askchapo

1. He's always on.

2. He's conventionally handsome.

3. He has above average speaking skills.

In that order.

He has a bachelor's degree in political science from Rutgers University, including studied Marxism at University. He interned at his uncle's new company 'The Young Turks. Then he started streaming on facebook to try to gain an independent following. It was Felix Biederman of Chapo Trap House who convinced him to start streaming on twitch. Chapo promoted Hasan before he was famous on twitch and Felix would stream fortnite with Hasan. His following initially exploded during the 2020 BLM protests.

Hasan has often credited his success to being inspired by Michael Brooks, who unexpectedly died in 2020. He often quotes Michael Brooks saying 'be kind to people, be ruthless to systems'. I think this principle is what makes him popular. He explains politics to people in simple terms and he doesn't act like he's better than you. He doesn't tell people that he's the furthest left person to ever live. He doesn't pretend like he's going to lead the revolution. He goes outside; he talks to people on their level; he explains socialism in ways that are easy to understand.

There seems to be a misconception that Marxism needs to be draped in esotericism. Some people feel as though they accomplished something great just by having discovered Marxism and express great importance of their own thoughts. The point of Marxism is to apply the Marxism to the real world. If you want to be popular, you have to go outside, talk to people on their own level, and explain your goals in ways that are easy to understand. If you want to be unpopular, don't go outside, express a sense of superiority to the people you interact with, and speak with shibboleths.

Hasan is a gateway for liberals into a broader left discourse. That is his role. I used to watch Hasan a lot but have since graduated to just reading all the time.

He's insanely (almost concerningly) active. Like streaming is his entire life. He's usually live 10 hours a day, nearly every single day

If he streamed only 10-30 hours/week like others, people might subscribe but forget about him. If you see the same dude on your feed every damn time you open Twitch, that consistency is appealing, almost like the closest equivalent to 24/7 live radio but for gen z leftists

Twitch success is primarily driven by consistency. You have to be a prolific daily streamer that is ALWAYS online. If you engage someone on one day, you need to be online and streaming at the same time that person is on the next day so they watch you and not someone else.

Secondly it's presentation. Saying the right things in the right way for the audience to engage.

Thirdly it's off-site engagement. Hasan is successfully reaching people with posts on all platforms, typically with short clips. These are probably created by an editor for him as part of a team.

Twitch streamer success is honestly brutal, most of the people succeeding on twitch stream every single day for 12 hours a day, they don't take holidays, they work 360 days straight in some cases. The ones that can do less than that have some niche or pull in an audience through some other method. Yeah it's sitting in a chair talking to a screen but the sheer consistency and neverending nature of it or getting subscriber losses is brutal.

Hmmmm, why is this handsome, charming guy popular? Plus He's lib/baby leftist friendly. He's the wide part of our funnel, such as it is.

Do a Google search for Hasan shirtless.

I think it's fine to like him. I think he's more palatable than someone like the Chapo hosts, even Matt Christman, for being more digestible and not-so-academic and also semi-serious the way people who are noticing or seeking alternative diagnoses for sociological problems of the US & West.

Podcasters and media personalities are not a political or social vanguard. Brace said it himself in an episode of a podcast Fourth Reich Archaeology, where he lists himself as someone who can follow orders or assess the reality but can not prescribe solutions or actions to address the grievances and sicknesses of the masses.

I think it's an odd question to ask about anyone.

"How can anyone on hexbear/grad like Hasan?" is a more reasonable question, and gets discussed on our site weekly. Might be best to reference this thread from 6 days ago where the discussion was pretty thorough:

https://hexbear.net/post/7863316

the man is nice to look at

Because people don't know Madeline Pendleton is streaming on twitch yet.

He's not a bad source for not-dogshit up-to-date (given a few hours' delay for edits) news with crumbs of analysis that I broadly agree with. I don't use Twitch or any streaming platform, I just put on clips on YT from time to time, often while working on something else. It's tough for me to find newsy content like this that doesn't make me cringe or piss me off one way or another. It's turning into my equivalent of the way my folks still put the 6pm news on the radio every evening.

His voice and cadence make for good background noise and he has relatively good takes 90% of the time, plus he streams RELENTLESSLY so it's easy to make a habit of listening in when you run out of other content

Also, look at him

I cannot watch him because he mostly eats on stream (which is fine to do, but slows down everything) and gets into fights with his chat and constantly has to repeat the same damn points. It just grates on me.

Here’s my hypothesis: he’s the Richard Spencer of the left.

The first thing he does is defy the stereotype just a little bit. Before the alt-right/anti-sjw glow up of the right, the stereotype of chuds would be frumpy suburbanites at best, but usually rednecks who don’t know a word they’re talking about (classism aside, it did make SOME chuddery ridiculous). But after that we got Richard Spencer in the suit & tie who treated being a chud as intellectual.

Now think of the current left-wing stereotype, literally either the local nerd or emo outcast from your high school. Either way, part of the “uncool” crowd. Hasan counters that by being pretty conventionally attractive and in his own words “just being a guy”. Plus he’s educated from Rutgers and speaks without Jargon so he comes off as aspirational. TL;DR: Breaks the leftist stereotype by being a bit of a jock.

The second thing he does is know when to be edgy and when not to be. He has been banned a bunch of times and has some infamy in both the traditional tv media and the social media which gives him some edgelord credentials.

Theres a lot of liberals out there. I dunno. I don't think I'm the target market.

bc hot

I don't watch any streamers, so I don't know how it's possible that 30k people would just sit there watching some dude play video games for 8 hours straight, but from what I can tell he's a productive part of the right-to-left pipeline.