Hasan Piker thinks being a man is simple.
Like many of the successful internet personalities who appeal to a generation of young men, Mr. Piker, a 33-year-old Twitch and YouTube streamer, is a “bro”: He likes weapons, inhales supplements, uses nicotine pouches and ruminates endlessly on the legacy of LeBron James. But unlike many of his contemporaries, Mr. Piker, an avowed socialist, is just as at ease dressing in French maid drag as he is on a basketball court.
In the six years since he started his daily online broadcasts about culture and politics, Mr. Piker has become a streaming star: He has about 4.5 million followers combined on YouTube and Twitch, the platform wildly popular with Americans who came of age during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“In the most reductive way, it just comes down to confidence — that’s what people are talking about when it comes to masculinity,” Mr. Piker said in an interview. “They’re talking about confidence.”
That confidence carries over into Mr. Piker’s discussions of politics. On his streams, conversations about dating, gaming or exercising often turn into rants supporting organized labor, universal health care or L.G.B.T.Q. rights. He will just as frequently pivot from criticizing the Democratic Party or the Israeli government to slamming right-wing comedians. This fluency between culture and ideology has led many to brand Mr. Piker a Joe Rogan of the left — if Mr. Rogan had a mop top and painted his nails.
Mr. Piker’s success on camera, in some part, has been aided by the fact that he is, by conventional standards, a very handsome man. He is 6 feet 4 inches tall and built like a professional athlete, with a square jaw, a beard and a head of thick dark hair.
“It’s the one aspect that many of my haters can’t shake,” Mr. Piker said of his appearance in a Twitch broadcast last year. “They can’t turn around and be like, ‘You’re not hot.’”
His physique is the result of an intense fitness regimen that, on a sunny morning in January, involved repeated sets of squats with a 275-pound barbell, Romanian dead lifts and walking lunges.
“It’s ironic because like a lot of those ‘Sigma grindset’ guys are constantly talking about ‘regimens’ and ‘being an alpha dog,’” Mr. Piker said, referring to subjects of memes about masculinity that are commonplace in right-wing discourse online. “I do live that life,” he added. “But then I have the diametrically opposite politics.”
Protected by ‘Jock Insurance’
Indeed, tens of thousands of viewers may watch his videos for his political views, but many also tune in for the view of Mr. Piker himself, whose social media profiles are littered with suggestive images of his muscly body in states of undress — or “thirst traps,” as the pictures are known. Some of his fans scrape, screenshot, clip and repackage them into “fancams” that travel across the internet, glorifying Mr. Piker’s appearance and, indirectly, his beliefs.
Emma Morgan, a 27-year-old researcher, is among them. “A lot of people are just really shallow online,” Ms. Morgan said. “There’s a stigma of if you care about marginalized people, if you care about these issues, you must be a weak, basement-dwelling dude.”
“If I have to make a fancam to radicalize people,” she added, “then I will.”
Mr. Piker approaches getting dressed with the same meticulousness as he does working out. Each day he streams, he typically posts a selfie of his outfit before he starts. His clothing choices can sometimes be as provocative as his opinions: On a recent trip to Japan, Mr. Piker wore a tight French maid’s outfit, a pair of fuzzy cat ears and a demure string of pearls while streaming from one of the country’s maid cafes.
During a Twitch stream in 2023, Mr. Piker asked viewers to participate in a live demographic survey; those who did offered a sense of his audience. About 70 percent of participants identified as male, more than 60 percent identified as being younger than 30, and about 40 percent identified as having a sexual orientation other than straight.
Mr. Piker benefits from “jock insurance,” said Tristan Bridges, a sociologist who studies masculinity and gender at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The term is used to describe how men with “a lot of masculine gender capital” are generally given more leeway to do things like challenge norms and make mistakes, he added.
“The jocks are allowed to break the rules and not have consequences for it,” Mr. Bridges said, adding that Mr. Piker’s idea of masculinity was less rigid than more traditional versions centered on the belief “that America was easier and better when everybody played the roles that they were designed to play.”
Jordan Dean, a 19-year-old gender studies student who follows Mr. Piker, said that “the part that he plays up the most is definitely that he’s a bro, cisgender heterosexual white guy.” Mr. Dean, a transgender man, added: “Watching him be comfortable painting his nails, wearing dresses — it’s not revolutionary things. But he’s showing that it’s OK to be a cis guy and experiment with gender presentation.”
Gains, Guns and Gay Culture
Mr. Piker typically streams from a studio at his home in West Hollywood, Calif., a modern townhouse he shares with Kaya, his Bernese mountain dog mix that weighs more than 100 pounds.
He can spend up to 10 hours a day recording in his studio, where there are no fewer than 10 swords and shelves festooned with video game art and other knickknacks. There is also a black assault rifle, which Mr. Piker was quick to note was fake. “It’s airsoft,” he said. “I like guns, but I would never keep one in the house.”
While Mr. Rogan’s podcasts typically feature interviews with guests that meander into politics, Mr. Piker often approaches the topic alone on solo streams, though he has recorded with the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. (Last year, he streamed from the Democratic National Convention.) Mr. Piker disagrees with the comparisons to Mr. Rogan, and has characterized what each does as being completely different.
His marathon streaming sessions are fueled partly by cartons of Zyn, cans of Diet Dr Pepper and energy drinks. Mr. Piker, who fasts daily as part of his fitness routine, usually consumes only coffee until around 2 p.m., when he has his first meal of precisely 1.1 pounds of roasted chicken breast with low-carb pita, mezze and sauces.
He says his persona is built upon authentic interests in fitness, culture, style and politics that he has had throughout his life. Mr. Piker was in a fraternity at Rutgers University, yes, but he has also been a lifelong gamer and anime fan.
He moved to the Los Angeles area in 2013, after graduating from Rutgers University and telling his parents — both college professors — that he intended to apply to law school. Instead, he got a job in ad sales at The Young Turks, a progressive news network founded by his uncle, the pundit Cenk Uygur. Mr. Piker does not deny that he is a “nepo baby,” he said. “A perfect society is one in which those types of advantages don’t matter,” he added.
By 2016, he was regularly appearing in videos on the Young Turks’ social media accounts. He started streaming on Twitch two years later. Fashion, he said, is something he has loved since he was a “too-big” teen growing up in Turkey, where he inhaled American culture through TV shows like “The Boondocks.”
Mr. Piker, who is straight, is aware that wearing pearls and painting his nails can suggest otherwise, inviting attention from gay men. Last year, when a gay content creator asked Mr. Piker if he was an “ally” in an interview at a Pride event in Los Angeles, he jokingly said no, then playfully added, “I’m a foe.” Mr. Piker then spanked the interviewer, who was wearing an American flag Speedo swimsuit, in front of a bus emblazoned with the logo for Grindr, the gay dating app.
Of his image, he said: “I don’t feel the need to present myself in any way that I am not.”
Always Unfiltered, Sometimes Extreme
Mr. Piker is similarly unfiltered with his viewpoints. Some can be extreme.
A vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Mr. Piker has been labeled anti-American by people across the political spectrum for saying the country “deserved” the Sept. 11 attacks. His recent accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza and his diatribes against the Zionist movement have led many supporters of Israel, including liberals like Representative Ritchie Torres of New York, to call Mr. Piker antisemitic.
“I find antisemitism to be completely unacceptable,” Mr. Piker said on a call in April. “I find the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism to be very dangerous,” he added.
His video streams are peppered with expletives, vulgarities and other language that many have disavowed in the name of political correctness. He blocks commenters for what he sees as overt hate speech, but not for speaking critically when they challenge his views on topics like transgender rights or the war in Gaza. Some have accused him of sharing misinformation on streams, but Mr. Piker says his aim is to provide factual information along with his own views.
Jon Favreau, a founder of the center-left podcast “Pod Save America” and its liberal parent company, Crooked Media, said Mr. Piker’s willingness to engage with viewpoints outside his own was another trait that might appeal to young men who had swung toward the right. “He wants to reach those people, too,” Mr. Favreau said.
But the way Mr. Piker presents himself could work against him, said Reece Peck, a professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island and the author of “Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class.”
“He’s more ‘events in SoHo’ than he is ‘Eastern Kentucky,’” as Mr. Peck put it. “That bicoastal, stylish, hip masculinity has its limitations to appeal to a broad array of young men, especially working-class young men.”
Clancy Campbell, a 20-year-old fan of Mr. Piker’s who is studying to become an aesthetician, said the difference between Mr. Piker and his right-leaning counterparts could be boiled down to “the amount of care and where you put it.”
“With the right wing media and stuff, they care almost too much about issues that don’t matter,” he said. “With Hasan, it’s like he cares, but in the right places.”
Alec Flynn, a 28-year-old comedian in Los Angeles, whose material draws from his life as a straight man, said he did not religiously follow Mr. Piker. But he understood the appeal of Mr. Piker’s brand of masculinity.
“The more authentically yourself you are, the more effective you will be,” said Mr. Flynn, who was also in a college fraternity. “At the end of the day,” he added, “people like frat bros.”
