Hasan Piker: ‘I think the Overton window is shifting on Palestine’

With eight-hour daily Twitch streams to his 2.7 million followers, you’d think there’d be nothing left to learn about the internet’s favourite leftist political commentator Hasan Piker (better known as HasanAbi). Yet here he is, an analytical faucet, distilling sprawling political issues into biting critiques as naturally as he teaspoons water into his black coffee when I meet him for a coffee in Covent Garden.

A Turkish-American with a background in broadcast journalism, Piker took to Twitch in 2018, where, unlike the Democratic Party, he managed to capture a significant following of young male supporters. His progressive politics, packaged in an endearing bro-ish exterior, serve as a disarming counter to right-wing notions of a supposedly emasculated left. For over a decade now, he’s surveyed and critiqued the ebb and flow of American policy, roping in Gen Z audiences with his authenticity and consistent reasoning – a fierce critic of Western hypocrisy and a long-time advocate for Palestinian liberation, universalist policies, and intersectional struggles. 

I caught up with him ahead of his talks at both the Oxford and Cambridge Unions to get his thoughts on the Democratic Party’s shortcomings, the radicalisation of young men, and the shifting Overton Window on Palestine.

In your view, why did the Democratic Party lose the US election? 

Hasan Piker: The short and sweet of it is that the Democratic Party has both a messaging and a policy problem. They aren’t seen as trustworthy; they’re seen as out-of-touch, smarmy elitists who are technocratic and ideological zealots in their commitment to the maintenance of third-wave neoliberalism in the US at a time when many Western nations are very clearly experiencing a resurgence of a formerly nascent fascist movement. America is no different, and the Democratic Party is so committed to the same corporate benefactors as the Republican Party that they are terrified of disrupting the status quo and engaging in populist left-wing economics in a meaningful way.

They had a right-wing campaign; they tacked to the centre, if not centre-right, on key issues like immigration and they cut out a lot of anti-corporate populist messaging early on. And then they turned around and said they lost because of trans people, because they were ‘too woke’ – they weren’t. They ran the most right-wing campaign I’ve seen in years. They ran to the right of Joe Biden in 2020 and it was a spectacular failure.

Establishment democrats love to claim that people like me are idealists or purists. We’re not; we’re pragmatic. I am pragmatic in my demands for left-wing economic populism. They are the idealists. They’ve failed time and time again and refuse to ever disrupt the pre-existing hierarchies because they’re terrified of upsetting their billionaire corporate donors.

I think this is what makes you refreshing to your audience. While those on the right often 100 per cent buy into the Republican idea, you’re always down to question exactly what you’re promoting.

Hasan Piker: People buy into that because they buy into the image of it. They’re angry. They’re frustrated.

They want direction and feel the right offers that. Do you feel like you’re offering an antidote to that messaging?

Hasan Piker: I try to do that, yeah. I was a vulnerable young man at some point. I’m 33 now, but I was a young man. And I understand that feeling of hopelessness and helplessness very well, the anxieties about the future. I get that. There’s a crisis that a lot of young people are facing across the board in virtually every single country within the American sphere of influence. It’s a very real issue and if left unexamined as it has been for so long, it’s going to cause even more resentment and anger, especially amongst young men who are now finding themselves in the throes of radicalisation towards the right.

Young men all around the planet are very frustrated with the way things are, and in that vulnerability they find themselves looking desperately for for answers, and these right-wing hacks are very good at communicating to the angers that they have and pointing to structural villains that move them away from the real answer – the answer being capitalism – towards feminism, towards those who are marginalised. They hyperfocus on these marginalised populations [as if to say] ‘they don’t care about you, they just care about trans people, migrants, and women’. And I think that’s unfair because trans people, migrants, and women all experience the same economic pressures that young men are experiencing. It’s a divide and conquer strategy that’s been very effective in redefining the ideological boundaries of battle, when [really] everyone is united in their class interest.

Everyone has the same exact interest. Trans people and migrants are not magical beings that exist outside of economic pressures. They still have a hard time making rent. When the housing market is exploding because virtually every single politician is trying to maintain the capital interests of landlords, real-estate developers, and refusing to provide adequate solutions that will fix the housing market, every single person suffers regardless of their background, ethnicity, or religion.

With this last year, Western media has lost some of its credibility, and people are turning to political commentators like you. How do you handle the responsibility of that influence?

Hasan Piker: I’ve been doing this for a while now. I rely on Western and traditional media to do real journalism, and I think there are still wonderful journalists that work in these institutions, but I think that these editorial rooms are dominated by people who are diametrically opposed to progress. I think there’s a real credibility crisis in legacy publishers both in America and around the world.

One thing that has people super-charged is the business-as-usual coverage on Israel. Now, because of social media, people can directly see what is happening on the ground. People can now develop almost parasocial relationships with people experiencing genocide. That’s something that’s never happened before. When Western populations saw for the first time what was going on in Gaza, because of this unimaginable level of access to the daily existence of Gaza’s withstanding genocide, the perspective changed dramatically. When they saw what was going on – children slaughtered every single day, man-made horrors beyond human comprehension – and then tuned into CNN or NYT or read the newspaper and saw the passive voice that these legacy publishers apply and their willingness to cooperate with Israeli narratives when they time and time again have openly lied about who is responsible for the new violent act that their forces engaged in, and they decide to counter-propagandise against it… when that happens every single day, people go: what are we doing here?

The average British or American citizen is not a weapons contractor, so they don’t see it with this sociopathic bloodless calculation intent on maintaining weapons contracts or trade partnerships with Israel. They look at it and think: why are we spending so much money here? Why aren’t we spending it on ourselves? We have homeless people on the streets, things are getting worse and worse. In the UK, public transport is awful, the NHS is underfunded. Almost two decades of austerity backed by Tories opened up floodgates of privatisation for the NHS. And when politicians say they’re going to fix it and never actually end up fixing it, and instead write off unlimited dollars in weapons transfers to Israel, they go: who is this for? I think that the media trying to normalise that has also played a significant role in the misinformation crisis that we’re experiencing.

Young men all around the planet are very frustrated with the way things are, and in that vulnerability they find themselves looking desperately for for answers

You’re being labelled as someone who radicalises people to the left. What do you think is the most misunderstood aspect about leftist ‘radicalisation’ among youth today?

Hasan Piker: After a century of ‘red scare’ propaganda, people are inherently hostile to any sort of anti-capitalist sentiment, without ever examining why. They’re so negatively polarised against it that anything that I say for many people immediately reads as me being an infiltrator, a disruptor, someone who wants to destroy America. Why? Because I want free healthcare, which is given to every single OECD nation citizen unconditionally. Developing nations have socialised medicine; they’ve been able to figure it out. America hasn’t. So the social democratic legislation that I advocate for is bastardised. That’s one of the most misunderstood aspects of my commentary. I believe in universality; that means universal healthcare and free college, unconditionally, for every single person – including people who are ideologically opposed to my worldview. There are no carve-outs. And I think a lot of people don’t understand that.

It’s your job, whether or not it’s overt, to proselytise people. What have you found is the best way to get people to see your perspective?

Hasan Piker: The number one thing – and this is going to sound weird, especially for what I do – is just being a normal person and meeting people where they’re at, communicating to the anger that everyone experiences. Everyone’s got problems paying rent or has a boss that they hate. I like to identify those issues and then try to explain why people are angry in simple terms. And also be normal and cool doing that. I think that goes a very long way. I think we on the left tend to think we’re on the right side of history and morality, so it’s not our job to educate. That’s an attitude that I see sometimes and it’s something I tell my audience not to engage in.

What are some challenges that you face for speaking about Palestine that perhaps go unspoken? 

Hasan Piker: I’ve been speaking about Palestinian emancipation for the last decade. It’s pretty bad. But I think the Overton window is shifting as the public is growing aware of what’s going on. In spite of all the death and destruction that we see on our screens every single day and the inhumanity of it all, I do still maintain a level of hope that I’ve never felt before in my life, because of the sea change that I have seen in normal Western society. This is the first time I’ve seen this kind of reckoning, especially as young people in Western Europe and in the US start to recognise the atrocities and take action. I never thought that would be the case.

None of the smears, none of the things that I withstand in the lap of luxury in the Western world amounts to anything when I think of Meadow, a fan of mine who was killed by an Israeli airstrike. He made a lot of TikTok content. He was 19 years old and was killed in an internet cafe. And all he wanted to do was make makeshift greenhouses. I think about that. I talk to Hossam Shabat in North Gaza – one of the last remaining Al Jazeera journalists alive – who Israel declared an enemy combatant a couple months ago, [which is] a death sentence. I talk about all those people, those alive and those who have passed, and I think their existence every single day is a hellish nightmare, and if they can resist and persist then nothing that happens to me is remotely as bad as what they’re going through. As long as I’m alive, I’m going to use every moment I can to communicate their humanity and try to get other people to recognise right from wrong.