Influencer Hasan Piker, dubbed the ‘Joe Rogan of the left’ and ‘Woke Bae’, received a glowing feature in the New York Times last week.
The venerable newspaper described the 33-year-old as ‘a very handsome man’ with ‘socialist politics’, a potential antidote to far-right streamers winning over young men.
But the Times left out a litany of Piker’s shocking statements and controversies – and scrambled to quietly edit the story after publication.
Piker, who has 4.5 million followers on streaming sites Twitch and YouTube, has called Miley Cyrus ‘a little sl*t’ and joked about pedophilia, told his fans to ‘kill Rick Scott’ the Florida senator, allegedly harangued his ex with calls to police, owns a ‘swastika sword’, gloated over support for terror groups including Hamas, and blamed Israel for Hamas’ murderous October 7, 2023 terror attack.
The Times’ profile of the left-wing influencer focused on his liberal credentials and a glowing description of his appearance: ‘6 feet 4 inches tall and built like a professional athlete, with a square jaw, a beard and a head of thick dark hair.’
The paper alluded to his past controversial statements, including a 2019 comment that America ‘deserved’ the 9/11 terror attacks – but added that Piker ‘blocks commenters for what he sees as overt hate speech’ on his stream.
But in the feature, the Times included a photo showing his computer screen in the background, in which one commenter could be seen writing: ‘I’d phuck this idf bitch to death and make his mother shove missiles up her a**. Pu**yy a** b**ches,’ referring to a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces.
When readers spotted the comment, the Times quietly cropped the photo and changed the headline from ‘A Progressive Mind in a MAGA body’ to ‘A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere’.
Yet they failed to add any of Piker’s most controversial comments – including one that landed him a temporary Twitch ban just a month earlier.
On a stream on February 28, he showed a CNN interview about potential cuts to government-funded healthcare, then repeatedly told his followers: ‘If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott.’
The Times presented the influencer as a more wholesome, liberal alternative to far-right figures that have gained large followings among young men.
Some, like Andrew Tate, are accused of glorifying the degradation and abuse of women.
But Piker has made his own deeply unsavory comments about women.
In one video he joked about pedophilia with the phrase: ‘old enough to count, old enough to mount’, suggesting with sick humor that a child who can count is old enough to have sex.
In the same video he added: ‘I always knew Hannah Montana was a little sl*t’, after referencing a story about an outfit giving a ‘cameltoe’ to singer Miley Cyrus who played child star Montana.
‘Look this is a classic example of what happens when your father doesn’t pay attention to you. You turn out to be a sl*t who’s craving for attention, and then I tend to pick you up at a bar late night and bang you out on the first date,’ he said.
Piker was accused online of calling police for an unwanted ‘wellness check’ on his ex-girlfriend, porn star Janice Griffith, after they broke up, allegedly because she wasn’t returning his calls.
Griffith posted about the incident in 2020 on social media site X, writing: ‘i wasn’t suicidal, i did not imply i would take my own life or even harm myself. he called against the advice of my best friend, and he only lived 12 minutes away from me. i have called 911 for an overdose before – after ACTUALLY exhausting all other options. he did not do that.’
‘Would you like screenshots of my best friend telling him not to call the police and him saying he did it anyway ?’ she wrote in a follow-up tweet.
‘I tried to reach out to him to talk about it and he didn’t answer me for a month, and still doesn’t want to talk about it. accountability matters.’
When asked on a live stream about why he called police to visit his ex, Piker said: ‘At the time I did not know. It’s as simple as that. I did know that there were risks involved with it.’
When Cosmopolitan magazine wrote a feature about him in 2018, he showed the reporter nudes that female fans had sent him.
‘That was, like, actually her blowing someone,’ he reportedly said, scrolling through the images with the journalist. ‘That’s butt stuff. Cool.’
He later joked about his career ending over the story – though he has since grown his following by hundreds of thousands.
In 2021 he caused a stir by posting videos from a strip club and visiting a German brothel, which he later framed as sex work advocacy.
‘I’ve gone to a brothel, Artemis, in Berlin, and had sex with the workers there,’ he said, according to a Vice article from the time.
His political statements have also been the source of deep controversy.
A staunch Palestine supporter and intense critic of Israel, Piker claimed responsibility when a poll showed one-third of Jewish-American teens sympathized with terror organization Hamas, saying ‘I did this’.
He told his fans that blame for Hamas’ murderous October 7, 2023 attack lay ‘directly in the hands of the Israeli state’.
Dismissing rapes by Hamas fighters of Israeli women during the terror attacks, he said ‘it doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.’
The comments were called out by Democrat congressman Ritchie Torres, who wrote to Twitch owner Amazon about Piker last month.
‘Hasan Piker, who has described Orthodox Jews as ‘inbred’ and a Jewish man as a ‘bloodthirsty pig,’ is the anti-Semitic voice of a systemically anti-Semitic platform led by [Twitch CEO] Dan Clancy,’ New York congressman Torres wrote.
Piker told NBC News that many of the videos cited in the letter were taken out of context.
As well as claiming in 2019 that America ‘deserved’ the 9/11 terror attacks, Piker also joked that Saudi Arabia should be given ‘a nuke so they can do 9/11 2’.
Speaking on Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, he said: ‘I think it’s a resistance group,’ and ‘I don’t have an issue with them.’
He has also shown propaganda videos from Yemen terror group the Houthis on his channel, and conducted an uncritical interview with Yemeni Tik-Toker Rashid al-Haddad, who posed with Houthi pirates capturing a cargo ship in 2023 – nicknaming him ‘TimHouthi Chalamet’ over his resemblance to the curly-haired Hollywood star.
The streamer, who portrays himself as an ‘anti fascist’, owns a sword with a pattern on the hilt resembling a swastika, which he calls his ‘swastika sword’.
An online spat blew up last month among his followers after he gave the sword to a friend to pose for a photo, brandishing the weapon while wearing a Palestine flag sash.