The New Radical Chic
That Party at Hasan's
In 1970, Tom Wolfe wrote a now-famous story for New York Magazine called Radical Chic. The essay details a fundraising event held at composer Leonard Bernstein’s home to raise money for the Black Panthers, after 21 of their members had been arrested by the FBI for conspiring to bomb shopping malls and police stations in New York City. The list of Bernstein’s elite friends in attendance at the party included actress Jean Seberg, the anchorwoman Barbara Walters, and director Otto Preminger. Often cited as an example of New Journalism, the story of Radical Chic was instantly read, as millions of middle Americans were shocked to learn that the most affluent class of socialites and celebrities had openly embraced a Marxist-Leninist group.
Fifty-six years later Wolfe’s exploration of the highest reaches of society succumbing to extreme politics in the name of presenting virtue remains disturbingly relevant. The concept of ‘Radical Chic’, this movement of the upper tiers of wealth and culture in America embracing extreme left-wing activism out of a self-interested drive to maintain and justify their privilege behind a veneer of ‘compassionate’ ideology, is still very much with us today, and its practitioners still go to great lengths to defend and justify it. As recently as 2020, art critic Ben Davis was arguing that Wolfe’s mockery of the participants at Leonard Bernstein’s fundraiser was snobbish and elitist, for instance.
With time, as the political and media landscape has evolved, the exact meaning of ‘radical chic’ has evolved as well. Social and alternative media have not only made more information accessible, they have also amplified populist ideologies that traditional institutions would not have given a public platform in the past. Content creators who promote these ideas develop a closer parasocial relationship with an undiscerning audience, with an emboldened sense of heroism. The new wave of radical chic sees the creator simultaneously embody the gentle privilege of Bernstein and the Black Panther’s rebellious anti-establishment attitudes. He and she can be a prophet and a pusher at the same time. Their ideas are enabled when established journalists and pundits are eager to excuse and justify their excesses.
This brings us to Hasan Piker, today one of the most prominent political streamers in the world. A self-styled socialist, Piker got his start at The Young Turks (founded by his uncle Cenk Uygur) before transitioning to livestreaming on Twitch, where he reacts to trending videos and current events for eight hours a day.
With millions of subscribers on Twitch and YouTube, Piker is often likened to a left-wing equivalent of Joe Rogan, and in a time when the Democratic Party is struggling to attract an ‘energetic’ base following their spectacular loss in the 2024 Presidential election, someone like him with his built in base would be useful to their cause… or so they seem to believe. Politicians that appeared on Piker’s livestream include Democratic Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and Former Democratic Presidential Candidate Marianne Williamson, in an effort to reach out to younger voters for the 2020 election. Recently, he was photographed alongside New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who shares with Piker a similar overtly socialist worldview.
On the surface, Piker doesn’t easily fit into the mould of what people think a left-wing content creator would look like. He surrounds himself in luxury, perhaps best exemplified by the $2.7 million dollar home in West Hollywood, California that Piker purchased in 2021 for his residence and to use as a streaming studio. A fawning headline by The New York Times described Piker as a “Progressive Mind in a MAGA Body”, implying that his laidback charisma and muscular build, infused with his support for socialist policies, could bring young men back into left-wing politics, pulling them back from an observed generational shift towards the political right. While the 34-year-old Piker takes politics seriously, he also shares the same hobbies as other young men, like fitness, gaming, sports, and anime, a superficial ‘relatability’ that would seem crucial in getting that cohort interested in addressing class inequalities, poverty, and tackling America’s military complex.
Despite his cult following Piker has a lack of mainstream support, but to his dedicated and very active fanbase Piker is prone to frequently spreading disinformation while promoting and justifying left-wing political violence. He has praised Luigi Mangione, currently on trial for assassinating United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and has excused Elias Rodriguez, a Free Palestine activist alleged to have killed two staffers at the American-Israeli embassy, by implying the murders were a “false-flag operation.”
He creates double standards, where the actions of Western democracies are to be condemned, while the actions taken by authoritarian dictatorships are rationalized. Among them, he accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians, while also excusing the Chinese Communist Party’s invasion of Tibet. Piker also tweeted that North Korea is a consequence of US imperialism and has also said that China’s annexation of Tibet was just, comparing the region to the Confederate South.
The press coverage of Piker has persistently overlooked the fatalist rhetoric. Throughout the interviews and profiles conducted by The New York Times, NBC, Vox, and CNN, few of them mention any controversies that had marred his reputation. Instead, they highlight him as a new savior whom progressives need to oppose the Trump administration.
This sanitization of Piker by the mainstream media is a striking combination of omission and exaggeration. The New York Times profile initially contained a photograph of Piker, sitting in front of his computer, where a comment was visibly saying “I’d phuck that IDF bitch to death and make her mother shove a missile up to her ass”, denying the rape happening on October 7 (that has since been cropped out to a picture of his protein meals). Former Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz has described Piker as a “genuinely good person.”, while a profile of him published in GQ in August of 2025 takes the sanctity a bit further with its overtly fawning tone: “Piker clearly has genuine convictions,” says the GQ writer Kieran Press-Reynolds, before the piece encouraged the Democrats to “subsidize a Piker-led creator bootcamp to help beat back Trump 2.0.”
Ultimately, Piker leverages the coverage for his own interests, calling the publicity that he received, which has sanitized his image, “terrorist insurance”. Therefore, anyone else who would be unfamiliar with his name doesn’t feel threatened by any controversy or far-fetched claim that arises from one of his streams.
But the closeness that Piker had with these journalists plays into a maddeningly popular narrative, where right-wing creators are held accountable for radicalizing their followers, whereas those on the left aren’t. In 2018, a non-profit organization named Data and Society released a report that found that watching commentators such as Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, and Carl Benjamin would lead to similar channels through YouTube’s algorithm, before concluding that because of this algorithmic drift, their videos overtly promoted white supremacy. Guilt by algorithmic association.
The Data and Society report was covered widely by mainstream and legacy media. The New York Times ran a profile in 2019 on a young man named Caleb Cain, who felt he was a victim of watching a series of hard-right videos that led him down a rabbit hole into white supremacy, before being rescued by left-wing creators like Hbomberguy, Destiny, and Contrapoints. While right-wing creators receive scorn for their commentary and are blamed for inspiring people to pursue violence, left-wing personalities earn fawning profiles from the corporate media for “deradicalizing” their audience.
The debate on how algorithms shape the ideology of crowds and whether creators should be held responsible for this effect is not yet settled. However, it would be fair to demonstrate that Hasan Piker, through using his hobbies and beliefs, serves as a gateway to these fringe views, carefully cultivating his relationship with his viewers, who are overall skeptical of established political institutions.
Ironically, audience members can demonstrate self-radicalization, even in front of their heroes. There’s a famous clip of a manosphere influencer who became shocked when he met pre-teen boys saying “all gays should die” in front of him. Similarly, when Piker took a trip to Australia, a fan ran into him, urging him not to drink Coke Zero again, because some of its operations are in Israel, and he was caught drinking it during a livestream with another creator. Piker seemed surprised by this information, but what’s more illuminating is that the fan suggested to him that he had to pretend to drink the soft drink while participating in the boycotts.
Journalists often compare Piker with manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate as his cultural opposite, but their commonality is a power to emit a nihilistic and tribalist attitude while empowering their followers to be more indulgent in their raw beliefs. It is a tactic that earns them more engagement while avoiding any accountability. As Susie Liefield describes in Quillette, “any movement that claims to represent an oppressed people must act ethically even if it is not in power and perceives itself as weak.” Piker is an incredibly powerful commentator whose sway few left-wing elites could imagine, but he is never ethical in anything he says.
The more that Piker attracts controversy, the more his supporters from larger media platforms double down on their endorsement by either orbiting around him or continuing to have him appear on their content. When he was accused of using a shock collar to discipline his dog Kaya during a livestream, Taylor Lorenz once again came to his defense, saying that she personally met her and claiming that he takes good care of Kaya and that the clip was taken out of context. The New York Times has continued to host and defend Piker on their opinion section and on their podcasts. When he appeared on the Opinions podcast with The New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, they endorsed many forms of looting, and Piker accused Brian Thompson of committing “social murder”.
In the aftermath of the publication of Radical Chic, Bernstein and his family claimed that his reputation was damaged by Wolfe misinterpreting the fundraiser. Because of his deep social justice activism, he was investigated by the FBI for any alleged ties with communist organizations. But the fundraiser revealed that the conductor, whose musical legacy was ultimately untarnished, would be happy to link himself with a criminal organization and become their most useful idiot. Today, prominent media figures like Lorenz and Tolentino seem to be eager to socialize with Piker consequence-free, for the perverse incentive of gaining more ideologically captured attention.
While the Black Panthers began to fade into obscurity and lose support from mainstream and elite institutions, Piker will continue to be the bug that America’s fractured media landscape will give host to. His role, as Ben Davis wrote in his defense of ‘radical chic’, is to bring “spectacle, performance, theatricality, etc. are very useful tools that activists employ to gain attention for a cause and win sympathies from wider layers of people. It is fundamentally a good thing for causes that you like to be cool and to command media attention.” It is unfortunate that this is what progressives want to be.
A guest post by
A freelance writer based in Sydney, Australia and whose writings have appeared in various publications including The Spectator, Quillette and The New York Sun. He runs a Substack called Lack of Taste
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