British media: hold my ale.

When you don’t want your audience to think about any real issues, you pick one or two focus on them so hard that anyone watching that is the single biggest problem in the world ever.

I think everyone who knows some about him will have an opinion on him - I’d call him divisive. I’ll try to give a relatively neutral rundown - I’m not a historian or researcher on this subject so my knowledge is likely to have holes.

I don’t have time to treat this like a dissertation or adding citations, but I’ll try to present things as neutrally as I can and then you (or anyone else reading) can decide to further research any of the points as you see fit. I am not the final authority on this, just someone who’s dug a little more into this than the average person, and who has no strong feelings for or against the person in question.

He is a political twitch streamer. He ties himself to, and uses the language of, the far left and related candidates. He backs and campaigns for progressive candidates which often raises awareness and donation for them, but the effect seems to be limited - some candidates he backs does well and others do not. He also seems to make plenty of statements that directly contradicts the candidates he backs and campaign for, causing some of them to try to distance themselves from him.

He appears to be well-versed in U.S. electoral politics, media framing, and progressive political arguments, which tracks with his bachelor’s degree in political science and communication studies from Rutgers from 2013. Being a streamer he ends up talking about a lot of related subjects, in which he often has to give off-the-cuff opinions and takes, which can often fall well-short of informed or accurate.

He says his end goal is communism. He got his start as a content creator in his uncle’s online news channel (The Young Turks), before later splitting off from them and doing his own streaming business. He is from a very affluent family, personally earns a lot of money and he clearly lives an affluent lifestyle. He claims to thrift for designer clothes but when pressed appears to reference outlet stores and similar. Initially he claimed that he doesn’t want his regular thrift stores to get raided by fans, although his fans might be less affluent than him and therefore better served by access to these stores. He has done several very successful charity streams that amassed large amounts of money for good causes. He claims to donate great amounts of money to charities, although the amount of donated money that can be tied to him is very low for his level of wealth, somewhere between 77.000 - 80.000 USD total (0,5-1%) of his estimated wealth, which is 8-14 million USD. While he does not appear to put his money where his mouth is, he does spend some of his time on popular fundraising, which drives a lot of attention to both him and the causes he fund-raise for.

He is often abrasive in his communication, although he will excuse that with passion for the subjects he talk about. He has a large audience that aggressively attacks dissenters or people Hassan expresses dislike for or disagreement with. The harassment from his fan base appears to be significantly above and beyond the norm for the space, and while he comments to the contrary it would be hard to believe that he is unaware of the dynamic between him and his fan base. From what I can tell he has taken no steps towards solving this dynamic beyond disavowing some instances of the harassment, while condoning other instances. He does not appear to have a problem with lying about people or broadcasting random people (even known malicious actors, that he himself states to be malicious) on twitter or twitch if it fits his narrative.

He often breaks the rules of his streaming platform (twitch) but receives special treatment, although I am unsure if that is due to personal popularity or personal relationships with the owner of twitch.

He denies using a shock collar on his dog, but looking at the evidence gathered through old videos, still frames from new videos, and from people who personally interacted with the dog would suggest that to be a lie. I do not know if he still uses a shock collar on his dog since the latest controversy.

As said, feel free to research each of these points, but do be critical of the sources of information and try to just find the actual evidence of what was done or said, rather than peoples’ conclusions. He is divisive so when people give their take they usually either dismiss all the criticism and focus on the things he does well, or dismiss the things he does well and focus on the criticism.

Find all the evidence you can and make up your own mind.

He’s a political commentary streamer on Twitch. He’s generally on the left with some mixed positions on various things that you’d honestly just have to watch to get the sense of.

In the last few years he’s gotten more directly involved in political organizing, highlighting certain progressive candidates around the US and even getting a lot of his viewers to donate or volunteer for their campaigns. It’s hard to know the full impact of this, but it’s one contribution among many to the movement needed to get the left elected.

Because of this more recent round of successes from progressive candidates, including ones Hasan helped with, establishment interests in the Republican and Democratic parties have been targeting him as a proxy for the movement as a whole. In particular pro-Israel groups have been prominent in attacking him since he’s against genocide.

He says some dumb shit sometimes, wording things the wrong way, being hyperbolic, etc. That plus the many opportunities for out of context clipping make it easy for these bad faith actors to find things that make him look bad. While some of it is red scare stuff, there’s also a lot of Islamophobia mixed in. They then try to tie this to the progressive candidates to hurt their chances.

I probably wouldn’t agree with every position he has, but he’s overall not a bad guy. The hysteria around him is basically just manufactured outrage for political gain and it’s not even working that well for that.

he is the guy conservatives online will bring up whenever I try to tell them that tankies are a small minority and that most of the real left is actually just very reasonable democratic socialists

I am not a fan, really, but he does reach demographics that other leftist have trouble reaching, so I guess he belongs in the tent

He’s a hard-left twitch streamer who does reactions on YouTube videos and current events. I find it boring as rain but he’s one of the most popular streamers on twitch.

He’s a “left” Asmomgold/grifter.

He’s got a YT channel, maybe check it out & make up your own mind

Reminds me of Obama’s Reverend back in the day. They really went after him.

Removed by mod

beats

In what way 🤔

Will start sending my nudes to fox journalists, got it

By getting mentioned on Fox News? Or by monitoring Fox News?

I’ll do my best, but as I don’t have a dog is it acceptable for me to wear the shock collar myself?

Fox has talked about Hasan so much that my mom tried to watch some of his videos bc she’s anti-trump so she figured if fox hated him that much maybe she should see what he has to say

She said his content is difficult to watch bc he jumps from topic to topic too quickly but she agreed with some of what he said

You’re totally right about the Streisand effect being in full force here

He’s left wing, outspoken, much better at articulating complex issues than they are, and extremely popular with young people.

Any one of those things are enough for their vilification, but the combo of all of them has them ABSOLUTELY apoplectic 😄

Viking Hippie got you but I wanted to add that Hasan rightly calls out Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.

A hateful boner. That’s what they have for Hasan.

He has a large support base, particularly reaching young men that would likely have otherwise gone down the alt right/redpill pipeline. He also appeals to some of the older republican voters who watch his actual content and not just clips because the majority of the content is responding to arguments on the merit of the argument and evidence, even if his takes are sometimes questionable and there are some outrageous clippable moments. Republicans view this as someone coming in and eating their lunch.

Democrats view it as someone easily achieving the success in converting nonvoters and republicans that they wished to achieve without actually changing their policy and hate him the same, attacking anyone left of them harder than they attack republicans. In doing so they also provide more ammunition to the republicans and republican media to try and paint him negatively, sometimes leaning into outright slander and libel (e.g. purposefully taking a clip of him reading someones comment then arguing against it, but clipping just the reading part to make it seem like he thinks that)

Why were you at the cpac 🤨