The New York Times ran a frankly weird article on Sunday celebrating leftist internet streamer Hasan Piker, “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere.’”
If that wasn’t enough to quality for the Hasan Piker fanclub, the subhead continued: “Hasan Piker pumps iron, likes weapons and wears pearls. His brand of masculinity has won him many fans online -- and has been a useful vehicle for his politics.”
Reporter Jack Crosbie’s actual profile matched. It was reminiscent of the paper’s bad old days of left-wing fan service, with alleged tech reporter Kevin Roose hyping censorious Marxist Twitter activists and accusing Christian satire site The Babylon Bee of purveying “misinformation.”
The paper devoted nearly 2,000 words to the obnoxious leftist of the so-called manosphere complete with pictures of his carb-friendly roast chicken meal and stash of nicotine pouches. It began:
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.
One reason Piker might have a big following is how much he hates America and Israel and expresses support for radical Islamists. Fox News listed a pile of wild anti-American rhetoric: "If Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, [then] America is the top terrorist organization," Piker said during a Sept. 17 stream. "Which it is, by the way. America is the top dog in terrorism and so is Israel."
Piker implied that Hamas fighters had no responsibility for the mass killings and rapes carried out on Oct. 7."You agree… Oct. 7, and the responsibility of Oct. 7 and all the actions that took place are directly in the hands of the Israeli state," Piker said to a chatter. "I’m glad." He openly rooted for a sequel to 9/11!
Crosbie sketched a limited analysis of Piker’s gross worldview, in paragraph…27!
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.
Torres protested to Twitch, lamenting “Piker has even gone as far as … telling his followers to ‘kill’ and ‘murder’ people “in the streets’ and ‘let the streets soak in their red-capitalist blood'." Piker has also joked about inciting gun violence against Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), praised a “brave mujahideen” for wounding Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) in combat.
Crosbie, an outside contributor, also writes for Rolling Stone. He plugged his recent article on X in a March 14 tweet: “….some scenes from the protest movement inside Columbia's campus this week, as the university administration sides wholeheartedly with both the Trump administration and Zionist groups on campus.”
(He clearly favors the loaded term “Zionist.” What’s wrong with simply saying "pro-Israel"?)
Newly pro-Israel liberal Brianna Wu chided the paper for what it left out of the bizarre profile: “The New York Times just wrote a puff piece about this person, not mentioning that he wants to eliminate everyone who has ever voiced support of Israel from public life, branding them a “Nazi.”
But Crosbie devoted a lot space to gushing (or was it crushing?) until it got cringeworthy.
….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.’”
Crosbie couldn’t stop talking about Piker’s sex appeal. In fact, it got really weird for a New York Times story.
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.
