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YOU MAD, BRO?

The New Yorker

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March 24, 2025

Young men have gone MAGA. Can the left win them back?

- ANDREW MARANTZ

YOU MAD, BRO?

"The Democrats are smug and condescending, and everything they say sounds fake as shit," Hasan Piker, a leftist streamer, said.

By the time I landed at LAX and switched my phone out of airplane mode, Hasan Piker had been streaming for three hours. I put in an earbud and watched as I filed off the plane. Visible behind him were walls of framed fan art, a cardboard cutout of Bernie Sanders sitting in the cold, and Piker's huge puppy, Kaya, taking a nap. Piker had already shown off his "cozyass 'fit" (sweatpants with kitschy bald eagles, a custom pair of platform Crocs), and recounted his experience the previous night at the Streamer Awards, a red-carpet event honoring A-listers on Twitch the popular live-streaming site where he is one of the biggest stars, and the only prominent leftist. He'd begun the day's broadcast by rattling off a standard opening monologue: "Folks, we're live and alive, and I hope all the boys, girls, and enbies"-nonbinary people "are having a fantastic one." To anyone listening for shibboleths, this would have pigeonholed him as a progressive. Also within view, though, were three towers of Zyn cannisters, and a "Make America Great Again" hat, which he sometimes wears ironically. He has the patter of a Rutgers frat bro and the laid-back charisma of a Miami club promoter, both of which he was, briefly, in his early twenties. Now he's thirtythree so old, in streamer years, that his fans call him "unc."

The New Yorker

This story is from the March 24, 2025 edition of The New Yorker.

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