How Hasan Piker Shapes On-Campus Dialogue
Recently, hundreds of students flocked to watch Hasan Piker address packed venues at UT Austin and Cornell University. These nights were filled with rhetoric brushing off hateful claims and excusing terrorism. However, other than one student yelling, none of this was met with significant pushback from those in the rooms. Instead, one night capped off with hundreds of students yelling “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” Despite documented history of making outrageous claims such as “It doesn’t matter if rapes happened on October 7th” and “America deserved 9/11” Hasan Piker remains a popular influencer among the left. By simplifying a complex geopolitical conflict into a trendy oppressor versus oppressed political movement, Piker has made extreme rhetoric seem morally justified, allowing it to be adopted into on campus rhetoric.
Tickets sold out within hours of going live and around twenty-five thousand online viewers tuned in to view each event. The demand suggests that Piker is no longer a fringe speaker. Considering his events were hosted by University Democrats at UT Austin and the YDSA, SJP, and JVP at Cornell, his views have clearly become fully entrenched in campus discourse.
A quick review of statements he made during these events shows how alarming his popularity truly is. Piker has called for the “end of Zionism,” suggested that Hamas should receive the Iron Dome Missile defense system, has wrongfully asserted that the 2024 campus encampments were peaceful, and has repeatedly defended his controversial declaration that “America deserved 9/11.”
Most telling, however, was his defense of the Democratic Socialists of America while speaking at Cornell University. Following co-chair Megan Romer’s disastrous interview where she confessed remorse over missing her chance to attend a pro-Hamas rally a day after the anti-Zionist genocide attempt of 2023, Piker noted that DSA members need “media training.” Piker is essentially stating that he does not have a problem with Romer being in direct support of rape, murdering civilians, or acts of genocide against the people of Israel. Rather, his chief concern is that this shouldn’t have been said publicly in the first place.
To anyone denying that this reflects the values of the DSA or Piker, an effortless Google search of the DSA’s stated foreign policy goals paints an adequate picture. On their website, the DSA enshrines the “right to return” and “right to resist” of the Palestinian people. As demonstrated by the events of October 7th, decades of violence, and global cries for Intifada by Pro-Palestinian activists, this language is code for supporting any violence against Jewish people and the state of Israel.
So, how does this inflammatory rhetoric gain traction? Social media platforms contain thousands of clips from Hasan Piker’s lengthy streams. These clips are often short 30- to 60- second edited videos that capture a specific moment of an online personality’s stream. Clips of Piker and many other streamers in general get circulated and become widely viewed across social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. While these successfully garner attention to a cause raised by an influencer, they do not allow for much context to be given. Research suggests that this form of repeated exposure to influencers is associated with young people perceiving politics as more simplified. In fact, Piker himself has stated that he encourages this form of content creation. When a student hears Piker accuse Israel of being an apartheid state and committing genocide, he’s relying on them not knowing of conflicts started by Hamas, such as the violence of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, or the fact that Arab-Israelis are equal members of society that work, vote, and serve in the government alongside all other people of differing faiths.
Social media making a narrative easier to push is not a new revelation. However, what is surprising is Piker’s audience and what he actually stands for. Hasan Piker frequently holds that Western institutions do immense harm and that fighting them is a noble cause. Existing student sentiment shows that trust in the federal government is at the lowest point in American history and that it is a defining characteristic among young adults. Piker’s rhetoric can become appealing when students feel that they too are opposed to oppression and exploitation. This helps to create a sense of communal righteousness based on fighting for those who have suffered at the hands of Western governments, and that supporting anything else is morally wrong.
By stating that Israel is a “settler-colonial operation” and that “Palestine has been a formative part of saving the Western world,” Hasan Piker has repeatedly simplified the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to this oppressor vs oppressed narrative. Combined with the widespread distribution of short form content online and this simplification, it becomes easy for a student to feel that supporting Palestine is morally correct and popular, no matter what.
The danger in this mechanism is that by connecting existing dissatisfaction with the government as a whole, Hasan Piker has helped disguise the use of extreme rhetoric as simply advocating for those in need. To combat this, students must understand that it is entirely possible to advocate for the rights and safety of others without supporting a radical influencer that happens to share their views. Students on the Pro-Palestinian side of the debate must take active steps in evaluating an influencer’s beliefs and character before they decide that this is someone they would like to align with and host on campus.
