"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."
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