The lefty who lands online
Streamer Hasan Piker more than held his own on Theo Von's podcast recently. As a rare progressive finding success in right wing spaces online, he's a pro-labor voice that is worth checking out.
Is it just me or is there a media microtrend of people on opposite sides of the political spectrum starting to speak to one another again, like they used to? Not debating, arguing or one-upping each other for likes or retweets, but actually talking and listening.
Time will tell whether Gavin Newsom’s move to begin his new podcast with interviews of mostly MAGA guests is a sign of wisdom or weakness. And I’m not trying to be naive about the intense political moment this country is in. But a recent cross-spectrum moment I found worthwhile was this interview between lefty streamer Hasan Piker and right-aligned podcaster and comedian Theo Von.
Piker is a 33-year-old video game streamer who has built a massive audience through his uncompromising brand of progressive politics online. He is perhaps the most prominent young leftist in new media spaces on YouTube, TikTok, Twitch and podcasting that have increasingly moved right in recent years.
Piker is a big labor booster, and I will never forget the moment his name first popped up for me as a reporter. I was writing about a union drive undertaken by a couple dozen food service workers at Waymo’s headquarters, in Mountain View, a few years ago.
In the parking lot of the building, I asked Fernanda, a kitchen worker and 28-year-old single mother who lived at a trailer park nearby with her mom, what had spurred her interest in unions.
“HasanAbi,” she told me, using Piker’s YouTube name. She nodded in the direction of an old SUV nearby, saying her first thought when she bought it was that it would be big enough for her and her son to live out of if she ever were evicted.
Through listening to Piker, Fernanda had come to see unions as an answer to the extreme economic disparities in the United States, where someone like her could be a few missed paychecks away from living in a van despite being surrounded — and employed by — bottomless tech wealth. Fernanda and the other workers behind the union push believed they deserved to make more than $24 an hour at one of the world’s wealthiest companies.
I have thought back on this interaction many times since. It was a revealing moment with a person who knew she was losing out in the new economy. And it felt prescient: Fernanda is the type of voter that traditional liberals and their dying media institutions have struggled to connect with in recent years. But Piker was landing with her.
He is the rare voice who can piece things together in a succinct but unsanctimonious way: how inequality has destabilized the country and caused voters to look for villains to blame. His interview with Von is worth a listen — he calmly makes the case for workers unionizing, why he believes immigrants are being unfairly blamed for a host of economic problems, and for even more robust government hiring. At a time when many prominent Democrats are scared to voice some of these positions, Piker is low-key transgressive. But he talks about issues in ways that doesn’t alienate or talk down to people.
Von’s politics are hard to quantify succinctly, but he has styled himself as a proverbial average Joe in many ways, and one who clearly has been taken by at least some of MAGA platform. Perhaps he was just being a genial host, but he seemed to agree with Piker on many points, acknowledging some skepticism about unions but also saying that he could see it as “a safety net for people to have a union against corporations. To me it makes perfect sense.”
Here are some other things I’m reading this week:
THE PERCEPTION of the health of the U.S. economy and labor market is tanking — and fast, according to the University of Michigan’s new consumer survey. “Look at what people are saying about the jobs market!” wrote one analyst. “Expected change in unemployment worst since the 2008 recession. No one is asking for a raise in this environment.”
The piece “Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’” from WIRED shows how AI is being implemented as part of the DOGE effort. But to follow up on our letter from last week, the cuts don’t appear to have made any discernible budgetary difference, so far: the Financial Times reports that US government spending in February was up 7 percent from the year before to $603 billion, a new record. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of fired federal workers must be reinstated immediately, a judge ruled Thursday.
How PRIVATE EQUITY-LED CONSOLIDATION in the poultry business left two big companies in control of the breeding market and helped fuel the recent rise in egg prices, from antitrust lawyer Basel Musharbash.
The Mayor of Miami Beach proposed cutting city funding from — and trying to terminate the lease of — an independent movie theater that screened, “No Other Land,” a documentary about PALESTINE AND ISRAEL. The film, which was directed by a mixed group of Israelis and Palestinians, recently won the Oscar for best documentary. “ Banning a film only makes people more determined to see it,” one of the directors said in response.
When many DEMOCRATIC LEADERS were issuing mealy-mouthed remarks about the detention of Mahmoud Khalil earlier this week, Sen. Chris Murphy’s clear statement, released in a video for social media, seemed to land.
Have a great weekend everybody and see you next week.