Twitch’s Top Streamer is Progressive, ‘Anti-Zionist’ and Pro-Houthi

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His name is Hasan Piker and he’s a nephew of YouTube progressive Cenk Uygur. Piker has a big following on the streaming platform Twitch but is also on YouTube and X. Since Kamala Harris lost, he has been featured by CNN and others the left’s answer to Joe Rogan. But Piker doesn’t think the Democratic Party needs more messengers. Like all progressives, he thinks the problem is that the party is too moderate.

For months, Piker has warned Harris’ campaign that its failure to represent the voters who would cast their ballots for the Democratic nominee would lead to its collapse. He stressed that Democrats need to move more to the left and to stop trying to court moderate Republicans and center-right voters, who proved again on Tuesday that they would not budge for Harris…

He argued that by sending pro-Israel Democrats, like Representative Richie Torres and former President Bill Clinton, to Michigan, Harris’ campaign “openly communicated that they did not want anyone who cared about Palestine to go out and vote for them.”

“They actively pushed aside these people with the hope that they could win the suburbs over, win these conservative voters over, and it was a failure,” he said…

“[Most Americans] do not care about civility. They do not care about these institutions. They do not have an ideological fear. They just want to stop the hurt,” Piker said. “If Kamala Harris would have come out and been like, ‘I’m literally going to jail the Walton family,’ people would have been like, ‘Ok… as long as you’re promising that’s going to drop the prices of groceries, I don’t give a s—.”

Piker is correct that the Democrats’ insistence that the economy was great, something they’ve been doing for a year, really hurt them. But he’s wrong when he claims that Democrats lost because they weren’t far left enough. As both Vox and Nate Cohn at the NY Times have argued based on exit poll data, Democrats did not lose the 2024 election because progressives stayed home. They lost because many former Biden voters moved to the right and either just stayed home or voted for Trump. It wasn’t the left that didn’t show up for Harris, it was people in the middle. Moving the party even further left would likely have made that problem much worse.

But in addition to his fairly routine progressive commentary about the election, Piker is also getting a lot of attention for his anti-Israel position and his seeming affinity for Hezbollah and the Houthis. Fox News wrote about it last month.

“It doesn’t matter if f—ing rapes happened on October 7,” Piker said in a May 22 stream. “It doesn’t change the dynamic [of Palestinians and Israelis] for me.”…

Though Piker says he is not aligned with Hamas and called the Oct. 7 attacks “one of the most unjustifiable and unimaginable and ongoing acts of cruelty” shortly after they began, his rhetoric has become more extreme since the Israel-Hamas war began, and he routinely defends violent Palestinian actors from any criticism.

“I don’t feel comfortable placing the blame of a violent settler colony that has killed and displaced tens of millions of Palestinians [on Palestine]… I don’t feel like it’s appropriate to lay the blame in the hands of anyone that is resisting against their own brutal occupation,” Piker said in an Oct. 19 YouTube video about the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

In January he interviewed a young man who may or may not be a Houthi fighter.

The interview subject, Rashid Al Haddad, denies being a Houthi fighter but has gained notoriety for hopping on a ship captured by Houthis and posing as one of the militants. Al Haddad has been banned from both TikTok and X for appearing to support the Houthis.

At one point in the interview, Piker asked Al Haddad through an Arabic translator if he watched an anime called “One Piece,” which his young audience would relate to. When the militant responded in the affirmative, Piker praised him…

“We think the Houthis, ansarullah, is [sic] doing what Luffy would do,” Piker said. Luffy is the protagonist of the anime, and ansarullah translates to “Supporters of God,” which is what Houthis refer to themselves as.

Piker always claims that any soundbites used to criticize his show are taken out of context, but in this case is really sounds like he’s comparing a terrorist group to the protagonist in a popular anime/live action show. The same group has fired missiles at US ships in the Red Sea.

Kara Frederick, director of the Tech Policy Center at the Heritage Foundation, echoed Ruby’s concerns about violent rhetoric on the platform.

“[Hasan] absolutely is promoting terrorist propaganda,” Frederick said. “You have to put it in the context of the Houthis, who he’s sympathizing with… they are actively attacking U.S. ships in the Red Sea…. At that point, you become a terrorist sympathizer. So it’s not educational, it is cheerleading for terrorism against the United States.”

Despite all of this, the mainstream media has been doing lots of profiles of Piker lately which downplay his pro-Houthi/pro-Hezbollah commentary.

CNN is not the only mainstream outlet where Piker has received a platform lately. NBC News profiled him in September, after he attended the Democratic National Convention as an influencer. Top New York Times political reporter Astead Herndon appeared on his stream as a guest the same day Piker devoted a segment to undermining allegations of antisemitism in Amsterdam. (Spokespeople at CNN and NBC did not respond to requests for comment about their decision to feature Piker, and The New York Times did not respond to an inquiry about Herndon’s appearance.)

“It is bewildering that mainstream media outlets continue to platform Hasan Piker, an influencer whose toxic screeds against Zionism and the Jewish state normalize antisemitism, reinforce bigotry and launder terror,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told Jewish Insider this week. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) told JI in October that “nobody has been a greater amplifier of antisemitism” than Piker.

But while the left-wing media is eager to embrace him as the left’s Joe Rogan, another group of current and former Twitch streamers has been pressing advertisers to look at Piker’s content.

The group of online organizers, led by creator Dan “DanCantStream” Saltman, has centered its criticisms of Twitch around the revelation that the platform had disabled email signups for users located in Israel and Palestine following the terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 and the following Israeli military action in Gaza…

As an example of the content that Saltman said he is sharing with prospective Twitch advertisers, the creator shared a video of a T-Mobile advertisement playing before a clip of pro-Palestinian streamer Hasan Piker claiming that reports of mass rapes committed by members of Hamas during the attack had never been confirmed. (Piker did not respond to a request for comment prior to this article’s publication.)

“I have tried to do this in a way that gives brands maximum cover. We are privately messaging the brands, media agencies and DSPs and showing them videos of their brands’ advertisements next to the most vile of content,” said Saltman, who told Digiday that his group had already reached out to over 100 advertisers, such as Kellogg’s, Chase and AT&T.

That campaign appears to be working to some degree as several large advertisers have backed away from Twitch.

Three major brands have halted their advertising on Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch online service, according to people with knowledge of the matter, after a controversial group of livestreamers alleged that the company is promoting antisemitic content.

AT&T Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Dunkin’ Brands have all pulled spots from the gamer-oriented service, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information. A fourth sponsor, Chevron Corp., is considering ending future support for the TwitchCon convention after its name appeared in the background of a controversial panel discussion at the annual event.

It goes without saying that cancel culture is not a good response to political speech. I don’t know if Piker has crossed a line by seemingly endorsing several designated terror groups. So far Twitch doesn’t seem to think so, though they did give him a warning about one of his streams. But there’s no doubt that advertisers aren’t obligated to support content they don’t like. With four major advertisers pulling back, others may decide to take a 2nd look at Piker’s content in particular.