If everything had gone according to Hasan Piker’s plan two weeks ago, he’d have no reason to talk to me.
He and his uncle – both controversial political commentators from the US – were barred from the UK earlier this month, so he’s sitting at a desk speaking via a video call, looking similar to how he spends most of his time, streaming eight hours a day, seven days a week, to 3.1 million followers on Twitch.
Somewhat of a leftist shock jock, Piker’s modus operandi is to use entertainment, provocation and streaming to turn people towards his causes. These are primarily criticising Israel and US mainstream politics, and pulling the Democratic party towards him and away from the center.
Piker and his uncle Cenk Uygur had been due to give talks at business-culture event SXSW in London and the Oxford Union this month, but found their Electronic Travel Authorisations cancelled before they were due to depart.
No formal statement has been given on the decision, but the Home Office confirmed to The Guardian the two men’s entry into the country “may not be conducive to the public good”.
Before the ban, Piker found himself accused of antisemitism by Labour MP David Taylor and a Jewish campaign group for his comments about Israel, a charge he denies.
Piker himself has heard nothing more about the official reasons behind the decision. The lack of clarity has left a gap he is more than happy to fill.
“It is advocacy organisations that clearly care about Israel’s reputation that were creating a fuss around my visit. And the Labour government has decided to take stringent action and engage in repression,” he tells me.
Piker was born in New Jersey and raised for most of his childhood in Istanbul. He returned to the US to study political science and communications. Starting out interning on his uncle’s online news network, The Young Turks, he has now become a law unto himself.
His channel makes him arguably one of the largest left-wing voices in America, certainly with younger generations.
He exists in the streamer sphere, a place fragmented across different digital platforms and largely populated by right-wing personalities on a broad spectrum, from former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder to proud white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who streams on Kick after being banned from Twitch.
Piker offers his followers live political commentary. He’s had Democratic big-hitters like Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez or Zohran Mamdani on stream and interviewed a Yemeni “pirate” affiliated with the Houthis. He and his base have raised millions of dollars for Palestinian charities.
His success in building a base has caught the eye of many across the US political spectrum, with the co-founder of self-described centrist American think tank Third Way, Jonathan Cowan, writing in the Wall Street Journal that Democrats are “too cosy” with the streamer.
Though the viewership is largely American, stats from the first quarter of 2025 show the UK as his third most popular audience base, and he thinks he can see a shift has happened across the pond.
He was allowed into the UK with no issue two years ago, when he was as vocal as he is now on Israel’s actions in Gaza, but now “there is an interest in disciplining people, disciplining prominent critics of Israel”.
Recently, Amnesty International platformed one protester, Haz, who was arrested under the Terrorism Act in 2025 for holding a placard saying “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. This comes as the Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the proscription of PA as a terror group.
When cases like this are conflated with the recent attack on Shomrim ambulances, deemed a terrorist incident by the Metropolitan Police, Piker says that one dilutes the severity of the other. He can’t speak directly to the Golders Green incident, but doesn’t deny that there has been an increase in antisemitism.
The lumping of these antisemitic attacks in with anti-Zionist action, though, is something Piker is concerned about, and which he, ironically, spoke about at his Oxford Union address in 2024.
A recent YouGov poll found that six in 10 UK citizens opposed Israel’s actions in Gaza, and the same number opposed the offensive in Lebanon. The percentage of those who support both hovers just above single figures.
At a time when public support for Israel in the UK is weakening amid post-ceasefire killings in Gaza and actions in the West Bank that Amnesty International have deemed deliberate ethnic cleansing, many, including Piker, perceive an increased crackdown on protest and resistance to Israel.
This approach by a supposedly left-wing Labour government speaks to a political shift, too, Piker says.
“The left [in the UK] is in a state of disarray,” he tells me. “I have a lot of respect for Zack Polanski, for taking advantage of the vacuum and at least trying to organise around it.”
He is, somewhat unsurprisingly, a big Jeremy Corbyn fan – though he is not too up to date with the situation concerning Your Party – which recently had members split off to form their own party, citing frustration with Corbyn’s leadership.
“We need more people who are robust and unapologetic in their advocacy,” Piker says.
He was due to meet both, and recently caught up with the latter in a video interview. Corbyn was also present with Piker on a recent humanitarian trip to Cuba, one that led to a subpoena from the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. Piker has earned a mention on the White House website under the label of “Left wing lunacy”.
The pushback against Piker doesn’t just come from Trump’s White House and the Democratic Party. He is outspoken – often to a fault.
His detractors have roughly eight years’ worth of eight-hour streams to pick out his most heinous quotes, but he does not shy away from provocation in any case.
He famously said that America “deserved 9/11”, later admitting the comment was inappropriate. He called allegations of sexual violence against Israeli people on 7 October “rape fantasies”, later saying that it did not matter if sexual assault did happen, and that Hamas “were not perfect”.
One position that he’s yet to backpedal on is his opinion of Israel. He has claimed the terrorist group Hamas is “a thousands times better than Israel” and compared Zionism to the Nazis.
Labour MP Mr Taylor highlighted Hasan’s views when he called for the UK ban.
“It’s shocking that SXSW would invite someone who has openly supported a proscribed terrorist organisation and spouted these kinds of vile antisemitic rants to speak at their festival,” he said before the visa refusal.
“With the unacceptable rise in antisemitism on our streets leaving British Jews in a constant state of anxiety, Hasan Piker is clearly not conducive to the public good.”
Piker is unbothered that such views may be seen as abhorrent, arguing “the entire point of Holocaust scholarship is so that we understand, identify, and use it as a mechanism of comparison”.
The 34 year-old sits in a strange emergent space between political analysis and entertainment that positions him closer to the brash punditry of Fox News than any Communist zine or left-wing agitator.
“When I describe my job to older people, I often jokingly point to Rush Limbaugh and conservative radio,” he says.
On Piker’s livestreams, he is in a constant feedback loop with his viewers. Chat comments come at a bewilderingly fast pace, and one comment can steer him wildly off-topic, but it means his viewers have the chance to interact with him.
The live format leads him to say things he could later regret, but it also leads to fairly admirable real-time reporting, for instance, his coverage of the January 6 riots – a stream that broke his previous viewership record with 231,000 concurrent viewers.
Highlights from his stream are chopped up and posted to YouTube with titles that run the gamut from “Discussing European Censorship w/ Yanis Varoufakis & Mehran Khalili” to “THE GIRLIES ARE FIGHTING”, referring to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Piker is emblematic of politics in the “always online” era: reactive, brazen and emotive. His popularity and infamy would both indicate that it’s working. His talk at SXSW was to be called “How the American Left Learned to Speak the Internet”.
Will he get to speak to the UK left in person anytime soon? He’s reapplied for his visa, so it once again falls to the British government to decide, whoever might be running the country when the time comes.
