Democrats’ drooling over Hasan Piker is a sign of desperation

America’s not-so-progressive left has apparently found a new pin-up: Hasan Piker, the socialist, pro-Palestine streamer with almost three million Twitch followers and a devoted fanbase.

Still recovering from the right’s cultural and electoral victory in the form of Donald Trump’s re-election last year, Democrats hope that Piker could be their saviour. He’s a left-wing, Israel-hating, gender-bending online commentator. Crucially, he is also tanked, square-jawed and masculine-looking. Since those physical attributes now read as ‘right-coded’, demoralised liberals think he might stand a chance at carrying their message to the notoriously right-leaning podcast space.

This can be the only explanation for how Piker has become the wet dream of every weak-chinned, tote-bag-carrying American male progressive. Last weekend, the New York Times published a fawning piece about Piker, initially titled ‘A progressive mind in a MAGA body’, it was later changed to ‘A progressive mind in a body made for the “manosphere”’. The article features a double-page photo of a manspreading Piker, his short-shorts revealing bulging, hairy thighs. In his large hands, he holds a basketball. On his face is an expression the kids would describe as ‘mogging’ or ‘looksmaxxing’. Message received, New York Times: Piker is a hottie.

The tone of the article is toe-curlingly swooning. He’s six foot four! He can do squats with a 275 pound barbell! But here’s the catch – he also wears nail polish and will sometimes prance about in a skimpy maid outfit. It’s manosphere, but make it queer.

For Democrats, all this makes Piker their last hope for renewing their popularity. After the 2024 election, it became painfully obvious that youth culture, especially online, is starting to trend rightwards and that corporate media now hold exactly zero sway over the opinions of young influencers. Trump has taken possession of large chunks of youth culture, thanks to figures like the similarly muscly and hirsute Joe Rogan. That is presumably why the likes of Bernie Sanders and darling of the left, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recently agreed to be interviewed by Piker. He was even invited to livestream at the Democratic National Convention last year (although he was apparently later kicked out due to his agitating over Israel-Palestine). While Piker is further to the left of the Democratic mainstream, the party clearly hopes to use his starpower to lure some of his young audience its way.

The fact that Piker has repeatedly referred to Jewish Israelis as ‘inbred’ and downplayed the 7 October attacks doesn’t seem to faze his new fans at the New York Times and among the Democrats. His existing millions-strong audience already laps this stuff up, in any case.

Like the rest of the woke American left, Piker is profoundly unserious. Last year, he did a rather bewildering interview with a Yemeni teenager called Rashid, who won a fleeting moment of fame by posting to Instagram and TikTok from aboard a cargo ship that he had helped Houthi militants to hijack in the Red Sea. The 30-minute chat between the self-described ‘Red Sea Pirate’, Piker and a translator was reminiscent of a surrealist satire. This random Yemeni teenager with a wispy moustache was held up as some kind of towering rebel leader by a grifting and vacuous American Z-list celeb.

At one point, Piker asked Rashid if he ever heard of an anime called One Piece, and when he replied that he’s watched it since he was a kid, Piker got all excited. ‘That’s sick! That’s fire!’, he said.

They also discussed their other shared passion: a maniacal hatred of Israel. Rashid told Piker that the reason the Houthis were disrupting trade in the Red Sea was to support Palestinians in Gaza, and Piker was keen that Rashid saw him as an ally in that fight. He instructed the translator to ‘Tell him [my] community of mostly Americans raised more than a million dollars for Palestinian charities, so he knows that I’m not some sort of fed or something’.

Interviews such as these usually get around 800,000 views on Twitch. Let’s face it, these are numbers CNN would kill for. Piker’s influence is such that he gets the stars of lefty youth culture on his streams. This includes, most notably, Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s trans-identified spawn, who gained fame by constantly berating his billionaire father in the media. In one recent stream, Wilson and Piker bonded over a ‘pro-Palestinian protest rave’ in Japan, which their mutual friend had attended.

Piker might come with a lot of star power, but the American left should think twice before hitching its wagon to a man who thinks that ‘Hamas unironically is the lesser evil’ in the war in Gaza. Or who has said that the rape of Jewish women on 7 October ‘doesn’t change the dynamic’ for him.

The fact of the matter is that the American left’s problems run far deeper than Piker’s biceps and streaming numbers can ever fix. Abandoning the working classes and obsessing over identity politics have obliterated Democratic support. If the likes of Hasan Piker are the future of the Democrats, they are in bigger trouble than they know.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here