Hasan Piker: A Progressive Mind in a MAGA Body

14 Min Read

Hasan Pauler believes that being a man is simple.

Like many of the successful internet personalities that attract a generation of young men, Mr. Paular, a Twitch and the 33 -year -old YouTube streamer, is a “brother”: he likes weapons, inhales supplements, uses nicotine bags and reflections in the Legacy or LeBron James. But unlike many of his contemporaries, Mr. Pauler, a declared socialist, is as to dress with the French maid drag as in a basketball court.

In the six years since he began his daily transmissions online on culture and politics, Mr. Pauler has become a transmission star: it has about 4.5 million followers combined on YouTube and Twitch, the very popular platform among Americans who reached the age of majority, Covid-19 pandemic.

“In the most reductive way, it is reduced to trust, that is talking about people when it comes to masculinity,” Pike said in an interview. “They are talking about confidence.”

That trust is carried out in the policy discussions of Mr. Pikeer. In their transmissions, conversations on appointments, games or exercises or becoming penions that support organized work, universal medical care or LGBTQ rights. Frequently, he will frequently criticize the Democratic Party or the Israeli government to hit the right -wing comedians. This fluidity between culture and ideology has led many to mark Mr. Pauler to Joe Rogan on the left, if Mr. Rogan had a mop lid and painted his nails.

The success of Mr. Pikeer in Chamber, somewhere, has helped the leg for the fact that he is, according to conventional standards, a very handsome man. It has 6 feet 4 inches high and builds as a professional athlete, with a square jaw, beard and a coarse dark hair head.

“It is the only aspect that many of my enemies cannot shake,” Pauler said about his appearance on a Twitch transmission last year. “They cannot turn around and say:” You are not hot. “

His physique is the result of an intense fitness regime that, in a sunny morning in January, involved repeated settings of squats with a bar of 275 pounds, Romanian dead elevators and lunge to walk.

“Said Ionic Pauler, referring to memes on masculinity that are common in the right -wing speech online.” I live that life, “he added.” But then I have diametrically opposite politics. “

Protected by ‘Insurance Jock’

In fact, tens of thousands of spectators can see their videos for their political views, but many also tune in to the view of Mr. Pauler himself, whose social media profiles are full of suggestive images of his muscular body in nudity states, or “thirst traps”, how the images are known. Some of their fans scrape, capture capture, clip and replace them in “Fancams” that travel through the Internet, glorifying the appearance of Mr. Pikeer and indirectly, their beliefs.

Emma Morgan, a 27 -year -old researcher, is among them. “Many people are really shallow online,” Morgan said. “There is a stigma of whether you care about marginalized people, if you care about these problems, you must be a weak guy and live in the base.”

“If I have to make a Fancam to radicalize people,” he added, “then I will.”

Mr. Pecker approaches to dress with the same meticulousness as exercising. Every day transmits, hey, typically publishes a selfie or its outfit before the beginning. His clothing options can sometimes be as provocative as their opinions: on a recent trip to Japan, Mr. Pikeer wore a tight outfit of a French maid, a blutch -cat couple or ears and a chain recalled pearls while transmitting from one of the country’s maid coffees.

Duration A Twitch Transmission in 2023, Mr. Pauler asked viewers to participate in a live demographic survey; Those who did offered a sense of their audience. About 70 percent or participants identified as men, more than 60 percent identified as under 30 years of age, and approximately 40 percent identified as a sexual orientation that is not straight.

Mr. Pauler benefits from the “Jock Insurance,” said Tristan Bridges, a sociologist who studies masculinity and gender at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The term is used to describe how men with “a lot of male gender capital” are generally given more margin to do things like standards of challenge and make mistakes, he added.

“Athletes can break the rules and have no consequences for it,” Bridges said, adding that Mr. Pikeer’s masculinity was less rigid than the most traditional versions focused on belief “that the United States was easier and better when everyone performed the roles they designed to play.”

Jordan Dean, a 19 -year -old study student who follows Mr. Pauler, said that “the most playing part is definitely that he is a white heterosexual tank brother.” Mr. Dean, a transgender man, added: “Seeing him feel comfortable by painting his nails, with dresses, they are not revolutionary things. But he is demonstrating that it is fine to be a cis type and experiment with the gender presentation.”

Gay gains and culture

Mr. Pike typically leaves a study at his home in West Hollywood, California, a modern house that shares with Kaya, his mixture of Bernese mountain dogs that weighs more than 100 pounds.

You can spend up to 10 hours a day recording in your study, where there is no ferro of 10 swords and shelves adorned with video games and other chucheías. There is also a black assault rifle, that Mr. Pecker hastened to notice that it was false. “It’s Airsoft,” he said. “I like weapons, but I would never keep one in the house.”

While Mr. Rogan’s podcasts generally present interviews with guests who wind in politics, Mr. Pecker often addresses the issue only in solitary transmissions, he thought he has registered with people such as Senator Bernie Sanders de Vermont and representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or New York. (Last year, he transmitted from the National Democratic Convention). Mr. Pike does not agree with comparisons with Mr. Rogan, and has characterized what each one does as completely different bees.

Its marathon transmission sessions are partially fed by the Zyn cards, Dr. Pepper diet cans and energy drinks. Mr. Pecker, who fasts daily as part of his physical conditioning routine, usually consumes only coffee until around 2 pm, when he has its first meal of 1.1 pounds of to roasted chicken breast, mezzey and success.

You say that your personality is based on authentic interests in physical aptitude, culture, style and politics that you have had through your life. Mr. Pikeer was in a fraternity at Rutgers University, yes, but he has also been a life player and anime fan.

He moved to the Los Angeles area in 2013, after graduating from the University of Rutgers and telling his parents, both university professors, who intend to apply for the Faculty of Law. Instead, he got a job in advertising sales in the young Turk, a progressive news network founded by his uncle, expert Cenk Uygur. Mr. Pecker does not deny that it is a “Baby of Nepo,” he said. “A perfect society is that in which these types of advantages do not matter,” he added.

For 2016, it appeared regularly in videos about the social media accounts of the young Turk. He started transmitting on Twitch two years later. Fashion, he said, is something he has loved since he was a “too big” teenager who grew in Turkey, where he inhaled American culture through television programs such as “The Bondocks.”

Mr. Pauler, who is heterosexual, is aware that using pearls and painting his nails can suggest otherwise, the attention of the invitation of homosexual men. Last year, when a Gay content creator asked Mr. Pikeer if he was an “ally” in an interview in a pride event in Los Angeles, he said no, then added playfully: “I am an enemy.” Mr. Pauler then hit the interviewer, who was wearing a swimsuit from the American flag of Speedo, in front of a bus stamped with the Grindr logo, the application of gay appointments.

From his image, he said: “I don’t feel the need to present myself in any way that it is not.”

Always without filter, sometimes extreme

Mr. Pauler is not leaked with his views. Some may be extreme.

A vocal critic of the United States foreign policy in the Middle East, Mr. Pauler has been labeled against Americans by people from all over the political spectrum to say that the country “deserved” the attacks of September 11. 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 such as Ritchie Torres in New York, to call Mr. Pike Anti -Semitic.

“I think anti -Semitism is completely unacceptable,” Pike said in a call in April. “I think the combination of anti -Semitism and anti -rush is very dangerous,” he added.

Their video transmissions are splashed with expletives, vulgarities and other language that many have rejected in the name of political correction. It blocks the initiators of what he sees how hate discourse is, but not by speaking criticism when they challenge their views on issues such as transgender rights or war in Gaza. Some have accused him of sharing erroneous information in transmissions, but Mr. Pikeer says that his goal is to provide objective information together with his own views.

Jon Favreau, a founder of the center’s left -wing podcast “Pod Save America” ​​and his liberal parent company, Crooked Media, said that Mr. Piker’s disposition to commit to views outside his own was another feature that could attract young men who had balanced to the right. “He also wants to reach those people,” said Favreau.

But the way in which Mr. Pauler presents himself could work against him, said Reece Peck, a media culture professor at the Staten Island College and author of “Fox Populism: Branding preservatisms as a working class.”

“It is more” events in Soho “than” oriental Kentucky “,” as Mr. Peck said. “That masculinity of the bicoastal, elegant and hip hip has its limitations to attract a wide range of young men, young working class men.”

Clancy Campbell, a 20 -year -old fan or Mr. Pikeer’s who is studying to become a aestheticist, said the difference between Mr. Pauler and his counterparts on the right could be reduced to “the amount of care and where you put it.”

“With the media and things, they care almost too too much about the problems that do not matter,” he said. “With Hasan, it’s as if he cared, but in the right places.”

Alec Flynn, a 28 -year -old comedian in Los Angeles, whose material is based on his life as a heterosexual man, said he did not religiously follow Mr. Pecker. But he understood the attractiveness of Mr. Pike’s fire or masculinity.

“The more authentic be you, the more effective it will be,” said Mr. Flynn, who was also in a university fraternity. “At the end of the day,” he added, “People like fraternity Bros.”

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