Waiting for Hasan

the revolution will not be streamed

"Let us not waste our time in idle discourse!
Let us do something, while we have the chance!"
— Waiting for Godot, Act II, Vladimir

I hear his voice before I see him. The window to his studio is propped open, but he’s so loud I imagine that I would still hear him even if it was locked shut. This is how it is every time. My plane arrives late, or I lose track of time, or I find myself on the uncomfortable couch of a friend’s rent-controlled apartment across town (though not for long as he always, without fail invites me to crash in his guest room). I catch a ride over. This moment feels like a replication of my childhood, in some way… going between my father’s house in one of the most expensive zip codes on Long Island, to my single mom’s place where my three sisters and our two cats and two dogs living crowded around a distinctly 80s styled kitchen.

Because Hasan Piker is rich. He drives an electric Porsche that I personally dislike but does, surprisingly, have a nice amount of legroom. Are there different kinds of rich people? I think so. Does it matter? Is Hasan a Che Guevara or a Vladimir Lenin? No, he isn’t, and he doesn’t claim to be. But undoubtedly the pair—men I think about often when I look at myself in the morning mirror and lament my personal cowardice—came from a background of wealth and privilege. Often this is the case of the most revolutionary figures in history—some of the most important among them were educated, from a well-off background, and at one point or another had life-altering experiences that led them down a path of no return. This is not to say, of course, that I believe that Hasan will be camping out with guerillas in the Sierra Maestra anytime soon.¹ But I would have loved to see him cackling with his infectious laugh while covering the news of the Bay of Pigs in real time.

I have never cared much that Hasan Piker was rich or famous. Or at least, a kind of celebrity. I have always said that our politics were different, but I struggle to find those differences when he and I sit down to chat. But not everything can always be stated in black and white. Hasan has been called an opportunist, grifter, charlatan, traitor, imperialist, shill, CIA-plant, useful idiot, dumbass, servant of capital, capitalist, about every vile name large and small that the right or left can cook up. But the longer I know Hasan, the less I feel any of those things are true. Although I will say, he likes to claim that he himself is a dumbass.

Do I like everything he says and does? No. Hasan can come across as a cocksure asshole, at times. But I also have grown to know him as giving and even softhearted. Hasan, for even reasons that sometimes seem to elude him, cares deeply for other people. It’s like an itch for some. No matter what, you have to try and fight for something. You have to keep going. Relentlessly. And relentless he is.

He is, technically, one of Amazon’s highest paid contractors—they own the streaming platform Twitch that pays him a princely sum of a few hundred thousand or so dollars a month—and he is also the highest single contributor to the Amazon Labor Union. Hasan has raised tremendous funds for countless organizations, and I have personally witnessed him shelling out tons of cash to such orgs. When I suggest to Hasan that we work with my friends at Water Drop LA, a local org that provides services to people living on the street in Skid Row (one of the densest homeless areas in the world) he is immediately ready to go. That day, Water Drop LA raised $20,000 in addition to the supplies we delivered. That’s what I like best about Hasan: he is game. If this helps people, let’s do it. I admire that.

Clockwise from top left: Driving to Skid Row in Hasan's Camry he still owns, the talented cameraman Yakub, buying supplies for Water Drop LA, speaking with Hawk, a local living on the streets of Skid Row

Hasan isn’t building the Vanguard Party. He’s not drilling a militia that is going to overthrow the bourgeois. But when you look around, there aren’t many other jumping off points. I think it would be foolish to think—and I hope after reading this interview, you might consider it as well—that the American left doesn’t need figures like Hasan Piker to move towards any kind of revolutionary future. Figures like Hasan aren’t the endgame, but they are a crucial stepping stone for an American left still searching for its voice in a revolutionary future.

Alex: It's Monday, December 30^th, 2024. Yep. I'm sitting here with… what's your name again?

Hasan: Hasan. Doğan. Piker.

Alex: Doğan, yeah, cool.

Hasan: I picked up the names of both my grandparents.

Alex: Wow. Hasan Piker. Okay. Where do we begin, Hasan? Who is Hasan Piker?

Hasan: That… you're joking, that's your first question?

Alex: No, no, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

Hasan: Oh, my. Incredible, Alex.

Alex: What do you think the role of a political streamer like you is in a broader political movement? I know you've referred to yourself as an entertainer before, but do you see yourself as an activist, as an educator, or as an entertainer? And what does that mean?

Hasan: I try to do a bit of everything, you know. Whenever I'm talking about a particular issue, obviously there's an educational component to it, but I do want to be, first and foremost, entertaining.

Because I feel like entertainment makes these systemic forms of oppression and understanding them more palatable. So, I try to do everything—be not super serious, but also be super serious at times when it's necessary.

I wouldn’t consider myself a journalist, even though there are some instances where I will contribute or like, editorialize. I mean, yeah, I’m not. I’m a commentator. I don’t think commentators are journalists. Commentators can come from a journalist background, but I am not doing objective news reporting.

I’m not creating new news. I’m not going out there and, you know, putting a microphone in people’s faces, asking questions, trying to figure out what’s going on in the world. I am simply relying on journalists and doing commentary.

And also, the way I explain it—what I do is basically like I’m Rush Limbaugh for Zoomers, but also not filled to the brim with brain worms, both literally and figuratively.

[Long pause]

Because he’s dead. And also, because he plugged holes in his head by eating a lot of opiates. And also, because he had brain cancer.

Alex: Do you ever worry that your persona—whether it’s the himbo thing or being a Twitch streamer or a loud, obnoxious guy—do you worry that it ever distracts from the seriousness of the political issues that you discuss?

Hasan: Yeah, I’m sure it does, but I don’t care. I mean, it’s just who I am.

And I think that people want a show. If that causes them—if that can open up their eyes and make them see the world through a materialist lens, recognize the real harm that’s being done to them and their neighbors, and who’s doing that harm in the process of being entertained, then that’s great.

Sometimes it will get in the way, and people definitely weaponize that against me with regular frequency. But that’s just who I am.

I don’t want to be a boring suit. I just want to be myself. If it works, it works. And it’s happened to be very—I mean, I’m very fortunate—it’s happened to be very successful.

So, I don’t see any reason to change it at all, to change who I am at all. Because I feel like when you’re a CNN host, when you’re an anchor, when you’re a commentator on any of these legacy publishers, you’re very limited in front of the camera.

You spend a very limited time on camera, so you can be as manicured as possible. But when you do what I’m doing—Twitch streaming for eight hours, 10 hours a day, taking your community with you wherever you go, like how we went to Skid Row, but before we went to Lowe’s together—we drove in the car, listened to music. I burped. All that stuff.

You know, you can’t edit those out in real time. So, it would require me to be someone different than who I actually am, and I don’t want to do that.

Alex: Would you say that you’re very online?

Hasan: [Laugh] What do you think? I’m live eight hours a day, directly online with a virtual hive mind. Yeah.

Alex: How long have you been really doing this? At the level that you’ve kind of been doing it?

Hasan: I would say 2020 is when I went full-time, yeah, as a Twitch streamer. And I haven’t stopped since.

Alex: And you’re definitely a workaholic. You’re streaming pretty much every day.

Hasan: Yeah.

Alex: Do you ever feel like that has an impact on you? Do you ever think it’s changed the way you digest information or even interact in your normal life, outside of this—you know, when the cameras aren’t on?

Hasan: Absolutely, yeah, for sure. I don’t have a lot of time to do normal things that I used to do—go out, you know, drink with some buddies.

Every part of my life is super regimented. Every day is structured to basically maximize every second. And you’ve been staying with me. You’ve stayed with me a couple of times. You’ve seen it. You’ve seen it in action. I don’t waste any moment throughout the day.

From the moment that I wake up till the moment that I go live at 11 A.M. Pacific, I’m trying to bring in as much data into my mind about the news of the day as I can in order to make sure that I can provide the best, most up-to-date news, to an audience.

I feel like that’s a responsibility that I have. I feel like it’s something that I have to do. I take that very seriously, and in that process, I definitely don’t take any breaks and don’t have too much time for friends and family, with the exception of, like, at night, I guess, when I hang out with my friends and family.

But yeah, that definitely has changed my life dramatically and probably, probably … you know, in a negative way.

Alex: Do you ever feel addicted to it?

Hasan: There’s certainly… I wouldn’t say I’m addicted to it. [Hasan pauses and puts his hands on his head]. I guess maybe I am an addict—like I’ve struggled with alcoholism in the past. I obviously am addicted to nicotine and caffeine.

Alex: Zyns, you got Zyns when we were…

Hasan: Yeah, yeah. And I’m definitely an addict. But what I have figured out in my life early on is that I try to weaponize my addiction, almost in a way where I try to get addicted to things that are healthy, like things that improve my life.

So, one could say I’m addicted to working out. I work out seven days a week. On days where I’m not training, weight lifting, I’m playing basketball, I’m doing something, right? And I think I’ve taken, like, one day off from working out, and only because I got a root canal. That was the only reason why I took one day off from working out in the past couple of months.

Sometimes I have to take a day off from working out because I’m traveling. It’s usually when I’m traveling where I don’t get to work out as consistently. But outside of that, I’m working out every single day. That’s… you know, one might consider that to be an addiction, but I think it’s still improving my life. It’s improving my confidence. It’s making me healthier. So, I think that’s a good thing.

Hasan working out, which he does religiously every morning. His “thirst traps” are something fans have come to adore

And the same goes for streaming. Like this is… this is everything that I do. This is my whole life. This is my profession. So, it’s… I don’t see it as, like, you know, I don’t see it as that bad to be addicted to streaming in that regard. I’d rather be addicted to things like that than, you know, drinking and drugs and playing video games, you know.

And that still creeps in every now and then. Sometimes I find myself getting addicted to playing a specific game. I just get hyper fixated on it, and I have to just pull myself out of it, because I have to monitor my own behavior to make sure that I don’t derail the regiment that I have.

Alex: Obviously, you’re in the public eye, you’re a prominent figure on the left, and people have opinions…and some of them are not nice opinions. Could you give an example of what you think is bullshit that you deal with—when you feel it’s an unjust or unfair criticism? Maybe where you thought, “This is a perfect example of the bullshit maybe I deal with day to day that I think is nonsense?”

Hasan: Well, while you were here, a couple things happened, right? One was my coverage over the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni stuff, where my overarching point was that a female celebrity’s, like, “vibes” overall is nowhere near as bad as, you know, doing workplace sexual harassment on set.

And also that these PR campaigns—I think now these security companies are engaging in very sophisticated misogynistic attacks against female celebrities that have valid claims. But in that process, I also was not forgiving of Blake Lively’s shortcomings, right?

And a lot of people got mad at me for that, and they only hyper-focused on me saying, “I don’t think Blake Lively is a child.” I think, as you know, a 40-plus-year-old, very famous Hollywood celebrity who had creative feedback, she did not have to capitulate to Sony and promote this movie about domestic violence in this cheery way, right? Regardless of Justin Baldoni’s smear campaign that was my assessment of the situation.

Alex: [You feel] people still focused on just one part?

Hasan: Yeah, and people were like, “No, you’re being duped by the smear campaign still.” And, no, I’m still on her side. I just think that we shouldn’t expect victims to be perfect victims anyway. This is something I believe in, something I talk about quite frequently.

But people just locked in on that one part and didn’t even mention what my overarching framework was—what my perspective was on the matter at all. Because if they were to mention that, most people would agree with me, right? The people that are calling me a misogynist for that.

I think that’s a perfect example of how people have their own interests, and a lot of nuance gets lost online for that reason.

Some people are doing it deliberately to get clout, you know. They know that it’s a great opportunity for them to, like, engage in community, right? And other people do it because they genuinely have an issue with it. They don’t like the way I covered it; they don’t think I should ever bring up any problems that any victim might have had.

I think there are genuine people who think they’re engaging in good faith, and then there’s a lot of disingenuous, cynical people. And then there’s the largest majority of people who just get, kind of, duped by other people who are having these scores and just don’t have the time to thoroughly investigate this, because why should they? It’s some random Twitch streamer, right? Rich dickhead. Who cares, right?

I think it just offers them a permission structure to say, “Yeah, another rich Twitch streamer, out of touch and a misogynist. Am I right?” Just to take that as the main takeaway from the story.

Another one, obviously, is when we went to Skid Row with Water Drop LA. The only thing that was dominating the discourse on that front was the speculation that I was actually engaging in this in an exploitative manner—even before we actually went.

Regardless of the fact that, as you know, we set up prior assurances, got consent ahead of time, worked with local organizers, and would not film anyone that we hadn’t gotten prior consent from for filming. Because the overarching goal there was to humanize homeless people at a time when there’s a tremendous amount of violence that they’re subjected to.

And yet people immediately said, “You criticize Tyler Oliveira², and yet you’re being hypocritical by also going and putting a camera into the face of homeless people.” And that’s not the same thing at all. So that’s another great example.

And this happens so frequently—it happens every day, basically. And I think it gives people permission to engage in thought-terminating cycles, basically, where they just go, “Yeah, I don’t have to hear anything from this guy. I don’t have to be charitable. I don’t have to question anything he’s saying. I don’t have to… everything this guy’s saying is just bad and wrong, and we should discount it.”

I think that’s the purpose it serves for people who might be my ideological opponents that want to vilify me in that regard. Therefore, you don’t ever have to make a counter-argument against me saying homeless people are human beings, they should be treated with dignity. They don’t ever have to address that issue and maybe come across like a fucking asshole, right? This way, they just effectively neuter the messenger.

Alex: On the other hand, do you ever reflect on the critiques and criticisms? Do you ever hear stuff or read stuff and think there’s validity to the critique?

Hasan: No, no. I mean, not really, because it sounds crazy to say this, because people are gonna be like, “Come on. Everyone has something that they’ve done that’s wrong.”

I think the most valid criticism I get is that I fly off the handle a lot. I notice that due to the endless cycle that I’m engaging in, I do sometimes experience burnout. And I track that myself by looking at how short-fused I am. And by the end of that burnout cycle, I’m literally fucking yelling at chatters.

The other day was a great example of this. I think I need to be more careful and, you know, take more time off and just not take things super seriously. And just avoid the bad-faith chatters that are simply looking for a moment of contentious talk—a moment where I just pay attention to them, and they become the centerpiece of the conversation.

And then that ends up feeding this economy of haters that the “HasanAbi hater industrial complex” will take from and just say, “Look at how bad he is. Look at how mean he is.”

The very same people that write think pieces or make YouTube videos about how I am so audience-captured—so at the mercy of my audience, and that’s why I say the things I say, because I can’t truly believe them—will then turn around and say, “He’s such an asshole to his audience.” Well, which is it? That doesn’t make any sense.

Am I audience-captured, or am I constantly yelling at my audience? Am I echo-chambered, or am I constantly talking to people that disagree with me?

I think the criticism, the only valid criticism there, is that it is probably not good for a newcomer that just encounters me for the first time ever in any given moment in my content. Because it’s in real time. Because it’s real. At any given moment, I could be pissed off and reacting in an inappropriate way to someone, and then that just automatically causes someone to be like, “Oh, this guy’s got to suck.”

Alex: Was there ever a moment you had in your career where you wondered if you were on the right path? Maybe doubted yourself or…?

Hasan: I gotta think about it. It’s a good question.

There’s definitely been moments, yeah. I think… well, “right path” as in what? Like ideologically, am I doing the right thing? Or do you mean, like, was this the right career choice? Or how much longer can I keep doing it?

Because as far as ideologically, I always… like, I feel like that’s my greatest strength—and greatest weakness, too, if you consider that to be a weakness.

[Hasan pauses] How good is that burrito? [I am eating a burrito he ordered for me, I give him a thumbs up].

Yeah, so, I’m very… I’m very grounded in my worldview. And fairly stubborn in that regard. And that’s why, if you look back 10 years in the past, my commentary has not changed all that much. Sometimes not at all, as a matter of fact.

Because the problems are the same, the problems persist, and the solutions are still the same from where I’m standing. And so, on that front, I don’t think I’ve ever considered, “Am I wrong on this?” at any point in… I mean, I think about it all the time. I’m constantly engaging in self-critique, where I don’t want to get things wrong.

And there are instances where that emboldened or aggressive attitude that I have can land me in trouble. Like when I was absolutely convinced that Russia would not invade Ukraine, alongside, you know, Zelensky and Ukrainians in general.

And normally the State Department is just kind of trying to drum up fears when they say, “No, no, it’s going to happen” under normal circumstances. So that was something that I was incorrect on. My prediction—my analysis was sound on it, but my prediction was wrong.

And everyone hyper-focused on that, and that played a really big role in people constantly saying, “Oh, he’s wrong, though. He’s wrong. Remember when he incorrectly predicted that Russia would never invade Ukraine?”

Even though, ironically enough, you know, I said that this would be a devastating thing for both countries. Like, I think that this would be a major mistake for Vladimir Putin as well, in general. And it’s obviously panned out in that exact same way. That’s not a hard prediction to make.

But anyway, that’s because I was so… what was it… was so rude to people that were just like, “Dude, you don’t understand. The State Department said this, so it’s correct” when they would come in and say that, you know?

That created a lot of resentment in a lot of people. That was one of those instances where I didn’t necessarily second-guess my analysis or my worldview or whatever. But it definitely was one where I thought, “I can’t be this brash.” Because being this brash and being this rude when I’m right 99% of the time is fine, but it’s still probably creating an air of resentment, and it’s not allowing people to receive me in a charitable manner.

And when you’re wrong the one time out of the 99%, then they never let you go. They never let that go. Especially because there’s so many people who are motivated at that point to just…to vilify you, to say, “You’re a bad guy.”

I’ve noticed this in my career. Noam Chomsky is a great example of this as well. He could be right 99% of the time about American foreign policy. But the one instance where he’s like, “Hold on, let’s wait till we find out about the Khmer Rouge numbers, like, let’s wait for the official numbers to come out!” everyone always brings that up to say, “Oh, remember when he was pro-Pol Pot?” They never want to let you forget the one instance where you’re not fully [correct]… because it’s seen as a W for the State Department.

That’s forever—that’s something that we’re gonna remind people of in perpetuity, even if it’s 100 years ago at this fucking point.

And I’ve noticed that you can be wrong every day of the week if you’re wrong at the behest of the American State Department or America’s allies. But if you’re wrong against America, and America is right in any single instance, they will never let you live that down.

Alex: I once said to you that Lenin would call you an opportunist. You said to me, “No, hell no.” You said, “Lenin would make me the Minister of Propaganda.”

You are criticized by people who are self-described communists, etc. There are people out there right now, some of them organized and some of them in the community. They’re doing stuff.

Hasan: Yeah.

Alex: How do you—what do you feel about that, I guess? But beyond what you feel about that, in what ways do you feel that the left is, like, insulated from the world? And how do you think that people can be more engaged and actually impactful?

Hasan: There are two separate questions. The first one is very different than the second one.

The first one is, like, the critiques I get from the actual, real leftists, right? Some of them are charlatans. Some of them are opportunists. Some of them have, I think, ideological disagreements that they turn into major complications in their minds. They blow it up. They make it seem as though this is the largest issue, the largest disagreement we might have.

The opportunists oftentimes turn into, like, MAGA communists or whatever, as you’ve seen. Because those were the original guys that would always say, “Hasan is not a real revolutionary. He’s not building the vanguard. But you know who’s building the vanguard? The treatlerites, the Adolf Treatlers of the world. The small business owners, the jet ski owners—those are the real proletarian people. We must eliminate the real bourgeois: the barista class.”

So, there are a lot of people who are just wrong. But instead of, I don’t know, trying to comprehend, trying to do a little bit more reading maybe—or maybe they’ve done too much reading, and it’s, like, fried their brains—there’s people like that.

But then there’s also people that are community organizers, right? There are certainly a lot of community organizers—and whatnot, not certainly a lot, but some community organizers—will, with a Twitter account, sometimes say, “Yo, this guy fucking sucks. He hasn’t done shit.”

And I think that’s partially because I haven’t directly worked with someone in their orbit. So that person will then quietly reach out to them and say, “Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? This guy gave us 20 grand last year, and he also fundraised,” or “This guy showed up to this picket line.”

There was a TikTok comment that I saw on an IShowSpeed video that truly, I think, captures this perfectly. It was me talking to IShowSpeed, and there was a guy who commented, “Listen, dude, I thought this guy was a real piece of fucking shit off of all the clips I’ve seen of him online. And then he came to my picket line, he brought us food, and he stayed with us for eight hours. And that was the day where I realized this dude is real. He’s a fucking real one. He’s not just, you know, the asshole that I thought he was off just seeing him in clips.”

I think that is usually the reality. There’s a lot of people that I have worked with in the local LA space as well, some of who were contentious to me originally on Twitter, where they’re like, “Oh, you don’t do a lot of hands-on work, right? You don’t do enough mutual aid.” And there’s validity to that. I don’t. I’m not, you know, actively out there, right, with regular frequency.

But I think that usually is because I haven’t worked with them directly, or worked with someone in their orbit that they trust, that they appreciate, that could just say, “No, you’re wrong about this.” So, I think there’s a little bit of that as well.

But I think for the hyper-left, I serve a very specific purpose if we’re going to think about this. I examine class consciousness in this country. I look at material conditions. I look at where the quote-unquote left is in this country, and I look at the relationship that the average American has with the means of production.

I think I play the role of instilling class consciousness and engaging in agitated propaganda to recenter the focus—recenter the attention of random American working-class individuals away from the identity markers and, you know, whatever television is telling them to get mad at, and back to the real people that are oppressing Americans. The real oppressors. The real vectors of pain.

That’s my purpose. And I think I do a decent job at serving that purpose. And I think a lot of people fail to comprehend that there is no…you can’t have a… you can’t have a vanguard if you don’t have a, like, assembly-line structure where people are recognizing the immediate harm that they’re experiencing year over year—or even a peasant class that’s being undermined, right?

Especially for a developed nation like the United States of America. Like, it’s not going to be the exact same. The revolution is not going to look the exact same. It can never be the same.

And I try to fill a role for the current American material conditions. It also happens to be what I believe, and it happens to be something that I’m, I guess, somewhat successful at. I’m supposed to be a gateway for people to go on their own personal journeys.

I’m not the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist vanguard party leader. I’ve never presented myself as that. I’m just a dumbass. I’m a dumbass streamer.

Alex: I want to follow up on that, though, because you’re not dumb, you know.

Hasan: What do you mean? I’m pretty dumb.

Alex: You’re not a dumb guy.

Hasan: I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m pretty dumb.

Alex: You’re not a dumb guy.

Hasan: I don’t think you necessarily have to be a smart guy to recognize right from wrong.

Alex: You’re smart. You’re a smart, capable guy, okay? And there’s a crowd of people that listen to the things that you say, and yeah, you have some influence over from what I’ve heard. So I think you should be conscious of that.

It’s a little bit of a cop-out to say, you know…it’s like a pressure valve or something—to kind of say, “Well, you know, I’m stupid, and also I’m an entertainer,” when you go every day, you talk about the news, you talk about it competently. You have, as you said before, a lot of ideas and thoughts that often are correct or borne out to be the truth, right? So, I don’t think you should say that you’re stupid. Do you feel like maybe you’re just trying to take the pressure off yourself a little bit in terms of the pressure other people…

Hasan: No, for sure. I mean, it is a cop-out. Yeah, it’s marketing. But also… but also, you know, it’s not incorrect. There are plenty of blind spots that I have, as everyone has, and I think it’s important to recognize that.

I don’t want to present myself ever as a brilliant intellect, because I’m not. I’m not the most well-read. I’m not the best speaker. I’m not the most charismatic person. I just try very hard, and I think that it’s important for people to recognize that.

And I’m not an activist either. I don’t think I deserve those titles. I’m not a journalist. I don’t deserve that title. I’m not a leader. I don’t deserve that title. That’s why I say, I’m a silly, dumb guy who just has these opinions.

Alex: How do you respond to critiques that you’ve commodified leftist discourse for profit?

Hasan: That’s my favorite. That’s my favorite approach. Because if discourse is commodifiable—which it is, certainly—why the fuck would I go after the most annoying people on the planet, who are so goddamn cynical and will fed-jacket you into oblivion for having a minor disagreement over what literature you think is better?

Leftists are the absolute worst people to grift to, if you were to grift to them. That’s precisely why many people that start off as quote-unquote leftists will find themselves in the throes of reactionary right-wing politics. And they usually develop much larger audiences as a consequence of leaning into reactionary right-wing politics.

So, no, this shit isn’t sweet. And it’s certainly… it’s obviously sweet in comparison to, you know, working as an Amazon delivery driver—and that’s what most people compare it to, where they’re like, “Oh, you would be, if you weren’t doing this, you would be, you know, serving me a coffee at Starbucks” or something.

And yes, of course, this job is infinitely cushier, and it’s not a real job, and I’m the most fortunate person on the planet.

But in terms of the space that I’m in, I don’t think people understand how difficult it is to promote left-wing ideals in perhaps the most hostile country—the country where anti-communist sentiment thrived and was invented, basically.

It’s crazy to think that that is an audience to market to. And I guess it doesn’t shock people at all or confuse people at all when they say stuff like that.

But then every single dominant media—dominant political commentary channel—is right-wing. Every single one. They’re either right-wing or super far-right, or they’re center-right, and they claim to be, you know, “non-ideological,” but they always end up on the right on many issues.

How the fuck does that work? Like, I guess my question is, [Hasan leans into the microphone] why don’t you grift to the left if it’s so fucking easy, you know? If it’s great, if it’s, like, such a wonderful opportunity, I welcome many other people to grift to the left. They should do that.

Alex: All right, let’s talk a little bit about the future. So, things feel kind of bleak right now.

Hasan: You don’t say.

Alex: They have felt bleak for a little while, actually, but particularly bleak now. Do you think that the left in America has a winning strategy for the next decade, or are we stuck in a cycle of losing battles?

Hasan: Yeah, that’s a tough one. That’s hard to… that’s hard to say something nice about, I’m gonna be honest.

I think that there are so many structural hurdles against the left. There’s so many structural hurdles against, not even just the ideological left or anything, but any sort of vehicle for change, any sort of vehicle to apply pressure—like labor unions, and even community organizations like 501(c)(3)s and whatnot, which I wouldn’t even consider to be on the quote-unquote left at all, but sometimes will at least align with the agenda of many progressive people, many socialist people, you know, working with undocumented migrants, defending the rights of marginalized people.

We are in a dire situation because the counterbalance against fascist forces in this country—the other side of the duopoly—is the Democratic Party. And they are… I don’t want to say controlled opposition, but they behave like that, certainly. And some are, I think, controlled opposition.

Some in positions of power in the Democratic Party are controlled opposition. And then others are just woefully incompetent, feckless, cowardly, powerless, ultimately… and actually comfortable in their position of not having any power as long as the current structure still allows them to retain their seats and send their children to the best schools and then to these very same corporations that they actively work at the behest of, against the interests of the American public.

So, the situation is dire. And I think it makes organizing harder, first and foremost, because we don’t even have the… we don’t even have the underlying mechanism for when the time is right to push back, right?

And so, I don’t know where we go from here. But I do know that things will inevitably change, and it will most likely be by force. But I don’t think that it will be in a positive direction, unfortunately. At least every single thing that I’ve seen thus far about where we are headed, I am fearful that we are not moving in a positive direction.

I think we’re moving into… not necessarily uncharted territory, but like something that we’ve seen in the ‘20s and ‘30s—the 1920s and 1930s. And I think that, you know… I think barbarism is going to overtake socialism.

Alex: Great. So, ignoring the dark thoughts about the potential futures…

Hasan: Dark MAGA.

Alex: What does success look like for you going forward into the future? Is it about changing some people’s perspectives and making that kind of impact, or are you hoping that it will reverberate out to more systemic changes in our society?

Hasan: Success for me on an individual level… because I see the growth of my community and I see broader outreach as a—not just like a financial win, even though it factors into the growth of my own personal success—but I see that growth as also an opportunity to have more community organizers.

Like Water Drop LA—one of the dudes was literally a fan of mine, you know, that we were out there with. That’s very common, that happens all the time. The people in my community are actively going out and engaging in very meaningful ways with their own peers to try and better their immediate material conditions to the best of their ability.

So, I see that growing. I see my community growth in that regard, not just simply as, like, a big number, but I think… I see it as overarching success, at least in the areas that I’m in. Because I think that gives a secondary permission structure to people who might be fearful of openly saying what they think because of the environment that they’re in that is inherently hostile, from their perspective, to left-wing ideals.

And I think it also creates an environment where it’s just cool. It’s cool to be like me, in the simplest terms possible. And some people, I think, discount how important that is. I think a lot of people on the left discount how important that is. They discount how important marketing is in general. They discount how important vibes are in general, right?

When you are presenting people with a new idea that they’ve never encountered—or an idea that they are immediately hostile to, that is dramatically different than the way they know the world to be, that they falsely identify as human nature—you have to be a pretty solid communicator to be able to get that across, and you have to have charitability, first and foremost, from your audience.

And I think a lot of people on the left discount that. So that’s why I’m saying I see my success as a content creator as something a little bit broader than that.

That doesn’t mean that, like, “Oh, if I have 300,000 viewers every day tuning in, we’re going to have a revolutionary vanguard, and we’re going to overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and institute the dictatorship of the proletariat.” I’m not saying that.

But I do think that it is a sign that there are more people, at least, that are open-minded to seeing the world through that perspective. And that’s good—[more people] are open to identifying some of these problems and doing something about it.

So that’s what success looks like to me. It doesn’t look like going on CNN or having a media empire. These are opportunities that I have enough upfront capital to engage in if I wanted to make a media company. I could. I just… I’m not good at that. I don’t want to do that. I’m good at what I do.

Alex: How do you justify promoting electoralism and social democracy as solutions when Marxist-Leninists would argue that they only serve to perpetuate capitalism?

Hasan: That’s a great question. So, I think that, first and foremost, it’s the same as, like, doing mutual aid. Is mutual aid actually going to be a full-blown solution to these societal problems? No. Seven hundred thousand people are sleeping outside. Are you going to mutual-aid your way out of that? No. That’s a systemic failure, and that needs to be solved through policy, through systemic change.

But it’s still harm reduction, and it’s absolutely necessary. And I see electoralism in the same vein. I’m not a person who believes that, like, the welfare state must be destroyed because the welfare state only has offered a lifeline to bourgeois capitalism. There is truth to that. I recognize that. That is not incorrect. Welfare states have at least created a mechanism so that the capitalist boom-bust cycles born out of the inherent contradictions are at least neutered a little bit so that people are not agitated enough to engage in revolution.

But I also simultaneously recognize that without any sort of underlying form of—not only protest, but form of organizing like labor unions and labor militancy—that chaos and instability caused by these economic factors will only lead to fascism. Will only lead to utter chaos. And the capital owners, at least historically, will find themselves in desperate need to reassert authority and order. And that order comes through totalitarian fascism. At least historically, that’s what’s happened, like in Nazi Germany.

And so, I focus on building the underlying base and creating an adequate mechanism of education and pushback so that people can at least, like, maybe even build some symbols of class consciousness and a little bit of confidence that they can make demands and win. Win back some of the value that they’re generating in their workplace, and win back benefits, and get better salaries overall, like, dramatically improve their lives, or even marginally improve their lives, and see that that is a successful strategy. So that when the time comes, there are networks that you can rely on.

So that’s the reason why I value electoralism, especially the likes of Bernie Sanders. A person who has a long track record of openly advocating for socialism, democratic socialism, openly advocating for his worldview, and is very earnest and very charismatic.

Not necessarily charismatic, but, very earnest and someone that you can trust. Someone that people genuinely love. A Bernie Sanders-like figure, if given the opportunity of the bully pulpit or a larger podium—even if people are not being charitable to him in mainstream media—was very obviously able to re-shift the attention of many people who feel the same way that he does back to more fruitful endeavors, back to organizing.

He was able to communicate a lot of the problems that people experience in a way that I think created, you know, the relatively small left movement that we’ve seen so far that has yielded some positive results.

Obviously, it’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s going to take a very long time, especially because America is so hostile and so resistant to any sort of anti-capitalist sentiment.

But that wouldn’t have happened without someone using electoralism as a way to organize. Does that make sense?

I don’t argue for a theoretical reality. I argue within the reality that we exist in. And like I said, Americans are needlessly hostile to any sort of anti-capital sentiment due to the Red Scare, due to the success of American capitalism in the Cold War, due to American imperialism, due to all of our institutions basically churning out the exact same social conditioning, normalizing the pain that you experience and making you fear alternatives. Making you genuinely fear any sort of alternative as, like, something that is completely inappropriate and devastating—much worse than what you’re experiencing now.

So when that is the material reality, then I think that casting aside electoralism and not using these broader podiums that are available to you—not even taking advantage of some semblance of interest—and even if you have no interest in becoming a Democratic Party operative necessarily, and becoming a servant of bourgeois democracy, you should still use the platforms that are given to you.

Especially because I do believe that many Americans would agree with the things that we advocate for. They just have never really thought about it. They just have never really encountered it. Not all of them, but I think many of them would.

Alex: All right, I got two more for you.

Hasan: You keep saying two more.

Alex: Okay, if streaming disappeared tomorrow, what would you do next?

Hasan: Probably go back to college.

Alex: Did you finish?

Hasan: Yeah, I did.

Alex: Why would you go back to college?

Hasan: Master’s. PhD. In Turkish? Turkish history?

I don’t know. This is probably something poli-sci related, though. I mean, I’ll be doing what I’m doing now, but basically in a smaller setting, in a classroom most likely.

Alex: Professor Hasan.

Hasan: Yeah.

Alex: Do you have a meditation practice?

Hasan: Fuck no.

Alex: Have you ever considered doing that?

Hasan: No. My mom always tries to get me to do it. The thing is, my meditation is just my day-to-day existence. I thrive in that chaos. When I go live, everything is silent. The whole world is silent. I’m just dialed in.

And I do feel like that’s almost meditative. When I work out, that’s the same way that I feel. When I’m accomplishing the goals that I’ve set out for myself, I feel like that’s a… it’s not meditation in the sense that I just, like, drop everything and do breathing techniques or whatever, but I feel like it’s meditative for me to engage in these moments of self-improvement.

Alex: Cool. All right, anything else you want to add?

Hasan: I think this is pretty good. You have any other questions?

Alex: No, I think that’s good. Wait, let’s see. One final one. One second.

Hasan: Oh, my God.

Alex: If you could replace one Twitch streamer with a famous revolutionary, who would it be and why?

Hasan: I mean… Damn, that’s… I would bring back Lenin. Yeah, replace myself with Lenin.

Alex: You think he could handle the chat?

Hasan: Yeah. Fantastic communicator.

Hasan Piker may not be the revolutionary messiah some hope for or the villain others paint him to be. He is, however, an accessible figure in an otherwise fractured left—a reminder that progress doesn’t come from waiting for perfect leaders but from leveraging imperfect moments and individuals to ignite collective action.

Hasan is a busy guy. His days are full of covering the news, exercise, and running around doing interviews. When I come to visit, I often find myself waiting for him—on the couch, outside his studio, in the car while he finishes a call. It’s a familiar feeling, isn’t it? Like his audience waiting for him to start his stream. Like all of us, waiting for something to give in this chaotic, often hopeless world.

But we shouldn’t be waiting. Hasan isn’t the answer. He’s just one part of the equation. The real work—the uncomfortable, relentless, transformative work—is waiting for us.

In the end, we’re not really waiting for Hasan. We’re waiting for ourselves to get the courage to do the things we must do for a better future.

1. I highly recommend Jon Lee Anderson’s Che: A Revolutionary Life to learn more about the man and the early shape of the Cuban Revolution.

2. Tyler Oliveira is an American YouTuber and self-described journalist. He has received criticism for his depictions of homelessness.