As Democrats recover from their bruising defeat last month, one voice looking to help liberals make sense of their loss to President-elect Donald Trump is Hasan Piker, a left-wing streamer with 2.8 million followers on Twitch, a video-game streaming platform. More than 7.5 million people tuned in to his election night livestream, more than the number of viewers for either MSNBC or CNN that night.

“I don’t think that the Democratic Party can podcast itself out of this issue,” Piker told CNN last week, responding to criticism that Vice President Kamala Harris hurt her chances by declining to appear with the popular podcast host Joe Rogan. “I think that they need to change their policies.”

Some on the left and in the media have identified Piker, an internet-savvy guru with a loyal left-wing following, as offering something of a solution for the Democratic Party. But despite his cachet among a Gen Z constituency that lives online, Piker comes with his own hate-filled baggage. 

Known as Hasanabi on Twitch, Piker has a history of invoking antisemitic tropes when he discusses Israel and the Jewish community. A staunch opponent of Israel’s right to exist, Piker offered justifications for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks just one day later. 

He has also mocked people concerned about rising antisemitism worldwide. Last month, after mobs motivated by calls for a “Jew hunt” attacked Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam, Piker claimed that people who called the incident antisemitic were wrong — and that by merely suggesting the incident was antisemitic, they were the ones responsible for more antisemitism. 

CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan briefly acknowledged those criticisms, but didn’t press Piker on the matter. “The way you talk about Israel is viewed by some as antisemitic. Are you antisemitic?” O’Sullivan asked. 

Piker answered with a straightforward Of course not. “The real problem here,” he responded, “is that I’m an anti-Zionist.” It’s a distinction he has leaned on often in response to criticism that he is, in fact, antisemitic. 

CNN is not the only mainstream outlet where Piker has received a platform lately. NBC News profiled him in September, after he attended the Democratic National Convention as an influencer. Top New York Times political reporter Astead Herndon appeared on his stream as a guest the same day Piker devoted a segment to undermining allegations of antisemitism in Amsterdam. (Spokespeople at CNN and NBC did not respond to requests for comment about their decision to feature Piker, and The New York Times did not respond to an inquiry about Herndon’s appearance.)

“It is bewildering that mainstream media outlets continue to platform Hasan Piker, an influencer whose toxic screeds against Zionism and the Jewish state normalize antisemitism, reinforce bigotry and launder terror,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told Jewish Insider this week. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) told JI in October that “nobody has been a greater amplifier of antisemitism” than Piker. 

In November, Piker was a guest host on the popular liberal podcast “Pod Save America.” The hosts knew that bringing him on would invite controversy.

“We’re going to ‘platform’ people you don’t like and that’s ok,” host Jon Lovett wrote on X, in response to a post decrying Piker’s guest appearance on the podcast. “We’re going to push back, or just listen sometimes, and that’s ok. But criticisms welcome!” 

On the show, Lovett acknowledged the heated reaction to Piker. “One of the reasons people will be mad that you’re on the show is because you’re, like, a proud anti-Zionist,” said Lovett, who in turn identified himself as a Zionist. Lovett described his own anger at Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza but reiterated his support for a two-state solution. Piker disagreed with that position, while describing Israel’s war as a “genocide.” Lovett did not push back. (Lovett did not respond to a request for comment from JI.) 

One day after Oct. 7, Piker — who broadcasts for up to 10 hours a day, occasionally with guests but often alone — addressed the Hamas attacks that killed 1,200 people and resulted in more than 200 hostages taken back to Gaza. 

“I am not going to be one of those people that says, like, ‘Oh, they’re settlers. They deserve the violence. They deserve getting shot in the street.’ No, nobody deserves that,” Piker said of the Israeli victims, before speaking at length about what he described as the “inevitability” of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, blaming it on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.

“Do you think that this happened out of nowhere? Do you think this happened out of thin air? Are you f***ing stupid? Do you think the Israeli state was just, like, peacefully coexisting, and then these guys came in with f***ing gliders out of nowhere?” he said angrily. “You cannot push people into a f***ing corner their whole lives and not expect them to fight back at a certain point. Suck my d***.”

He has argued that there is no such thing as “liberal Zionism,” and that support for Israel is incompatible with progressive politics, even as he acknowledged that the majority of Jews feel a connection to Israel.

“So many Jews have some connection to Israel. That is the line I hear a lot from liberal Zionists,” Piker said in a June 2024 stream. “No matter how progressive you are, if you still have this hang up, this hang up born out of so much social conditioning from birth … ultimately, you are still engaging in some way, shape or form in the defense of an otherwise ethno-nationalist, supremacist ideology.” (More than 80% of American Jews feel a connection to Israel, according to a 2021 Pew poll.) 

Piker has routinely belittled Jews’ fears of antisemitism and argued that accusations of antisemitism are employed in order to distract from Israel’s actions in Gaza.

In October, during a CNN town hall with Harris, Piker hosted a stream responding to Harris’ comments. When a voter asked Harris how she will address rising antisemitism on U.S. campuses,. Piker derided the questioner and mocked Harris’ response.

“Will every single college campus liberal sign a petition to say they will never disparage the beautiful state of Israel, or not? If your answer is no, I don’t know, I can’t vote for you,” he said sarcastically. 

“How will Kamala Harris combat antisemitism on college campuses? That’s my single issue,” Piker continued. “There are still students out there that learn in classrooms that genocide is bad, for example. I don’t think that that’s appropriate. I think that sometimes genocide is good, like, for example, if the victims of the genocide are barbaric animal monsters who have an antiquated, ancient gene of antisemitism in their hearts. If you don’t teach it like that, then people are going to learn the wrong lessons.”

When Piker discussed the violence against Israelis in Amsterdam, he attributed it to soccer’s “hooligan” culture. At the same time, he suggested that Israelis who were beaten up and stalked in the streets deserved it because some fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv had taunted Arabs in the city with Islamophobic slurs earlier in the day. He called the Israeli fans “Judeo-Nazi ultra fans.” 

“It is so gross and so shameless the way that people who want to defend Israel’s utterly unconscionable, immoral actions will just so cynically, consistently say that this is antisemitic,” Piker said. “When Israel is going on defense mode after siccing their football hooligans on foreign soil, and then crying foul after they got their ass beat, to be like, ‘This is an antisemitic pogrom,’ you’re literally just making people more antisemitic.”

Two weeks later, he hosted Ta-Nehisi Coates, the National Book Award-winning author, to talk about how he “saw the truth about Palestine.” In May, Piker hosted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). 

Piker did not respond to a request for comment.