin. The event hosted by the University Democrats offered the latest test of his influence and infamy.
Free tickets to the speech sold out in half an hour. Ultimately, 3,000 people RSVP’d, three times the number who attended a Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) campus event, according to organizers.
Piker climbed out of the car and was led onto campus to a backstage room while hundreds filed into the auditorium. After weeks of back-and-forth with university staff, and complaints from organizers and Piker about censorship, the event ultimately was held in a 466-seat venue, far smaller than organizers had hoped.
For all the online chatter, the in-person reality was muted. The campus was calm. Outside the auditorium, a substantial protest crowd didn’t materialize. Inside, the room was sprinkled with empty seats.
New Jersey-born and Turkey-raised, Piker’s media career started out at the Young Turks, the progressive online news network co-founded by his uncle, Cenk Uygur. In the eight years since he started his regular online broadcasts about culture and politics, Piker has become one of the most-watched streamers on Twitch, where he now boasts north of 3 million followers.
He live-streamed from the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as part of the party’s digital creator outreach. Then, amid the soul-searching that followed Kamala Harris’s loss later that year, liberal commentators and consultants began to call for a “Joe Rogan of the left,” someone who could reach young men where they already are online.
He is a self-described anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, socialist and, at least aesthetically, a “stereotypical dude bro.” He has been banned, temporarily, by Twitch at least seven times — most recently this January after a stream in which he used the term “Zionist pigs.” He reportedly earns a seven-figure income from his streams on the platform.
From these hours and hours of footage, spanning years and years of his online existence, critics have clutched to a cluster of his most controversial comments.
Among them: “There’s a lot we can learn from” the Chinese Communist Party; “Hamas is a thousand times better” than Israel; and, about landlords who don’t rent their properties, “Let the streets soak in their f—ing red capitalist blood.” And perhaps the most repeated remark, one Piker made in 2019: “America deserved 9/11.” He apologized soon after, describing the comments as satirical and inappropriate.
This year, Britain would not allow Piker to enter the country to do speaking events, with officials saying his visit “may not be conducive to the public good.”
In the run-up to the midterm elections, mentions of Piker have exploded across social media. In August, high-profile left- and right-wing politicians, commentators and influencers were 14 times more likely to mention Piker than any point in 2024 or 2025, according to a Washington Post analysis of political commentary across social media, newsletters and podcasts.
In recent years, Piker has asked viewers to participate in an annual demographic survey — an unverified, self-reported census of sorts that suggests his audience has become older, more female, more White and less politically diverse. In 2020, roughly 3 in 5 viewers said they were 25 years old or younger. This summer, 1 in 5 viewers were 25 or younger. And during the same six-year window, his viewership shifted from 83 percent male to 63 percent male.
During his streams, Piker hopscotches from deep dives on the day’s headlines to banter with random tidbits dropped in the chat by viewers in real time, all peppered with curse words. He’ll also interview lawmakers including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), as well as campaign hopefuls.
Though his oratory style has remained largely consistent over the years, he’s seen a shift in the narrative surrounding him. In the last year or so, he told The Post, the media coverage moved from “Hasan Piker is reaching out to the youth and converting young men away from MAGA” to “Hasan Piker is an electoral burden. He’s a terrorist. He’s a radical.”
He points to two moments that accelerated the shift. First, the upset win of Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York last summer. “That was the first time I was very invested in a candidate,” Piker said. Then came the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary in Michigan, one of the most nail-biting Senate races of the year. As Piker sees it, his own footprint expanded over the electoral map, and the mood soured.
“They wanted a Joe Rogan of the left to be an establishment Democrat,” he said on a recent stream. That’s not what they got.
This year, Piker has waded more deeply into the muck of political campaigns, crisscrossing the country to rally for progressive candidates, extending his reach off-screen. Vincent Vertuccio, a progressive strategist, helped him navigate that world, planning collaborations between Piker and a handful of leftist congressional candidates across the nation.
“He will drive legions of his followers to show up in person to knock on doors,” Vertuccio said of Piker. “These volunteers would have never existed within the campaign’s ecosystem if not for him.”
That kind of capacity typically comes only in areas with robust labor unions, decades-old advocacy networks and the nation’s largest Democratic Socialists of America chapters, Vertuccio added. But Piker can trigger that sort of passion with just his name on a flier.
In New Jersey, Piker headlined an event in May for Adam Hamawy, a combat surgeon running for an open House seat, turning out students from local college campuses. “It was just like a whole new universe unlocked,” Vertuccio said. A few days later, Hamawy clinched victory in the crowded Democratic primary.
Piker also advocated for Melat Kiros, a lawyer and barista who went on to topple a liberal, three-decade incumbent in one of Colorado’s deeply Democratic House districts. His presence stirred backlash: Three Denver-area venues canceled Kiros’s events featuring Piker, forcing a relocation to the state Capitol steps. Ultimately, Piker didn’t attend.
His preferred candidates haven’t always won primaries. In Wisconsin, supporters of Francesca Hong’s long-shot bid for governor were badgering Piker in the comments section of his streams to pay attention to her, recalled Becky Cooper, her campaign manager. “We actually had to tell our supporters to kind of back off,” Cooper said. Hong ended up on his stream in June, raising $57,000 in the process, according to local news outlets. She narrowly lost the Democratic primary six weeks later, and Piker said he “should never be the biggest surrogate of a campaign.”
His most prominent role as political surrogate came in Michigan, where Piker rallied in April with El-Sayed. Still, most Michigan voters have no opinion on Piker. Those who did recognize his name had an overwhelmingly negative opinion — 6 percent favorable versus 39 percent unfavorable — according to a recentWashington Post-Schar School poll. El-Sayed has since minimized Piker’s relevance as “a streamer in California” and, according to CNN, has told him his inflammatory rhetoric about Israel is costing him votes. (A spokesperson for El-Sayed did not respond to a request for comment.)
Piker’s public persona has exposed his friends and family to threats, and left him inundated with death threats, too. Yet he shows no sign of slowing down as he describes the expansion of his movement at a scale he once thought impossible.
“This is a level of real political legitimacy that we’ve been able to secure that is far beyond my wildest imaginations,” he said. “And we’re just beginning.”
On UT’s campus in late September, the protesters gathered a few hours before Piker was scheduled to take the stage. Benjamin Shrader, 28, chairman and president of the Austin Young Republicans, who helped organize the rally, had expected up to 300 attendees. Instead, there were only a couple dozen. Most were not students.
Inside the event, Piker was met with cheers and the occasional stray boo. Thousands watched along live on Twitch, sending a flurry of heart emojis and inside puns, surging in real time across the screen.
He wore a burnt-orange tie in school colors, evidence of a broader outfit shift in recent years. Gone are the sweats, replaced with sharp suits, a transition he has described as an effort to package the same ideas for wider appeal, especially in an era when his videos are increasingly cable news fodder.
Piker told the crowd he believed in the promise of his country and the goodness of his neighbors.
“A lot of people say I hate America,” he said. “But look, I always tell people, if I hated America, I’d be a Republican.” They, he said, are destroying the country.
The last question of the evening asked for his thoughts on how to keep progressive momentum going in Texas.
The state is home to one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country, one both parties see as pivotal to control of Congress. Piker has criticized James Talarico, the Democratic candidate, as a “liberal slopulist,” with scant policy substance underneath populist rhetoric.
Onstage, Piker’s answer reflected a specific brand of agility he demonstrates on his streams — a fluency between culture and ideology, an ability to jump between the crass and the philosophical.
He began with a couple of expletives, questioning what Trump sees in Ken Paxton, Talarico’s Republican opponent, and why women sleep with him, a reference to Paxton’s alleged adultery. Then he pivoted, calling on the audience to recognize their power. He said Talarico is the “right guy” to win and pressed attendees to hold him to account long after Election Day.
“We’ve got to make sure that he doesn’t become another do-nothing Democrat,” Piker said. “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.” He left the stage to rapturous applause.
Online, that nugget was soon clipped and delivered on the algorithm to screens across the country in the hours and days to come. The remarks were shared by Republican accounts and centrist Democrats alike supposing that Talarico would become a Piker pawn.
On campus, though, the nearby protest had packed up long ago.
Luke Connors in Washington contributed to this report.
The post Meet Hasan Piker, the streamer dividing Democrats in the midterms appeared first on Washington Post.
