In today’s Vatnik Soup and May Day special, we introduce Hasan Piker, a Turkish-American streamer and millionaire. He’s best known for his champagne socialism, his rabid criticism of the US and Israel, his support for the Soviet Union and for Chinese and Russian invasions, and for mistreating his dog.

Born in 1991, Piker grew up in a privileged and well-connected environment. His father held senior roles at big corporations and his uncle, Cenk Uygur, is the founder of The Young Turks media network. He graduated cum laude from Rutgers, a top-tier public university in New Jersey.

His main activity and primary source of income consists of hours-long livestreams on Twitch where he comments on news and yells at videos.

He also keeps his dog in place the whole time with a shock collar, and that’s not even his first instance of animal abuse.

Despite presenting himself as anti-capitalist, Hasan drives a $200,000 Porsche Taycan and bought a $2.7 million house in West Hollywood, which is where he does most of his “revolutionary” activities. He also wears high-end, expensive clothes and fashion items.

Hasan has “no issue with an end goal of communism”, but of course his kind of Marxism-Leninism somehow always includes Cartier rings and Gucci stores for privileged kids like him. “To each according to his needs”, as Karl Marx said, but boy oh boy does this one need a lot.

15 facts about China Hasan won’t tell you

This ridiculous “champagne socialism” or “cava communism” (or even “limousine leninism”?) culminated in a “humanitarian” propaganda trip to Cuba, parading around in clothes worth a decade of local salary and staying in five-star hotels with fellow “left-wing” supporters of Russian imperialism such as Codepink.

Now to be fair, Hasan did actually collect money for some humanitarian causes through his platform, in particular for Gaza soon after October 7, and even briefly for Ukraine after the February 2022 full-scale invasion.

But most of his appeals to his massive audience are the complete opposite: angry, uninformed and simplistic rants, support for totalitarian dictatorships and calls for direct violence, often with striking hypocrisy given his wealthy family background:

“Kill those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood.”

Hasan’s mother as well as Hasan’s grandfather Doğan Uygur (from whom he got his middle name) are or were both real estate owners and managers:

Hasan has attacked US foreign policy and the US in general, justifying the September 11 terrorist attacks with “America deserved it.” He’s also crossed the line from legitimate criticism of Israel into support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and antisemitism:

He’s called Jews “inbred” and downplayed the October 7 atrocities, called Hamas “a thousand times better than Israel” and justified the Nova music festival massacre with “context”.

As is tankie tradition, he’s also endorsed the totalitarian North Korean regime helping Russia with their war on Ukraine, the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and a potential invasion of Taiwan. Ironically, Twitch is blocked in China, so Hasan had to use a VPN to stream from his maoist utopia.

For Hasan, the well-being of the actual people living under the regimes he praises is of no concern. He’s not even interested in their opinion. Case in point, he violently insulted a Vietnamese refugee the moment she mentioned the damage communism has done to her country.

He was much nicer to even a Houthi pirate, whose terrorist activities he conveniently ignored. Then again, he’s also interviewed infamous vatnik liar Jeffrey Sachs.

Just like Putin, Hasan is nostalgic for the Soviet Union, word for word:

• Putin: “The collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the 20th century”.
• Piker: “The fall of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century”.

Of course, Putin’s state media RT was eager to jump on that:

Like many of his fellow vatniks, Hasan insisted throughout February 2022 that Russia would not launch its full-scale invasion, laughing about it up to literally one week before February 24: “It was gonna be like next week, dude”.

Of course, once it did happen, instead of revising his worldview and his complacent assessment of the Russian threat, he simply switched to blaming the West, using the pro-Kremlin narratives oh-so-conveniently made available by the invader:

He’s called NATO the aggressor — while Russia is the one bombing Ukraine — completely denying Ukraine’s sovereignty and thereby endorsing Russian imperialism.

Yes, that’s the usual vatnik narratives spread by the Kremlin, whose main purpose is to help Putin invade, occupy and murder more countries and more people. It makes no difference whatsoever if the vatniks claim to be against Putin or “anti-war” or “left-wing”, nor if they consciously share the genocidal goals that those narratives were crafted for, or merely use them for their own post-truth campism.

And Hasan even took it a step further by declaring that “Ukrainian sovereignty is insignificant” and fully endorsing Russia’s invasions and their consequences:

He’s proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk Russian and called the invasion and annexation of Crimea a “completely justifiable fucking act”.

He doubled down on that with “Crimea? Cry me a river. A Russian river”.

Despite the fact that Putin himself clearly recognized Crimea as Ukrainian, multiple times, only a few years ago:

It got even worse with an insane rant on “talk to me when Putin is throwing Ukrainians into concentration camps” (which he is, whether it’s “filtration camps” or civilians held as POWs, starved, abused and tortured). At which point Hasan gets very angry and downplays even Hitler’s nazi invasions as no big deal.

Speaking of whom, Hasan’s been dubbed the “Nick Fuentes of the left”. Indeed, despite their differences, they’re both wealthy, aggressive streamers encouraging hatred, violence and wars, and making a living out of that.

Nick Fuentes

Both of them should get much more condemnation from their respective sides of the political spectrum, which both get upset at the comparison instead.

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Russia spends $5 billion a year on propaganda to manufacture support for its invasions through its false narratives, amplified by bot and troll farms and then spread by vatniks like Hasan Piker.

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