By 8:30 p.m. on day one of the Socialism 2026 conference, Hasan Piker was tired and hungry and ready to leave. He had flown to Chicago from L.A. that morning, moderated a panel, interviewed an academic about her forthcoming book Confronting Zionism, broadcast everything live per usual, and now wanted to go to Au Cheval, a restaurant in the West Loop with a famous hamburger. “Let’s see if we can get in,” he said, looking down at his phone. It was a Friday night in September. While he tried to find a table, Piker commented that the organizers of the conference had not given him a tote bag. “Which is the craziest thing because everybody has totes here. This is tote central.” He had been presented with other gifts, including a Democratic Socialists of America hat designed to look like a White Sox hat, another one that said SATAN’S SCHOOL OF GAY COMMUNISM, and a vintage tie clip in the form of a USSR locomotive.

People at the conference, which was taking place at a Hyatt, were treating him like a visiting dignitary. Piker, 35, who is six-foot-four, was wearing a royal-blue suit and tasseled brown loafers. He used to dress in streetwear, but as his profile exploded this year, he started wearing jackets and ties. “It’s respectability politics to a certain degree,” he explained. “I’m not going to change my commentary or my worldview, but maybe I can change the immediate way you receive it.”

The last time I’d seen Piker, in August, the socialist livestreamer was filming in the VIP section of Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s election party on the night of the Michigan Senate primary. Now he was speaking at a literal socialism convention, an event I had imagined would channel the energy of the ascendant American left. That turned out not to be the case. It was late summer in Chicago, but there would be no rerun of the ’68 DNC, no latter-day yippies disturbing the peace and parading livestock around town and getting bludgeoned by the cops on Michigan Avenue. The conference, put on by the book publisher Haymarket, was niche and dryly academic. Organizers required attendees to wear a KN95 or N95 mask, an anachronistic rule that literalized the conference’s airless aspect. The whole event was unnervingly quiet as people trudged silently to panels or carried on muffled conversations.

Piker was conflicted about the masks. “lmao. woke 1.0,” he wrote when I first texted him about the rule. But, he added, “there’s a very COVID conscious group in the super left. Lots of people w disabilities who are more vulnerable to disease spread.” He didn’t end up wearing one, which was allowed because he was a speaker. As we waited for the Uber to Au Cheval, Piker asked if I remembered an infamous video from a DSA meeting in which someone prone to sensory overload asks people to keep their chatter to a minimum, after which the next person calls out the prior speaker for referring to people as “guys” — a human chain of hyperspecific grievances. “I want to be as accommodating as possible, but at the same time, that is just organizing poison,” he said. “Or maybe we’re fascist eugenicists, and we are advancing the able-bodied supremacy and the disability holocaust in the same way the Nazis did!”

His joke proved prescient. A day later, a researcher from the Manhattan Institute who had been mercilessly posting the most cringeworthy stuff he could find from Socialism 2026 hit pay dirt with a presentation on the left’s need to become “more dysgenic,” in which a panelist made the case it was essentially fascist to prioritize physical fitness. Inevitably, it made me think of the almost comically muscular Piker, whose good looks and physical presence have helped establish him as a singular charismatic force on the left.

For those who worry American society has become siloed and fragmented, take solace in our collective fixation on Hasan Piker. He is subject to regular bipartisan denunciations in Washington and blanket coverage across the cable-news spectrum. He is almost never not in the news. There he was in his underwear on a jumbotron at American Airlines Center in Dallas during the GOP midterm convention. There was Democrat Jared Moskowitz sarcastically offering his condolences to Piker on X moments after the pro-Israel politician won an election. There was imprisoned Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes posting that he is a “communist dog abuser.” In a speech commemorating the 25th anniversary of 9/11, NYPD police commissioner Jessica Tisch denounced those who “blur that distinction” between terrorists and heroes, which was seen as a shot at Piker. A week later, President Trump discussed him with reporters in the Oval Office, while at the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned Mayor Zohran Mamdani for his association with Piker (“bb mention,” Piker texted me that day).

The infatuation with Piker stems from the recent evolution in his identity from leftist influencer to political surrogate for El-Sayed and a host of other left-wing candidates. Appearing on Piker’s show and inviting him onto the campaign trail has provided these insurgents attention and donations from his fan base and turned him into a primary-season kingmaker. As a result, mainstream Democrats fear his shock-jock brand of Marxism and anti-Zionism will erode the party’s mass appeal in the midterm elections and alter its brand beyond recognition. Many in the party, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are horrified and offended by Piker’s past statements regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which include that “it doesn’t matter if fucking rapes happened on October 7.” He once said an elderly Vietnamese-American woman, who in a video was explaining her community’s support for Trump by drawing on their experiences under communism, could “suck my dick,” drawing accusations of misogyny.

Along with Mamdani, Piker embodies the generational and factional fissure between the Establishment leadership and the socialists who consider labeling the war in Gaza a genocide a bare-minimum requirement for office. Unlike Mamdani, however, Piker is unbound by political convention. He has long considered Zionism — the belief that Jewish people have the right to a homeland in Israel — a “racist” ideology and, in the aftermath of Israel’s flattening of Gaza, has claimed the country is “1,000 times worse” than Hamas. He is often feuding with the Anti-Defamation League, which accuses him of antisemitism and which he in turn calls the “Apartheid Defense League.” He relentlessly critiques American foreign policy while harboring romantic and credulous attitudes about repressive regimes abroad in the way elements of the left always have.

Dragged down by Trump, Republicans have made anti-Pikerism a centerpiece of their campaign strategy this fall, as though he were personally on the ballot. “He’s a terrible liability,” Trump said. And although it’s often Israel-Gaza that gets him in trouble, it is hard to predict what will trigger a Piker outrage cycle. Forgotten episodes from this year include him leading a theater audience in a sing-along of an AI-generated Charlie Kirk anthem, wearing a Mao-style Zhongshan suit to the College Democrats of America convention, and accusing slain UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson of “social murder” on a New York Times podcast. In September, Piker said America was “pound for pound” a worse terrorist than Al Qaeda, a quote the New York Post promptly splashed on its front page alongside a photo of him and El-Sayed from the spring.

The Uber arrived. Piker and I climbed in the back of the SUV and David Hollings, Piker’s cameraman, producer, and all-purpose travel aide, took the front, where he often sits while filming on the road. The driver, Mohammed G. from Bangladesh, recognized Piker: “I saw you on some interview yesterday.” He approved. Mohammed asked Piker what he thought of “the Rahm,” referring to Chicago’s former mayor Rahm Emanuel, the centrist Democrat with presidential ambitions. “He hates me. Yeah, on CNN, he said he’s going to beat me with a two-by-four,” Piker said. “On Kasie Hunt. Kasie was like, ‘Would you go on Hasan’s show?’ And Rahm turned around and said, ‘Yeah, to go beat him up.’”

Piker got out of the SUV, obliged Mohammed with a photo, then checked in with the Au Cheval hostess. “Hi,” Piker said a little shyly. “We do not have a reservation, but we are wondering how long the wait is for three people.” The hostess said we were 14th in line, so we went next door to a bar to wait.

The Kasie Hunt reference was typical. Surely most of Piker’s followers had not been aware of The Arena With Kasie Hunt before checking out his stream, during which he is constantly watching daytime cable news. “Yeah, no, I’m a media demon,” Piker said as we drank our beers. “I read articles endlessly. I read Michelle Goldberg. I personally choose to read Michelle Goldberg,” he said, referring to the liberal New York Times columnist. I asked what was wrong with Michelle Goldberg.

“She’s been shitting on me a lot!” he said. “She wrote, like, two pieces. In one, she said I was jejune. Which, I didn’t even know the word. It means ‘shallow, stupid.’” I told him The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz had also once called him jejune. Marantz wrote that Piker was always “trying to reduce any societal problem to a one-word culprit, usually ‘capitalism’ or ‘imperialism,’” which is true. “She said that in the first piece,” Piker continued, again about Goldberg and jejune. “In the second piece, she begs Abdul to basically Sister Souljah/Jeremiah Wright me.”

In a classic pivot to the center after his primary victory, El-Sayed was in fact trying to Sister Souljah/Jeremiah Wright him, distancing himself in a press release and declining to keep campaigning with him. But if Piker is now a pariah in the Democratic Party, in an environment like Socialism 2026, he is considered relatively basic: the politically incorrect guy who lifts weights. At the panel he moderated, Piker gently exhorted his comrades to broaden their appeal, asking three DSA officials how they planned to sell their platform to the blue-collar working class. One of them replied, “I really do want to emphasize that socialism is a vision for a future without capitalism.” She later spoke of a “tool kit” for educating co-workers about the DSA. “I think you win a lot more people over if you’re just a normal chill guy to hang out with than by trying to constantly do HR-style lectures on how to build socialism,” he told me later.

Is Piker one of the few American figures sublimating radical politics into productive political action? Or is he just making people more extreme? Is he, actually, a normal chill guy? One of the disorienting aspects of his new infamy is that until pretty recently, the discourse around Piker suggested he might in fact salvage the Democratic Party by drawing in the elusive disaffected-male demographic it had long ceded to Trump. In 2025, the Times ran a soft-focus profile of Piker with the headline “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere.’” Before anxious Democrats wondered what to do about Hasan Piker, they asked, “Who could be our Joe Rogan?” One frequent answer was Hasan Piker.

I first met Piker on Friday, July 31, at his hotel suite in Detroit, four days before El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan primary. He was in town for a swing of campaign events, and I got to the hotel just before he started streaming. Piker began his broadcast saluting the start of the weekend and “all the wage cucks out there who are finally getting a sense of respite.” He added, “There’s also a journalist in the room right now, so it feels a little bit awkward.” Piker broadcasts his show on Twitch, a platform largely used by gamers. Typically, he does this at his home in Los Angeles from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Pacific, every day. The live, free-associative nature of the........

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