Even Hasan Piker Was Surprised He Got to Stream From the DNC
Hasan Piker, just named one of Rolling Stone‘s 25 most influential creators of 2024, was among the wave of influencers to cover the Democratic National Convention this month alongside mainstream broadcasters. Known for his socialist perspectives and sharp critiques of American foreign policy — born to Turkish parents in New Jersey, the popular Twitch streamer was raised in Istanbul and returned to the U.S. for college — Piker was not exactly a “safe” pick for top-level media credentials, as he is first to acknowledge.
“I was not even expecting the accommodations that I got,” he tells Rolling Stone. “But that didn’t mean that I was going to change my commentary.”
Like his creator peers, the 33-year-old Piker brought a large, younger audience with him to the convention — 2.7 million followers, to be exact — adding to the sense of momentum and excitement that the party has felt since Vice President Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the ticket and chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. That the Democrats would solicit internet personalities to help amplify their message as the party gathered to officially launch their nominee is basically without precedent.
It’s more surprising still that the Harris camp wanted Piker, who has not been shy about criticizing the Biden administration from a leftist perspective in his daily political commentary, to join a “Creators for Kamala” team. But, as Piker himself points out, the Trump team is also doing digital outreach with the help of streaming stars; the campaigns seem locked in a fierce competition to tap a pool of voters whose worldview is shaped less by cable news than their favorite social media channels. “I think the Trump team is doing — I hate to admit this — a pretty solid job at it, one that I was originally critical of, but one that I’ve started recognizing as a serious threat,” Piker says.
Here, Piker tells Rolling Stone about having a vast new platform to talk about the presidential election, what he wanted to accomplish in contrast to the traditional journalists at the event, efforts to put a Palestinian-American on the stage, and his theory of why he was abruptly ousted from his balcony space while on camera as the DNC drew to a close.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I really appreciate you taking the time to do a little debrief of the DNC craziness, because it seemed like quite a trip.
It was a very interesting experience overall. I didn’t have my Hunter S. Thompson moment, but you know, it’s probably because I don’t really do any drugs anymore — or anything fun, for that matter. No partying for me.
It was a really huge moment for creators at this convention. I was wondering what your ambitions were, and how you feel it went.
Overall, there is a much larger — I would say consequential — partnership amongst political operatives and influencers nowadays. And there’s plenty of willing and able content creators who were interested to participate in the process. For me, in particular, the DNC is something that I have followed closely from afar. I was just excited at the prospect of being able to get inside. And, I mean, nothing really fundamentally changed about my commentary, and nothing really fundamentally changed about my opinion, either — maybe with some negative opinions. It’s something I talked to other journalists about as well: When it was in the middle of everything happening… I’ve never felt so out of touch with the real world.
I never really thought I would get this level of access that I got. It was definitely shocking, because of how critical I’ve very famously been of the Democratic Party. Obviously, it’s not a secret that I despise Donald Trump, I hate Donald Trump. Don’t want him to be president. But it’s not like I hold back from from calling out the Democrats when they do things that I find disagreeable, right? It was unprecedented for influencers in general, but it was certainly unprecedented for an influencer of my ideological background.
Do you think bringing your perspective into this space is something that you can do differently than mainstream journalists who have always had access to this to this event?
Absolutely. First and foremost, I’m 33 years old, which is definitely a little bit younger than the average commentator that is doing what I’m doing on mainstream media. I don’t consider myself a journalist. I’m a political commentator. What I do, I think, is like the equivalent of what Jake Tapper is doing, but also simultaneously what Donie O’Sullivan is doing. I’m also doing the roaming stuff and maybe interviews, things of that nature. But my perspective is definitely different because of my background and because of my ideological predisposition and because of what my audience is like. I talk to labor leaders, community organizers on a daily basis. They’re in my community. I hear what their problems are. I know what my struggle used to look like, not that long ago, in terms of, like my own personal finances, having to budget everything. These are financial problems not so far removed from my immediate experience. Obviously, now I’m in a dramatically different situation overall, but an Anderson Cooper might have never actually experienced those issues his entire life, because he’s a secret Vanderbilt.
I talked to [Rep.] Ro Khanna. He met with a bunch of other content creators as well. I think he’s definitely invested in this space in some ways, and he wanted to talk. So I said, yes, let’s do it. And we had a conversation about Israel-Palestine, where, in that conversation, I very openly said that what Israel is doing is genocide, and what Israel is doing when it’s not engaging in an active siege on Gaza is apartheid — and he disagreed with that. But I could tell it was just not something that he expected, or something that he’s used to hearing from people that are interviewing him. I don’t think mainstream media is ever going to do that. I was listening to The Daily earlier today, and they were talking about Trump’s economic policies. They brought up the fact that Donald Trump’s solution to skyrocketing rents is deporting 12 million undocumented migrants. And their assessment of the situation was that, well, that would be really harmful for the economy. And I was sitting there thinking, “That’s just Hitler! That’s what Adolf Hitler wanted to do!” I have a more unrestricted — perhaps maybe even too emotional at times — way of communicating my opinions.
Did you have a game plan going in, knowing that there were probably going to becontroversies around how Gaza would be discussed? And we didn’t hear from a Palestinian-American speaker. Did you know how you were going to center that issue?
I can’t believe I’m about to admit this, but, absolutely not. Rarely ever. I always roll with the punches, both in terms of production, which is certainly one of the reasons why I was even able to do what I was doing inside of the DNC. Because I would just carry my remote desktop setup around in a Pelican case, and then we would just create a makeshift table, like we did in the creator lounge, on one of those moving bar tables. I usually have a broad outline, but I oftentimes find myself just very fluid, depending on the circumstances.
So as soon as the “Uncommitted” campaign put forward their demands about having a Palestinian-American — a Democratic Party operative, who was willing and able to endorse Kamala Harris with a vetted speech — and then they were denied, I knew that I would want to interview [the Uncommitted protesters] once they started demonstrating. And then I did.
I didn’t have a plan of agitation ahead of time. I have a policy on my stream where I just basically give you the energy that you’re giving to me. If someone is kind, courteous, and genuinely curious and charitable, I’m always going to take time out to educate them. But if someone is like abusing that attitude, I’m going to push back with the same energy. The same principle applies in my DNC coverage. They were very gracious. I don’t think anyone thought I would get this level of access. People were shocked that I was in there to begin with, let alone streaming to 60,000 people from the middle of the stadium. I never really took it for granted.
It did cause a lot of chatter when you got removed from where you had set up a studio — that caused some confusion, where people thought you had been kicked out of the entire convention. What happened?
Obviously, there’s a lot going on at the DNC. And most people, even in the influencer space, don’t fully grasp what I do and how I do it, what kind of bandwidth is necessary on the logistics side, and I tried to communicate that to the best of my ability to the DNC ahead of time. I told them exactly what I do — I have a remote desktop setup, and I’m going to be carrying that. I need a table and an Ethernet cable for it, and that’s it. Everything else I have covered. I also have a backpack that I call the roaming camera. I told them, I need a space for the entire day where my remote desktop setup can live.
First day, that was an impossibility. That’s why I set up in my hotel room. Second day, they were like, “We gave you all the access, we want you to be here, so we’re going to carve out a space for you.” Day three, they moved me to a different space. This time it was the lower level. I was right behind the band, phenomenal view. There were some times that were blocked out for like, [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren, but then I came back and I continued filming, it wasn’t a problem.
The last day, I knew it was going to be chaotic. I was like, I can stay at the hotel. It’s not a big deal. They’re said, no, it’s fine, you have the entire balcony space from 2:30 p.m. onwards. Now, why did I do this? Not because I suspected foul play or anything. It was because I was setting up interviews with key figures such as [Rep.] Ilhan Omar, [Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and UAW president Shawn Fain, and I needed a space to be able to do so.
That day, I started off my broadcast with the interviews of [Rep.] Cori Bush [about] the uncommitted delegates that were protesting outside of the the United Center, and then moved on to do my regular commentary. At that same time things were getting heated. I’d already heard that there was a little bit of drama internally with who wanted me there. The DNC not being super happy with the Kamala campaign demanding that I be there, is what I gathered. But as far as I understand, the straw that broke the camel’s back was my criticism of the DNC for not allowing a Palestinian-American speaker.
What ended up happening was, they unceremoniously, out of nowhere, were like, yeah, you’ve got to get out by [this certain time]. I was like, that’s weird, because you guys told me that that wasn’t going to happen. They were like, no, no, it just happened, sorry. They didn’t kick me out or anything, but they basically made it so that it was as difficult as possible to continue streaming there. Well, I have all this gear on me, I’m giving an interview to the New York Times at this point about Creators for Kamala. I’m like, is there a place I can put my stuff? And they’re like, no — at which point I was like, OK, I think we’re just being politely booted.
I want to reiterate this: every single moment that I spent inside of the DNC I consider to be a bonus. There’s no point I ever thought that I would even get this level of access to begin with. So I was happy with every single thing that I was able to do in there. I don’t consider this to be a a massive slight. It was a little annoying at the time, for sure, because I had all these interviews lined up, and then I couldn’t do them. So that was frustrating. [But] no hard feelings, I would say, because I’m stoked that I even got access to begin with.
It sounds like they had some technical stuff to work out in terms of accommodating someone like you.
That definitely was a problem. But I’ll just say, I think that this was definitely deliberate, the moving around. There’s plausible deniability there, for sure, amidst the chaos. But especially after talking to some people, like I said, I found out that there was already a little bit of contention with my presence there from the jump, and then there was definitely a straw that broke the camel’s back, with my last day of coverage, everything that I was saying and doing.
You mentioned that it’s not just Kamala — the Trump team is also trying to figure out this creator space. I wondered what you thought of of Adin Ross’s interview of Trump, if you watched that stream and if you think that moves the needle.
I don’t necessarily know if the Adin Ross one will move the needle as much as like the Theo Von one will. Even on his own YouTube page, he got like 2.5 million views in two weeks, whereas the Theo Von one got 10 million in literally four days. The golfer one [with Bryson DeChambeau] 10 million, 11 million. Whenever Trump actually links up with someone, whether it’s Dr. Phil or anyone like that, where they have a serious back-and-forth that is 55 minutes long, an hour long, he gets to come across like a normal human being, which he is not. But he does have his humanizing moments. I think those do very well. Adin Ross specifically did not, I think, move the needle all that much, partially because he doesn’t know anything. He is barely is literate. But I do think that Trump’s media push is looking somewhat interesting. And I said this when I was watching the Theo Von conversation: if you had maxed out your name recognition and you’d already lost, after being president for four years — people have made up their minds about you. So much so that after you almost got assassinated, you barely got a bump in the polls. People are that polarized, it doesn’t even matter if you get shot at and survive. At that point, what are the demographics that you can reach out to?
We know that young men in the 18-to-35 age bracket are significantly more right-wing than young women are in that same bracket. So although they do not participate in the democratic process to the same degree as young women do, they are young enough that they might have [started to] developed their political opinions in your first term, and might be coming to develop their political opinions now. These were non-voters, whether they were too young or just non-voters in general. And I think that that is what Donald Trump is going after — Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Adin Ross, all of these spaces that have a shit-ton of people who are maybe outside of the normal party loyalty. That maybe have a likelihood to have right-wing beliefs, and they haven’t made up their minds on Trump yet. I think that he is trying to actively target those people with this big media push.
In that case, you certainly have your work cut out for you for the rest of this election cycle.
Absolutely. I don’t know if Kamala Harris, by the way, is the right person to be able to do this. Because Donald Trump is a telegenic reality TV star, he can have those conversations where he can be normal and kind of funny, even. Whereas I fear that Kamala Harris looks too manicured and too professional as a politician. Perhaps Tim Walz could do that. I think the best surrogate [would be] Barack Obama. Anything he says won’t actually translate back to an attack on Kamala Harris. But any kind of momentum in the direction of Kamala Harris will look good. That was the suggestion I gave the New York Times as well. If I was sitting on top of the DNC, I’d put Barack Obama next to Kai Cenat, that’s something I would do — or even someone like myself, as a matter of fact.
Beyond that, I don’t know how well Kamala would do in these sorts of uncontrolled media environments. Maybe she would be great at it. Who knows, but I haven’t really seen that yet. But this space is, really, really right-wing at this point. This is an issue that’s very near and dear to me. I see it. The age gap between young men and women is crazy for the 18-to-29 age demographic, in terms of supporting Harris versus supporting Trump. Men demonstrate relatively high support for Trump, women support Kamala Harris by plus-40 points. And to that, I said, every young male interest online, from gaming to fitness culture and self help, is dominated by right-wing, red-pilled manosphere commentary. They prey on the anxieties and insecurities of vulnerable young men. Because a lot of men recognize the shitty material circumstances they exist under. They might even have a sense of entitlement about what the future is supposed to look like for them, how society was supposed to be designed for them. And when they recognize that they’re not getting the outcomes that they were supposed to get, or that the previous generation got, that creates hostility overall. A lot of that manosphere space takes advantage of that insecurity and and anger and resentment and channels it back to making loyal soldiers that are that are ready to go for the right — even if these guys are not voters themselves. They still churn out a lot of right-wing sentiment on a daily basis.