TheQuartering [8/18/2021]
These streamers sure do like getting rich, though.
Leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker guested on the popular leftist podcast Chapo Trap House, and told the Chapo hosts that he’s breaking through to the insular, potentially reactionary teens on Twitch.
Hasan Piker, who works for the left-wing news YouTube news show The Young Turks, is a pretty popular Twitch streamer with over 90,000 followers. He’s also an outspoken socialist, and his audience crosses over with the incredibly popular Chapo Trap House podcast. Last night’s episode had Piker explaining the streaming platform to co-hosts Will Menaker, Amber Frost, and Matt Christman.
Chapo co-host Felix Biederman, who wasn’t present for this episode, is an avid gamer and streams on Twitch himself. But Piker said that Biederman doesn’t really participate in the culture of Twitch, jokingly calling Biederman and his friends the “Boomers of Twitch.” For Piker, participating in that culture and talking to young people is part of the reason why he came to the platform. He had been on Facebook duty at The Young Turks, and found that experience to be miserable.
“Everyone that watches Facebook news now is like 68 years old. So it’s awful. I mean, they vote, but whatever, they don’t care for my leftist takes regardless,” Piker told the hosts of Chapo. “So I got on Twitch because I knew that this is a young audience, mostly male, probably prone to reactionary politics, but their political idols are a bunch of idiots. I mean, they don’t know anything. All the takes that they’ve heard about like leftist politics have been just strawmen from the likes of Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro.”