This guy’s dad is the former VP of a multibillion dollar Turkish conglomerate, as well as the secretary of a government department. Mom and Dad were able to fly to their other home in NJ to give birth so he’d get US citizenship. His uncle is the founder and owner of TYT Media and gave him his media career. He went to Rutgers. He lives in a multimillion dollar mansion in the Hollywood Hills. This is by definition not the kind of person who can be a voice of the People. Saying “I recognize my privilege” over and over, while living his lifestyle, doesn’t negate his privilege and complete lack of real-life experience outside of the curated garden of the wealthy. He gets paid obscene amounts of cash to sit in his bedroom and word-vomit for 9 hours a day. Why are his unending opinions taken so seriously? He gives me strong controlled opposition vibes.
So what? A class traitor is a class traitor, and we only have to win with this. What’s next, you gonna say Engels wasn’t a communist because he was a part of the bourgeoisie?
You do not need some sort of vow of poverty to be a true leftist.
He sometimes tells his audience to log off and join an org, we get a handful of new recruits occasionally due to the guy.
So he actually is successfully moving people from being socialist sympathizers to actual socialists (you need to be part of an org to be a socialist)
That’s all I really know about him, besides some people being thirsty about him.
Semi off-topic but genuinely curious: did going to Rutgers become something that is fancy/seen akin to Ivy league? Or was mention of the school just aention that he went to college?
A person’s class is defined by their relation to labor, not their wealth. He’s not exploiting labor. I’m not sure the people claiming he’s a hypocrite for having money understand anything about communist/socialist theory. Engels was famously in a very similar situation.
Hasan occupies a niche within the broad “leftist” umbrella niche within the West. Unlike many breadtubers, he actually doesn’t serve as much of a barrier for further leftist movement (see: Vaush, Destiny, etc.). He is privledged, but so was Engels. Hasan certainly is no Engels, but he does serve a useful role in radicalizing liberals towards the Left, like how he vocally combats the nonsense usage of the word “tankie” trendy among liberals these days.
Hasan is a pundit at the end of the day, and isn’t bringing about the revolution, and he is definitely more of a USophile than he should be, but he is better than most leftist commentators and helps serve as a conveyor to the left of himself.
Thank you for a nuanced reply. When you put it this way, I can see why many listeners find value in his content. I worked another shift today with him constantly droning in the background and I think my opinion is largely being colored by his presentation style, and my own distaste for “streamers” and “react culture” in general, with his aforementioned privilege issues now coming in third.
His comments about people working “real” jobs having an easier time of it than he does certainly rubbed me the wrong way, though, and his response when called out on it was more of the exact same “BROOO WHAT ARE YOU STUPID? THATS NOT WHAT I MEANT! OK!?” that his streams are full of.
‘This person’s not allowed to do the right thing, because he was born wrong.’
Uh huh.
The revolution will not have a channel on youtube.
I was going to comment the same ö
I think you have an extremely online view of “leftist political spaces” because I have never even heard this guy’s name mentioned in any real life context, and I’ve been a very politically active communist since I was a teenager.
Yeah the problem with living in capitalist hellworld at the heart of the empire is that you have two separated insular communities of leftists that are knife fighting rings. One in meetings and one on message boards, and they frequently know nothing about each other.
While the meetings communists sometimes eke out wins like Kshama Sawant, they often struggle to connect to the message board communists who really should be their base. Meanwhile both struggle to connect to society at large.
What’s really funny is that most meetings communists I know locally essentially think of him in essentially the same way message board communists think of AOC. Most meetings communists cannot stand his level of yadda yadda when pressed on any specifics he often just goes more general and says things like ‘I just want everyone to have healthcare bro’.
I’ve never listened to him for more than a few seconds. He gives me shyster vibes and I don’t need a pundit to tell me everything is shit.
Addition: his father is a founding member of a right wing party in Turkey
You can advocate for hungry people after eating a meal. You can advocate fornsex worker rights even if you are a virgin.
You can’t tell people you are “working class” if you’re rich. You can’t advocate for punishing day people while pretending to be straight.
It is not complicated.
What’s with the identity politics man? Does what he says makes sense or not? Don’t tell me you won’t listen to rich white people when they make sense because they’re rich and white.
I’ll state this: I know of this person in name only.
He’s a hypocrite. It’s as simple as that. His popularity is probably derived from the novelty of a member of the upper class agreeing with the lower classes and his ability to entertain them. It gives those that belong to the lower class hope of change being enacted by those with capital. The Wikipedia page states he brought a $2.7 million USD mansion. He has access to capital, and what does he do? Asks others to donate to ‘worthy’ causes whilst accruing more capital for his own vested, personal vanity projects?
From what I’ve read he is not an ally. He’s an entertainer. The capitalist system is able to create products that espouse anti-capitalist ideas. This is just another such product. It’s not controlled opposition. It’s just an individual who’s found himself the owner of a sought after product. Just another capitalist.
I’ll state this: I know of this person in name only.
surely THIS is a solid base to work off of when forming an opinion of somebody
He has access to capital, and what does he do? Asks others to donate to ‘worthy’ causes whilst accruing more capital for his own vested, personal vanity projects?
a recent donation drive run by his community for Palestinian aid raised $840,000, with at least $75,000 coming directly from his pocket. Another previous donation drive last October raised $1,236,473.25, with another $50,000 coming directly from Hasan.
That’s not very much for a house in LA
Okay let’s do some introspection, why does Hasan Piker need to live in LA?
He could live in La Puente which has a median sale price of $700k, 20 miles from downtown LA, but for some reason he moved to LA.
It’s kind-of odd you know? That basically once a streamer, podcaster, or one of these online personalities makes it big they often move to like LA or NYC. Why is that? Why don’t they move to Nabraska or something? It’s kind of weird that there’s this seeming class of people (new media people making it big) that have an interest in moving to some of the most expensive areas of the country that seemingly have a conglomeration of other people who are part of their class.
What the fuck does any of that matter. How are you about to say someone shouldn’t live where they want because its expensive and they can afford it? Nebraska fucking sucks BTW.
Because this is a plain instance of him not being a class traitor to further his own career and desires.
The reality of the “stop pocket watching” argument that Hasan has successfully deployed on his fans and friends is that it’s the same argument every rich person pulls out when you question how they spend their money and what that practically says about their place and ideas for society at large.
My argument isn’t that “people shouldn’t live in LA” (okay fine maybe it is a little). My argument is that Hasan made the same choice that every influencer makes.
Beyond the very obvious influencer argument, how exactly do you think that upper middle class comes to support capitalism as a whole? They get addicted to their level of consumption like every wealthy class has done for millennia.
So the underlying argument there isn’t “Hasan doesn’t deserve nice things”, it’s that “Hasan’s appetite for nice things is a form of class expression” and there is a point of where that class expression and the addiction to consumption overrides any “do socialism” argument that you say on stream.
This is literally how the nomenklatura got fat in the USSR, they didn’t have streams but they had their local, national, and general assembly soviets. Every post-Soviet person knows an uncle who was a party apparatchik and stopped saying “do socialism” the moment the wall came down, and he was one out of maybe two/three guys in your whole extended family who happened to have a car prior to 1995. I have 3 of such uncles and 2 of them aren’t even blood relatives.
Y’all are getting wrecked by the same attitudes that wrecked the USSR and y’all don’t even have state capitalism with socialist characteristics.
The real problem here is that Hasan doesn’t admit these things. Hasan can’t admit these things because he doesn’t know these things. Hasan is very limited in his knowledge of “socialism”, he’s a guy who just says shit on stream. Being a class traitor is a cool coat he wears along with all his other cool coats.
I struggle to even call myself a class traitor despite the fact that I have Eastern European thrift embedded so deeply in my veins that I live way below my means. Guess what class expression doesn’t stop there. Being thrifty doesn’t stop you from being compromised by your class. That money doesn’t sit under my mattress it’s invested, which means I’m in a class of people who not only will have private money for retirement but I’m invested in the outcomes of the market like every upper middle class person.
So I’m sorry that I don’t buy the whole class traitor shit, because neither the fans giving him that title nor he can actually untangle and explain his place in the world beyond saying “stop pocket watching”. It’s one thing to call yourself a class traitor because you bought a cool eat the rich shirt, it’s another thing to actually take inventory of your life and apply socialist theory to figure that out.
Log the fuck off.
once a streamer, podcaster, or one of these online personalities makes it big they often move to like LA or NYC. Why is that?
That’s not a streamer thing, that’s an almost everyone thing. Tons of people move to cities as soon as they can afford it, tons of those who don’t stay where they are in no small part because it’s less expensive.
Hasan literally told Business Insider that he wanted to move to LA because of fucking Entourage.
Likewise yeah people in their 20s-30s move to cities to chill, but not everyone moves to LA or NY.
Never heard of him.
Also, class is not defined by wealth, but by relation to labor. He is doing the work he is getting paid for, regardless of whether someone thinks its too much. He’s not exploiting others to make that money as far as I know.
Exactly!
this is hard as fuck holy
Moving to LA to buy a multi-million dollar house and be close to your other rich content creator friends is the same as setting yourself on fire for the proles.
Got it.
Fwiw, the picture doesn’t show someone setting themselves on fire, it shows someone having lit a Molotov cocktail.
Damn you’re right, that’s drawn by someone who’s never seen a molotov in real life lmao.
