HasanAbi Has Political Twitch on Lock

To have a leftist streamer with such massive influence was once thought mythical, but Hasan made it a reality.

Courtesy of Hasan Piker on YouTube.

If The Young Turks — the collective Hasan Piker was once a part of — were the renegades of mainstream media, comprised almost-entirely of outcasts and dissidents, Hasan’s standing on Twitch was just as rebellious–the platform alongside YouTube had been home for many conservatives who successfully wielded divisive rhetoric to stoke the flames of political polarization, but as Hasan rose to prominence on the back of his 2020 presidential race coverage, the dominance of conservative political commentary on Twitch no longer seemed so permanent.

Even before his hard pivot to Twitch, Hasan had always been a citizen of the internet–his presence on Cenk Uygur’s erstwhile-influential media empire honed him the skills necessary to eventually a plot a path forward for his own career, unconstrained by what role his superiors might’ve fashioned for him otherwise. While Hasan got to flex his political acumen there with a focus on socialist politics, delivering in the style of cable news always had him on the back foot against the right-wing’s Koch-funded media empire–Hasan got to wear fancy suits and try to out-PragerU his ideological nemeses, but it was clear that this wouldn’t work…