If you are Hasan Piker’s publicist and this is the first you’re hearing that he took me, a reporter writing a story about him, to the Highlight Room, a rooftop nightclub in Los Angeles, I want to tell you that it was his idea. He was aware that you were going to “fucking shit [your] pants” if you found out, but we went anyway.
It was a Thursday night in September when we skipped the line and I heard a group of women shivering outside loud-whisper: Wait, he’s that guy. He’s Woke Bae! It was the second time Piker — the brash political commentator and host of “The Breakdown” on The Young Turks network — had been recognized that night. (It happens all the time, he says, except the time Trevor Noah didn’t know him at the West Hollywood Soho House, something that still irks him.) Maybe it was because, at 6’4” and with linebacker shoulders, he’s hard not to notice. Or maybe it was his T-shirt, which he’s worn in some of his viral videos, that says ANTIFASCIST in big Old English–style font.
In a May 2017 article that he still has pinned on his Twitter feed, BuzzFeed crowned Piker, a Bernie Sanders fan who eventually supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, the internet’s newest Woke Bae. His left-wing talking-head videos started going viral during the 2016 election among a fan base of primarily 18- to 24-year-old women, and “The Breakdown” is now the second most popular show on The Young Turks after the network's eponymous main show, with a quarter million to tens of millions views per video.
But despite Piker’s Buzzfeed-bestowed title, his publicist has reason to be concerned about what he might say during a night of clubbing. He’s been called out before — like, for example, in 2016 when he said, “I’m being a total misogynist, but I’m being honest,” in a video, or when he hit on conservative firebrand Tomi Lahren in his takedown videos of her. But Piker argues that wokeness shouldn’t require perfection, and that his imperfection makes him more relatable – and more popular – than he would be if he stuck to the script. “What the media does well is just whittle down your personality and reduce you to one thing, and no one is that,” Piker says. “That’s why fuckin’ everyone hates Taylor Swift now. Because she’s not that person – that was carefully crafted media messages that made her seem this way … You can be this person who has a lot of empathy for all these macro-perspective problems the world has to go through, but still be able to laugh at something. That’s one of the bigger problems with the progressive movement, and even saying that is problematic, inherently. Because a lot of people will be like, ‘How fuckin' dare you say that — you're a piece of shit.’”
There are three key things Piker has going for him that allow his career to remain relatively unscathed by his profoundly unwoke moments: he’s hot, he’s on a network that specializes in liberal political incorrectness, and he hit the timing jackpot. “If there’s anything we’ve found out in the aftermath of Donald Trump being president it's you can get away with a lot of horrific shit,” Piker says. “Not saying that I’ve said horrible shit like that, but I think, overall, people don’t genuinely care as much.”
Piker, 26, was born in Turkey, and growing up in the ‘90s, he witnessed now-president Recep Tayyip Erdogan transforming the Turkish government from a democracy into an authoritarian regime. “At the time, I was too young to speak up and I saw others who had the opportunity fail to do so,” he says. “It was not a mistake I wanted to repeat.”
Piker was chubby, a self-described “outcast” who doodled animé comics and questioned authority. Once, in a third-grade private-school religion class, he criticized the curriculum for covering only Islam. “I would ask about dogmas, like, why are we supposed to believe this, just because the book says so?” he says. The next year, Piker’s dad moved him to public school, and Piker’s questions and lack of physical fitness attracted bullies. “I got beaten the fuck out of,” he says.
Growing up “horny in a repressed culture,” Piker fantasized about moving to the United States. “There’s a saying in Turkey that, when you go to America, the girls ask to fuck,” he says. His parents let him go to the University of Miami, and within weeks of his arrival, he was approached to promote nightclubs around South Beach. On the job, he met the first woman he had sex with. “I pulled the worst fucking line I’ve ever pulled on a girl, which still probably works to this day whenever I say it. I said, 'Let’s get out of here,' ...because I can’t do the things I wanna do to you in here,” he says. The two went to a nearby apartment-complex courtyard, where they had sex on a gravel staircase, Piker’s back bleeding the whole time. “I remember thinking, I don’t know the next time I’ll have sex again, so I better make this last,” he says. “Which I did … It was fucking amazing.”
After two semesters in which he earned a 2.9 GPA, Piker’s parents made him transfer to Rutgers University. There, he rushed Theta Delta Chi after asking girls which fraternity they liked most. Now, Piker attributes his approach in “The Breakdown” to debates with his conservative frat brothers. “I am a little bit more tolerant to understanding the other side’s opinion because of that,” he says. In 2013, his senior year, he skipped a spring break trip for a weeklong internship with his uncle Cenk Uygur’s news network, The Young Turks (TYT).
Uygur had started the network with Ben Mankiewicz and Dave Koller as a Sirius radio show in 2002, and after several TV ventures ultimately ended, Uygur turned the company’s focus to internet videos the same year Piker interned, with liberal rants that would often veer into anti-establishment territory criticizing the Obama administration. Piker got a job in the sales department after graduating with degrees in political science and communication but begged the producers to put him on air when they needed a fill-in. “When he first went on air, it was super rough around the edges, but it was obvious he had talent,” Uygur says. “Whether he’s doing something you agree with or disagree with, he’s magnetic.”
Then the 2016 presidential campaigns launched. David Weigel, a political reporter for the Washington Post, was covering Bernie Sanders’s campaign when he noticed Sanders supporters swarming Young Turks personalities like celebrities. Sanders’s far-left, anti-establishment message excited the exact base TYT was trying to reach, and his followers rabidly shared the network’s videos. In May 2016, Weigel reported that TYT’s YouTube shares had more than doubled, its Facebook likes had tripled, and its subscriber base had grown by 75 percent since January 2015. “It’s one of the few mass liberal news outlets where the starting assumption is that you can’t trust the mainstream media,” Weigel says. “That’s a point of view that’s not really shared, even on something like The Daily Show. There’s a lot of mockery of dumb cable, but mostly it’s reserved for something like Fox News.”
The network now claims 80 million unique YouTube views a month, on par with the New York Times and Washington Post, but at the time they needed a young voice to appeal to Sanders’s millennial supporters directly on Facebook. Piker pitched “The Breakdown” — now a thrice-weekly, five-minute video of Piker on a white backdrop, yelling at the camera about racist conservatives and the Trump policy of the moment, whether it’s DACA or net neutrality. The first video, “5 Things You Need to Know About Bernie Sanders,” was published in February 2016 and has 126,000 views — respectable, not viral. But Uygur kept him on air. “When we launched it,” he says, “I said, 'Has, this is going to make you famous.'”
Bro, I went to Nightingale last night, and Tomi Lahren apparently goes there.” Piker was gossiping with his friend Gaston McGary before another night of clubbing. “One of the hostesses there was like, 'I used to work in politics in Chicago and I have to tell you I love your work, blah blah blah, and also, Tomi was here.'”
On his desk at The Young Turks office in Culver City, Piker has photos of conservative pundits Milo Yiannopolous, Bill O’Reilly, and Lahren, which he marked with red Xs when each lost his or her job: Yiannopolous from Breitbart, O’Reilly from Fox News, and Lahren from TheBlaze.
Lahren, who moved to LA when she started at Fox News in August, is Piker’s greatest adversary, and the news that she went to one of his nightclubs perturbs him. “It’s like, you can’t enjoy the benefits of this sexually liberated, open-minded, liberal environment while also attempting to change America as best you can into this puritanical, conservative society,” he says. “That’s genuinely offensive. It’s so weirdly hypocritical.”
Calling out Lahren’s hypocrisy, as he sees it, is what helped skyrocket Piker to the success he has now. By late 2016, Lahren’s videos for Glenn Beck's conservative network TheBlaze were igniting so much vitriol that she was landing slots on cable news and late-night talk shows, while Piker’s videos were struggling to crest a million views.
Riled up by her provocative stances, Piker posted his first Tomi takedown video, in which he ripped apart Lahren’s commentary on the Women’s March, in January 2017. It got more than 12 million views. His next two videos were also anti-Lahren rants — one about the Muslim ban (17 million views) and another more generally about Lahren’s conservative opinions (18 million views). But Piker’s videos about Lahren also started to get him in trouble. In each, he mentioned that Lahren is “kinda cute,” asked her to slide into his DMs, and asked why she hadn’t hit him up for a date. (Lahren declined to comment on Piker and has never publicly responded to his videos.)
“I’m getting really tired of this whole, ‘I hate her but I want to date her’ thing, even if it’s all a joke,” Piker fan Cassidy Millard, 21, commented on one video. “It’s not really helping women who want to be taken seriously and might also be attractive.” It’s now the top comment.
Piker explains the bit as an “alternate storyline” for people to follow along with. “It was in no way meant to devalue her in any capacity,” he says, “but to also have an extended, open-minded discussion if she was to actually agree to it, which I originally thought she would, but then I realized she has no interest in it.” Asked if he thinks he was objectifying Lahren, he deflects: “My goal is to make this commentary as palatable as possible, and, like, make the news and information accessible to younger generations. Having understood that, do you think that I — and you can be completely honest, because I’ve thought about this a lot — do you think I was objectifying her for asking her out in one of the videos?” (It was actually in three videos.)
Piker says he dropped the bit once he picked up on the backlash. “Look, we’re not perfect animals,” he says. “I’m only 26. I’ve only been doing this for so long, and we have to allow people to fail and learn from their mistakes and grow … In an internet era where everything we're doing is documented, just to turn around and be like, ‘Oh you did this, therefore all of your opinions are completely null and void because I personally feel like I didn't get the context and now I'm like very upset’ is counterproductive.”
In another conversation, he offers what he calls a “perfect example” of how liberal woke culture can go too far. “You can put this in your piece, too — this is something everyone’s gonna freak out over. After the Woke Bae article came out,” he says, referencing the Buzzfeed post, “there were two Teen Vogue columnists, and the first thing they did was fuckin’ Twitter-key-search my goddamn timeline and found tweets that would be deemed problematic.” (The woman who found the tweets, a writer who has not worked for Teen Vogue, did not return request for comment. A Teen Vogue PR rep confirmed the other woman was a contributing writer at the time but was not on staff, and the woman said, “I believe [my tweet] speaks for itself, as do his prior tweets.”) “I’ve been on Twitter since 2007 or some shit like that, and they found three tweets after, like, 5,000 tweets that had — not the N-word in a bad way, but describing a segment within the Roast Battle called the ‘All N-word Wave.’” The tweets, which he’s deleted, referenced an episode of a comedy show Piker saw.
This ordeal could’ve crucified Piker, but instead it quietly subsided and his fan base grew. Even some of the fans who criticized Piker for objectifying Lahren didn’t actually seem that bothered by it; Millard’s comment on his Lahren video concluded, “That being said, I’ll 100 percent take her place if she says no.”
Piker, who maintains his heavily Instagrammed abs with extreme dieting and a treasured Equinox membership, knows his looks have something to do with his audience’s willingness to forgive. “It's definitely something that I am aware of and use to my advantage,” he says. “I’m able to build an audience that completely understands where I’m coming from, and can follow me both for that body stuff and also be educated on political matters along the way.”
The Young Turks has dealt with a handful of sexism scandals recently. In December 2017, blog posts Uygur wrote in the early 2000s that argued women are “poorly designed creatures” who don’t want to have sex often enough resurfaced. (They’ve since been deleted, and Uygur publicly apologized.) In November 2017, a 2011 video surfaced showing Uygur and Ana Kasparian, a Young Turks host, dismissing Olivia Munn’s sexual harassment claims against director Brett Ratner. “I think Olivia Munn’s move was so classless,” Kasparian said. Uygur and Kasparian apologized last year. And then there’s Jordan Chariton, a former Young Turks reporter who was fired in November 2017 after being accused of sexual assault. Chariton maintains the claims are false and his attorneys have filed a $23.5 million lawsuit against HuffPost, which first published the allegations.
But Hasan’s — and The Young Turks’s — numbers continue to soar. The Young Turks, Weigel says, is the only liberal network whose pundits are loud and annoying enough to take YouTube back from the right. Despite the missteps, they’re filling a gap with an audience. In late January, Dan Rather even announced he’d be starting a new show with The Young Turks. While many media companies are dealing with sexual harassment scandals in the wake of #MeToo, Weigel says, The Young Turks’s scandals seem to have blown over because it’s not particularly surprising given their brazen personalities. “Sometimes brash people say stupid things about women,” Weigel says. “Or brash men, I should say.”
Piker insists that his videos – even if they are sometimes problematic – serve a larger purpose for the progressive moment: changing minds, and making moderates pay attention and engage with the political process. It’s hard to say definitively whether he’s been successful at this mission – there are no studies that reveal a certain number of people watched a “Breakdown” video and then voted for the liberal — but at least anecdotally there’s some evidence his methods have worked.
One 23-year-old fan named Matt, who lives in Texas, told me he’d always considered himself a Republican and had planned to vote for Trump in 2016 but came across some of Piker’s videos and was impressed at the way Piker combined information and entertainment. “It's not just sitting there listening to some smart guy talk — he makes it fun,” he said. Matt ended up voting for Clinton and now considers himself “progressive.”
Sophia, 32, a lifelong Democrat who lives in Arizona, says she has started expressing her views on social media more lately, including sharing Piker’s videos. “He's very vulgar when he speaks sometimes, and that just kind of gets me going, versus somebody who's kind of polite about it,” she says. “Not to mention he's not hard on the eyes.” She recently got fired up enough after watching a Piker rant that she showed her Republican boyfriend two “Breakdown” videos. “He’s like, I agree with his views, but I still think he’s a douchebag,” she says. “And I was like, Wow, we’re making a little progress.”
Before we head to the Highlight Room against his publicist's wishes, Piker pulls out his phone to show me more examples of his impact via the Snapchat DMs fans send of them wearing his merch — a black T-shirt he designed that says RACISM BIGORTY PATRIARCHY WHITE SUPREMACY INEQUALITY OPPRESSION INTOLERANCE INJUSTICE on it in white letters, each word crossed out in red. He's sold nearly 2,000 of them so far. “It’s so dope,” he says, opening Snapchat. “I don’t know if any of these are nudes so don’t judge me.”
The first one is a nude. He reads the message attached aloud: “I’m sure you have hot girls throwing themselves at you all the time, but I’m a huge fan of TYT and love all your work....” As promised, there are photos in his inbox of fans wearing the shirt, but it’s about 70 percent nudes. “Whoa, that's crazy," he says, methodically opening each message. "That was, like, actually her blowing someone. … I don't ever, like, talk to any of these people. … That's butt stuff. Cool.”
The next day, Hasan jokes that his career will be over when my article comes out. Maybe he’s said too much, shown me one too many Snapchat DMs. But a few months later, in February 2018, he doesn’t seem too worried about his public persona, tweeting:
“this valentines day i encourage every conservative pundit to eat ass and get their ass eaten, it might help them loosen up a bit.”
“its 2018, we've already moved on to spitting in mouths, but y'all can try that 2017 shit.”
“this is why i’ll never be hired by a [mainstream media] outlet.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that "The Breakdown" is now the most popular show on The Young Turks network. It is the second most popular show after the network's main show.
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