Who Is Hasan Piker?

If you don't know who Hasan Piker is, I envy you.

He has told his millions of viewers to "kill" and "murder" people "in the streets." A Democratic congressman formally documented it in a public letter to Amazon and Twitch. He's told them "let the streets soak in their red-capitalist blood." He said America "deserved 9/11."

He said publicly he has "no issue" with Hezbollah, the terrorist group that murdered 241 US Marines in their sleep in 1983. He lives in a $2.74 million mansion he bought with donations from young men who can't afford their rent, while streaming "eat the rich" to them every day.

This week, the New York Times, the paper of record, put him on one of their flagship podcasts.

You live in a world where all of that doesn't exist... it's a better world than mine. I'm not going to be the one to spoil it for you. Close this email. Go outside. Hug someone you love...

For everyone else, we need to talk...

Yesterday I wrote to you about the Southern Poverty Law Center getting federally indicted for funding actual Nazis while they spent four decades labeling conservatives as Nazi-adjacent.

I called it "The Leash Just Broke In Public." The permission structure for progressive violence against everyone to our right just got handed over to a federal grand jury.

The same afternoon, the New York Times put the leash's biggest salesman on one of their podcasts.

Same day. Different courtroom.

For those of you still reading who have no idea what I'm talking about, here's the short version...

Hasan Piker is an open communist... not the revolutionary kind... the regime-approved kind. He doesn't hide it... he doesn't soften it.

And he's the biggest leftist streamer on the internet by a country mile. Three million followers on Twitch. Tens of thousands watching him live at any hour of the day. If you're a teacher, some of your students watch him. If you have a bunch of grandkids, don't be surprised if they do too.

His live audience skews young and male. His broader cultural reach, the GQ spreads and the glossy print profiles, is aimed at young progressive women who've been sold him as a kind of lefty intellectual sex symbol. Different products for different audiences. Tiger Beat Politics.

He's what the left built to answer Joe Rogan. Which is a funny sentence, because Rogan is a liberal. But liberals look right-wing to progressives now. That's how far the goalposts have moved. The left's answer to a liberal isn't another liberal... It's a communist. That's what time it is.

If you watch him for five minutes with the sound off, you see what he actually is. A teenage mean girl in a 30+ year-old man's body.

The posture, the eye rolls, the mocking tone, the snide one-liners, the performance of standing above the people he's dunking on. He's a high-school bully.

He's not angry. He's catty. And that catty register is exactly the one teenage girls used to run on each other in the hallway at school. Which isn't an accident. It's the posture that captures the female audience GQ and Interview Magazine are quietly packaging him for.

His politics have all the sophistication of a child's. "Things should be free from the government." "The rich should pay." He doesn't argue. He sneers. That's the whole bit.

Thomas Sowell described this phenomenon twenty years ago.

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.

Hasan Piker is the Platonic ideal of what Sowell was warning us about. The useless man made important by activism. The career built on grievance. The "help" that makes everything worse. Sowell saw it coming. We're living inside the thing he described.

Now watch how their journalists treat him...

Taylor Lorenz, remember her? She's the one who made Libs of TikTok famous by stalking her. Formerly of the Washington Post, she does glossy print profiles with him in Interview Magazine, hosts him on her "Power User" podcast as a kind of visionary, and rushes to his defense publicly when he gets detained at the border. When you read her writing about him she glows. That's the word. She glows.

GQ ran a photo spread calling him "the hottest left-wing commentator online." Then they followed it up with a separate piece about his supplement stack. His supplement stack. "Power to the people." The revolution comes with promo codes and profit margins.

Rolling Stone put him at #15 on their "25 Most Influential Creators of 2024" list, and described his content as, quote, "expletive-laced, sometimes-controversial breakdowns of current political events." Read that phrase twice. That is how Rolling Stone describes a man who has, on camera, called for a United States senator to be killed.

The New York Times' Ezra Klein wrote an entire column about him under the original headline, "Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy." They later softened the title... the column itself is still up.

That was the warm-up.

Yesterday was the main event.

Yesterday on the New York Times "Opinions" podcast, Hasan told a mainstream audience that he's "pro-stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers." He's "pro-piracy all the way, like, across the board." The hosts asked if he'd pirate a car. His answer: yes. They discussed killing a CEO as a form of protest.

The podcast episode was titled "microlooting."

This was the New York Times. The paper of record. The most powerful and prestigious media institution in the world.

Ask yourself a question. If any commentator on the right had said a tenth of that on a mainstream outlet, how many news cycles would it take to destroy them?

Now you see the system. Predators get podcasts. Prey gets destroyed.

Now. This wasn't a slip. This is the body of work.

In 2019 he said America "deserves 9/11" on his show while mocking a Navy SEAL who lost his eye in combat. When the clip surfaced he walked it back to "inappropriate" and blamed the English language.

His grasp of the English language is just fine. Trust me. As someone who's had the misfortune of listening to hours of his content, the problem isn't his handle of the English language. The problem, as Michael Malice puts it, is that he doesn't use words to communicate. He uses them to manipulate.

And when you look at the whole record, that's exactly what you see.

A year ago he told his audience that if Republicans actually cared about Medicare fraud "they would kill Rick Scott." Twitch gave him a 24-hour ban. One day. Ten days ago he extended the logic, calling the Republican Party "the biggest domestic terrorist in the country."

He has said publicly that he has "no issue" with Hezbollah. The terrorist organization that killed 241 U.S. service members in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. He called Hezbollah a "successful resistance group."

In January 2024, he interviewed a 19-year-old Yemeni man who had filmed himself aboard the Galaxy Leader, a cargo ship that Houthi militants were holding hostage.

On stream, Hasan told the hostage-taker, quote, "I love you." He laughed with him about taking hostages. He gave him a cute nickname, "Tim-Houthi," a play on Timothée Chalamet. When critics called it out, he compared the interview to "talking to Anne Frank, basically." The man who calls his opponents Nazis.

And when he was criticized, he said he planned to do more interviews like it.

Admittedly, I kind of have to respect him, predator to predator. He understands the game. Better than almost all conservatives. And he wields real power.

Two weeks ago on Pod Save America, after being pushed to back off his earlier claim that Hamas is "a thousand times better than" Israel, he doubled down: "I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time."

Predator move. Conservatives apologize, Progressives double down.

An American commentator. Forced to choose between a designated foreign terrorist organization and a nation-state. He picked the terrorist organization.

Said out loud. On a Democrat-aligned podcast. In 2026.

And in October 2024, a Democratic congressman, Ritchie Torres of New York, wrote a formal letter to Amazon and Twitch executives documenting quotes of Hasan telling his followers to "kill" and "murder" people "in the streets," to let the streets soak in "red-capitalist blood."

That letter came from a Democrat.

Read that sentence again.

A Democratic congressman formally asked Amazon and Twitch to take action against one of their biggest creators because he believed Hasan was inciting real-world violence against Americans.

Twitch and Amazon kept him.

Centrist Democrats, the ones who haven't gone full communist yet, are trying to push back... they're failing.

And then when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, CNN, the New York Times, NPR, Politico, and Vanity Fair all booked Hasan Piker to interpret it.

The man with a documented record of calling for political killings got to write the epitaph for the man who was politically killed.

Think about what it takes to book that man in that moment. That's not a mistake... that's a choice. Start noticing it. For your own safety.

The part most people don't understand:

Hasan Piker is not a contradiction to the regime. He's a function of it. He's a licensed predator. His audience is not. They are his prey.

In October 2021 he spent $2.74 million on a 3,800 square foot Mediterranean home in Beverly Grove, Los Angeles, where he streams "eat the rich" to young men who can't afford rent. The press did not treat this as hypocrisy. The press treated it as a flex. When critics came for him he said the housing market was a bubble and he needed space for his studio. GQ kept writing. Taylor Lorenz kept glowing. And you, for noticing, are the weird one.

Why do you think that is?

He's allowed to say what would destroy anyone else because the regime needs him to say it. Someone has to hand young men the permission slip. Someone has to tell them that stealing is justice. That murdered CEOs are protest. That Houthi hostage-takers are Anne Frank. That Republicans are domestic terrorists. That anyone in the way of progress is morally illegitimate.

Because if your enemies are morally illegitimate, anything you do to them isn't violence. It's justice.

Who do you think is celebrating Charlie Kirk's murder? What kind of media figures do you think they're consuming? You already know. You're reading about him now.

That's the product. That's what he sells. It's why the New York Times hands him a microphone while their colleagues at other outlets demand you lose your job for misgendering a biologically male swimmer.

The leash is for you. The license is for him.

Here's the thing.

Hasan doesn't pull triggers. I want to be careful about what I'm saying. I'm not claiming he specifically caused any specific act of violence. That's not the claim... the claim is bigger than that.

He manufactures the permission structure... he sells the license... and when young men who came to him lost and angry and purposeless use that license, he shrugs... maybe even smirks. Violence doesn't happen in a vacuum, he says. It's capitalism. It's the gun laws. It's rising rents.

It's never him...

His audience comes to him prey. They feel invisible, unemployed, sexless, outraged. He hands them an enemy. You. Me. Their fathers. Their pastors. Their employers. Charlie... Anyone who reminds them of the world that didn't work out for them. And then he tells them hurting that enemy isn't really hurting anyone. It's healing. It's righteous.

This is happening right now to young men in your life. Your sons. Your nephews. Your students. Your sister's kid. The quiet one at Christmas dinner who doesn't want to talk to you anymore... if you know one, you're already in this fight.

They came to him prey.

He sends them out armed.

They're hunting you.

And everyone you love.

Let's talk about how Hasan makes his money.

He pulls in roughly $200,000 a month from Twitch subscriptions. Another $50,000 to $90,000 in direct donations. Call it a quarter of a million dollars every thirty days, well over a million and a half a year, from the exact young men he tells to "eat the rich."

He lives in that $2.74 million house because they paid for it.

Sit with that... It's quite something, isn't it? It's quite a business, this communism thing!

The "eat the rich" streamer is the rich. His viewers can't afford rent. He's got a master bathroom they'll never see the inside of...

That's not hypocrisy. That's the business model.

Grievance goes in... money comes out. The longer young men stay angry, broke, and purposeless, the longer his subscription tier stays full.

He needs them to believe the system is rigged.

Because if they ever figure out it isn't, they stop paying him to tell them it is.

I don't run that business.

I write free. Every day. No paywall. If you want this work in the world, you can fund it: readsowell.com/support-donate. If you don't, keep reading anyway. You don't owe me an open rate and you don't owe me a dollar.

That's the asymmetry. His audience funds his mansion. Mine funds the work... and yet he's the communist and I'm the capitalist. Weird eh?

Here's why the Hasans win.

They've spent their careers hunting prey. They know typical conservatives. They know what a standard conservative response looks like. They've practiced dismantling it. They're effective because their prey is legible to them.

Yesterday the permission structure got federally indicted. Today its biggest salesman got a New York Times podcast spot. The regime adapts. Take down one SPLC and another stands up. Cancel one Hasan and they'll produce two.

The only counter to a licensed predator is a trained population. One that sees his traps. Navigates them. Lays its own.

That's what I'm building. Call it the arsenal. Not just to beat Hasan. Something bigger than any Hasan they can put in the lineup.

They build predators. We build people their predators can't read.

stay close.

~ Clay

P.S. If you'd never heard of Hasan Piker before today, I'm sorry. I told you at the top. Go back to not knowing, if you can. The knowing doesn't help you personally. What helps you is knowing the shape of the machine he serves. That, we can use.

P.P.S. Hasan has three million followers. I have one hundred and eighty-six thousand. If this piece hit you, send it to one person. Just one. That's how this spreads. It works.

P.P.P.S. He's funded by grievance. I'm funded by readers. If you want to be one: readsowell.com/support-donate.

~ Clay