Hasan Piker on why the boys are all right (wing)

The boys are alt-right.

At least that’s what polling and voting data suggests. Men under 25 were nearly 20 percent more likely to vote for Donald Trump than women in that age group in the 2024 election, revealing a gender gap far larger than those in older generations.

Democrats have been freaking out about their young men problem. They’re starting podcasts. They’re talking about sports. They’re cursing more.

And increasingly they’re courting Hasan Piker: a 33-year-old Twitch streamer some are calling the “Joe Rogan of the left.” Piker livestreams for eight hours or more nearly every day. He has millions of followers, a group that skews young and male. Piker is a self-described leftist. He’ll vote Democrat as the lesser of two evils, but he’s been very critical of the party, especially over its handling of Israel’s war in Gaza.

He’s overtly political — but also an entertainer. During a recent streaming session, Piker bantered about his squat form and riffed on Andy Samberg’s face, before pivoting to a long interview with New York Times politics reporter Astead Herndon.

The message is equal parts self-improvement and how to fight for a better world, emphasis on fight. His message to his followers — and to Democrats seeking a way forward — is to get more antagonistic in pushing for what they believe in.

“You should fight back,” Piker told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “You should be like, ‘No, this is what I believe.’ Why do you not want to give health care to poor people? Like, what’s wrong with you?”

Piker’s conversation with Today, Explained ranged from his protein intake, to Lyndon B. Johnson’s thoughts on race, to the “warm blanket” of right-wing media. Make sure you listen to the whole thing at the link below or wherever you get your podcasts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s your protein intake? Is there a lot of protein going on?

Yes, I consume about 200, at a minimum, 220 grams of protein every day.

Amazing.

I mean, it’s alright. I eat a lot of chicken. I love chicken. So this is fine. Just straight white chicken breasts every day.

Oh! How much do you feel like being kind of yoked is like part of your draw and your persona?

I think it initially in leftist circles is a…it’s a negative. People look at me and immediately assume that I am a right-wing dude. At this point it’s hard to say that because obviously most people know what my politics are. But if you don’t know who I am from afar, you think like, “Oh, that’s like an alpha bro potentially right kinda guy.”

My demeanor also is like that too. I’m just authentically myself. I do not like putting on a show. I don’t even think I’d be capable of lying and being inauthentic for 10 hours a day in real time — especially as I’m responding in real-time to both news that is happening, but also then to people who are trying to argue with me about it. It’s just who I am. There’s not much I can do to change it. And I don’t even want to change the way I behave.

What is your read on why this male optimization, (getting, you know, really beefed up) has a left-right divide? And what is that divide about?

There’s a bunch of different reasons for it, but I think, like a lot of these guys, they don’t think too hard about politics and then they find themselves trapped in this right-wing bubble. And then I think that they just like to associate that with self-improvement and self-help with that in general. Self-help inherently is not like a leftist or a right-wing thing.

But it does seem like a lot of the content creators that are promoting that and presenting themselves as that are definitely, at the very least, right-wing. But I think part of it is because that’s just the domineering attitude in general, if you don’t really think about things too much and you kind of find yourself susceptible to social conditioning. And that does have a right-wing slant, the whole commonsense narrative. It’s like, “Oh, this is just common sense…two genders: commonsense.”

You didn’t put a lot of thought into it. That’s just what you learned your entire life. So of course you kind of slot yourself into the right-wing in that regard.

I guess the other reason is because self-improvement can turn into hyper-individualism very quickly, which is also another incredibly American attitude in general, but that’s what it is.

You try to couple self-improvement with helping others, which feels really critical in this moment where a lot of people feel lost, but that leads to them becoming more inward, introverted, even angry. How do you feel like you’re fairing in that battle right now to not just improve yourself inside and out, but to be more considerate of those around you?

I don’t know. I’m just…I’m a stubborn dude. I’m not doing deliberate gym content specifically because I want to penetrate the alpha bro fitness space. It’s just something that I have always liked to do organically. And, the content creators that I watch from this space are people that I end up collaborating with or have at least some mutual interests.

It feels like we’re at a pretty important juncture for young men, right? And there’s a lot of people telling them to regress, to be expecting women to take their last names, and to stay at home and to make lots of babies and to not ask too many questions. And then, I don’t know, it feels like you’re on the other side of that fight trying to tell men to grow.

I don’t tell people like, “Women have to stay in the kitchen,” or “Women don’t have to stay in the kitchen.” I’m just more like: Treat women as individuals, you know? Just like you would your sisters or your mother with respect as like a normal human being. Let them do whatever they want to do. That’s my attitude on it at least.

I think that the reason why the right is so successful at capturing the attention of young men in particular is because they’re taking a lot of the worst aspects of the hopelessness that I was just talking about — that everyone in the next generation is experiencing. And right-wing commentary is like a warm blanket that you can surround yourself with that says: “You’re right to be angry and you should be angry at vulnerable populations. You should be angry at people who have no power over you. And then if you dominate them a little bit, then that gives you a little bit of power, right?”

It reminds me of the LBJ quote about telling the lowest white man that he is higher than any Black man.

“If you can convince the lowest white man, he’s better than the best colored man. He won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

I think what you’re getting at here is the vision that the right is selling to young men is very compelling, because it doesn’t necessarily involve growth or progress. It just affirms what they already believe or maybe what their fathers and their fathers before them believed. But you seem to do something special which is you create an alternate vision for young men, for young people, what keeps you hopeful?

The one area of hope that I have right now is the momentum that I’ve seen from AOC and Bernie Sanders, who are going out and speaking in front of tens of thousands of people, people that may have not even voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries, right? Like people from all different walks of life — both Democrats and maybe even some not Democrats — coming together and being like, “Yeah, everything is messed up. We need to do something about it.”

So there’s definitely a lot of interest amongst the American working class to to change things. Some people have associated that change with Donald Trump. I find that kind of change to be worse because I think Donald Trump is further breaking the system that was broken previously prior to this.

The fact that some people recognize that there must be a difference, there must be a different mechanism for change. And they find Bernie to be a vehicle for that is somewhat positive, but it entirely depends on where it goes from here. Does the Democratic Party turn around and go, “Okay, we got to do that. Enough with this, you know, third-way neoliberalism.”

This kind of [neoliberal] attitude is ridiculous. I think it’s academic, it’s smug, it’s elitist, and it’s wrong. It’s demonstrably wrong. And I think people don’t want to hear it anymore.

So, I hope the Democratic Party recognizes that, and then more and more people run for office and say, “No, I don’t want corporate donations. I’m done with the billionaires and millionaires. I’m done with you. I’m done with the rest of the Democratic Party. I’m going to be a Democrat, but I’m done with the Democratic Party.”

That’s what Republicans did over the course of many, many years as well. They feared their base. They did not worry about the potential political repercussions of pushing for incredibly unfavorable and unpopular policies. And look where they’re at now. They got rewarded consistently time and time again. Or at least doing something.

That’s the attitude that many Americans have. They’re just like, “Yeah, everything is messed up. At least this guy wants to break the system. And I don’t really like the system anyway. I don’t like the institutions anyway. They, what have they done for me? So let’s test this out.”