Hasan Piker admits he was surprised when a photograph of him in his underwear popped up on a giant screen at the Republican Party convention in Dallas earlier this month.
“They’re trying to present me as this dangerous, radical, Islamist, jihadist terrorist and then all of a sudden, they’re like, here he is, shirtless in all of his glory,” he said in an interview. “Look at his chest. Look at his abs.”
For conservatives, Piker (35) is one of the most dangerous men in the country. The far-left online influencer is a self-declared “socialist anti-imperialist” who once said the United States “deserved 9/11”. He later apologised.
He has enraged Israel’s allies in the US by saying he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every time” and speaking approvingly of militant groups Hizbullah and the Houthis. He was recently banned from entering the UK because his presence “may not be conducive to the public good”.
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But the Republicans’ use of a “meat pic” from Piker’s Instagram in a montage about “extremist” Democrats was clearly a miscalculation, he said. “I think it backfired on them for sure. It was a great photo of me.”
Republicans are using Piker as a bogeyman to frighten voters in advance of the midterm elections in November, depicting him as the true face of the Democratic Party. House speaker Mike Johnson this month said people such as Piker want to lead the US “down this dark, dangerous, deadly road to communism”.
But the prolific streamer said the Republicans’ campaign of vilification “isn’t working”. Piker, who has had glowing profiles in The New York Times style section and been featured in GQ lying in a bubble bath, is not your typical cartoon villain.
“If you talk to me you very quickly realise I’m a fairly pragmatic person,” he said, adding that the Financial Times was his “favourite newspaper”.
With three million followers on Twitch, and millions of others on Instagram and YouTube, Piker has a huge reach with young American males. In livestream sessions that often last seven to eight hours, he riffs on current affairs, plays video games, reacts to TikTok posts and interacts with messages from his audience that constantly unfurl in the corner of his screen. For many of his young fans he is their primary source of news.
With the build of a professional athlete, Piker has been described as a left-wing Joe Rogan, the right-leaning podcaster credited with bolstering young men’s support for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Piker finds the comparison with such “brocasters” insulting.
“A lot of these manosphere guys don’t know what they’re talking about – their level of involvement with politics is super, super basic,” Piker said. He sees himself more as a shock jock of the left: “Rush Limbaugh,” he said, referring to the late arch-conservative commentator, “but for Zoomers”.
But in recent months, Piker, who was born in New Jersey and spent his childhood in Turkey, has left the confines of the streaming world to become a political player in his own right. In campaigns up and down the country this year he has appeared on the stump with leftwing candidates who proceeded to score stunning wins in Democratic primaries.
He dismisses the “kingmaker” tag. “This is a mass movement and I’m simply one person,” he said.
Nevertheless, his admirers say he has an uncanny ability to get through to young voters, a skill conspicuously lacking among many more moderate Democrats, and mobilise them for candidates with an unashamedly progressive agenda.
Piker said he is now breaking through with an older demographic, too. “Everywhere I go around the country, at airports, you got people stopping me saying, ‘Hey, look, you’re really sticking it to them.’”
Piker’s influence was particularly visible in Michigan where the Democratic Senate primary race pitted a little-known left-winger, Abdul El-Sayed, against an experienced rival backed by the Democratic Party establishment.
Analysts said his success in galvanising the youth vote helped propel El-Sayed to victory, despite being outspent nine to one.
Yet some fear his ties to Piker could cost El-Sayed victory in a race seen as crucial to Democratic hopes of seizing control of the Senate.
“No rational person could think that Hasan Piker is helping El-Sayed – that would be insane to think that,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, the centrist Democratic think-tank.
Republicans are running attack ads in which Mike Rogers, the party’s candidate, calls Piker El-Sayed’s “running mate”. Pushed on to the defensive, the candidate has distanced himself from his ally. “This is not a campaign that is about a Twitch streamer in California,” El-Sayed said last month.
Piker was not always an activist. He was spurred to political action, he said, after taking part in the “No Kings” marches against Trump, the “Stop the Oligarchy” rallies organised by the progressive senator Bernie Sanders and protests against the government’s brutal crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
There he met ordinary people who were all saying “enough is enough to Trump and where are the Democrats?” The deep frustration he encountered there with both parties convinced him that “actually left populism was a successful way to win elections and to build a resilient movement”.
He is becoming one of the most recognisable faces of that movement. Yet he continues to excite controversy. Each interview he gives provokes an explosion of outrage on social media and critics dredge up inflammatory comments from his live stream, some made in jest, and use them against him.
He recently told Axios that “pound for pound”, the US had killed more people than al-Qaeda. He has called Mao Zedong a “great man of history”, suggested that the US could learn from the Chinese Communist Party and called the collapse of the Soviet Union one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes of the 20th century.
But it is his attitude to Israel that has provoked the greatest backlash. He said Hamas’ October 7th, 2023, attack was Israel’s fault and “it doesn’t matter if f*****g rapes happened” on that day.
Piker said the accusation that he is an anti-Semite is part of a “ridiculous smear campaign” that conflates anti-Zionism with hatred of Jews. He also accuses his critics of double standards. Right-wing political commentators “say truly heinous things all the time, things that I disagree with, things that I find odious”.
“My comments, on the other hand, might come across as incendiary because you disagree with my position,” he said. “But they’re rarely ever immoral.”
His detractors might beg to differ. In one recent stream he appeared to suggest that Jews in America who were “singularly invested in Israel” might be laying themselves open to attack at home. Some conservative commentators have said that suggests Jews only have themselves to blame if they are assaulted.
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In his interview with the Financial Times he tried to unpack that thought. Jews who equated any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism came across as “ridiculous” and “hysterical”, he said. “And perhaps even more dangerously from their perspective, that also legitimises the anti-Semites because [they] will point to that and go, ‘See? They’re doing it again.’”
His anti-Israel activism has brought him to New York this week. On Thursday he was due to attend a protest against Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who was scheduled to speak at the UN General Assembly. From there he planned to go upstate to Cornell University, where the group Students Not Bombs, which is campaigning for the university to divest from Israel, invited him to give a talk.
Sofia Eliasi, a sophomore student at Cornell and member of Cornellians for Israel, won’t be attending.
“Inviting Piker ... is putting a stamp on anti-Semitism as a legitimate philosophy,” she said. “And history has shown that students are more than willing to emulate this hateful mindset.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
