The media and political world has been utterly, bizarrely fixated on the streamer Hasan Piker over the past six weeks. He’s been leading coverage on both left- and right-wing outlets, turned into a kind of litmus test for Democratic politicians, and has become the subject of seemingly endless think pieces. Hasan is, to be sure, an influential and charismatic figure in our politics—and his worldview is “radical” as far as the mainstream goes—but the scale and intensity of this obsession has been genuinely bewildering to me.
So I wanted to talk to him directly and ask: Hasan, why is this happening? What do these people actually want from you? What does it feel like to suddenly be treated as a political issue on par with healthcare or affordability? What did you do in a past life to deserve this? Are you okay?
We get into the mechanics of the smear campaign against him, including a breakdown of Olivia Reingold’s now-infamous fabrication in The Free Press, before widening out to other questions: coalition politics vs. leftist purity; whether there’s a place for “recovering liberal Zionists” in the pro-Palestine movement; what actual antisemitism looks like right now; and what to make of figures like Tucker Carlson positioning themselves as anti-Israel voices.
Finally, we turn to the West Bank, where the violence is constant and largely invisible—including a school shooting this past week—and discuss what it would take to make people here actually pay attention.
Infinite Jaz exists because I believe reporting on Israel-Palestine, and the systems of power that shape it, should not be filtered through the priorities of billionaires and politically biased, risk-averse institutions.
But all of my reporting is self-funded, and it cannot continue without your support. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank. A one-year subscription comes out to just over a dollar a week.
