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Come back with me to the autumn of 2021. I’m a writer who has been sent out on assignment to the stucco estates of suburban Los Angeles to profile a young socialist named Hasan Piker. Piker initially came to fame a few years prior while making YouTube videos for his uncle’s media company The Young Turks. After leaving, he built a brand as a Bernie-boosting leftist pundit, his rapid-fire takes meted out through the livestreaming platform Twitch. Thousands of young people were tuning in to Piker’s daily eight-hour broadcasts; they watched him scroll through New York Times headlines and riff on cable-news segments, all filtered through his chagrin for bland liberal consensus. I plopped down on a couch across from Piker, his body partially obscured by a towering PlayStation 5, and asked what he made of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, who were then just beginning to make a name for themselves in Democratic politics. Did Piker sense that the party was changing?

“We’re ants, we’re nothing,” I remember him saying, sizing up the state of the American left. Looking back, he was right. The Sanders movement was quashed by Joe Biden, of all people. At that moment, the moderate flank seemed to be keeping people like Piker in check.

Now come back with me to Tuesday evening, when the Democratic Socialists of America–endorsed public health official Abdul El-Sayed triumphed over establishment candidate Haley Stevens in a fiercely contested primary for Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination. When I visited Piker’s Twitch profile on election night, I wasn’t surprised to find him broadcasting live from El-Sayed’s reception. Piker had rallied with the candidate throughout the campaign. Back in 2025, El-Sayed had outlined on Piker’s stream his platform of economic populism and an end to military aid to Israel, and Piker had early on joined El-Sayed on the campaign trail, notably leading the streamer’s past comments about 9/11 and Israel to become a major issue in the race. Despite the heat, El-Sayed refused to disavow Piker.

And when El-Sayed won his primary, there Piker was, looking on from the crowd. Compared to the 30-year-old I interviewed five years ago, Piker looked considerably more grown-up. Instead of the ratty, paint-spattered graphic tee he had worn........

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