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.
I hate seeing Hasan become a prominent face of democratic socialism.
He wields nuance like a bludgeon, not a tool for understanding. He doesn’t inspire curiosity or invite people to question their assumptions. He tells his audience what to think and delivers it with absolute conviction.
For all their ideological differences, he reminds me of Shapiro and Crowder. The same performative certainty, selective reasoning, and confidence masquerading as intellectual authority.
And that’s precisely what makes him such a convenient bogeyman for conservative propaganda. He sounds remarkably similar to the very right-wing influencers whose audiences are being told to despise him.
I don’t doubt that much of the outrage surrounding him is manufactured. But that doesn’t make every criticism of him illegitimate, nor does it excuse his own intellectual shortcomings.
Attention isn’t credibility, and political fandom isn’t intellectual discourse.
I despise that style of political commentary, regardless of which side it comes from.
Yeah. It’s definitely legitimate to have criticisms of him and I wouldn’t entirely disagree with your assessment, it’s just worth keeping in mind that the kind of criticisms we might have aren’t even in the same intellectual ballpark as those of the right wing attacks on him.
As far as him being the face of the movement, I think it’s just a sad reality of left organizing, or the lack thereof, in America as well as the issue of organizing primarily around electoral politics. Socialist movements are mass politics. It’s not about specific people, it’s about everyone working together towards a common cause. Elections, and the media that discusses them, end up being more cults of personality. It’s great that we’re getting more leftists/progressives elected, but the way that gets portrayed focuses almost exclusively on the politician themselves as a charismatic figure with the right moral character rather than all of the work done by people to get them there. A similar thing happens with media. I think it’s just easier to follow and make a narrative around some individual than around a large ill defined group.
How do we fix that? Idk. It’s not like we don’t have any media which puts the focus on the broader movement activities, it’s just that they don’t tend to break containment to the broader public who aren’t super nerdy lefties or people directly involved with whatever is being discussed.
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
Any kind of streamer I give some level of benefit of the doubt because you get anyone talking for 6-12 hours straight without any opportunity to edit out something in post, you’re gonna get something questionable every once in a while, even if its purely just a joke that doesn’t land or a mispeak, or of course sometimes its the mask slipping for a moment and the real colors showing. It takes a bit of digging sometimes to figure out which it is regarding a given flub, but Hasan is generally a pretty decent guy from what I’ve seen.
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.
I hate seeing Hasan become a prominent face of democratic socialism.
He wields nuance like a bludgeon, not a tool for understanding. He doesn’t inspire curiosity or invite people to question their assumptions. He tells his audience what to think and delivers it with absolute conviction.
For all their ideological differences, he reminds me of Shapiro and Crowder. The same performative certainty, selective reasoning, and confidence masquerading as intellectual authority.
And that’s precisely what makes him such a convenient bogeyman for conservative propaganda. He sounds remarkably similar to the very right-wing influencers whose audiences are being told to despise him.
I don’t doubt that much of the outrage surrounding him is manufactured. But that doesn’t make every criticism of him illegitimate, nor does it excuse his own intellectual shortcomings.
Attention isn’t credibility, and political fandom isn’t intellectual discourse.
I despise that style of political commentary, regardless of which side it comes from.
Yeah. It’s definitely legitimate to have criticisms of him and I wouldn’t entirely disagree with your assessment, it’s just worth keeping in mind that the kind of criticisms we might have aren’t even in the same intellectual ballpark as those of the right wing attacks on him.
As far as him being the face of the movement, I think it’s just a sad reality of left organizing, or the lack thereof, in America as well as the issue of organizing primarily around electoral politics. Socialist movements are mass politics. It’s not about specific people, it’s about everyone working together towards a common cause. Elections, and the media that discusses them, end up being more cults of personality. It’s great that we’re getting more leftists/progressives elected, but the way that gets portrayed focuses almost exclusively on the politician themselves as a charismatic figure with the right moral character rather than all of the work done by people to get them there. A similar thing happens with media. I think it’s just easier to follow and make a narrative around some individual than around a large ill defined group.
How do we fix that? Idk. It’s not like we don’t have any media which puts the focus on the broader movement activities, it’s just that they don’t tend to break containment to the broader public who aren’t super nerdy lefties or people directly involved with whatever is being discussed.
Any kind of streamer I give some level of benefit of the doubt because you get anyone talking for 6-12 hours straight without any opportunity to edit out something in post, you’re gonna get something questionable every once in a while, even if its purely just a joke that doesn’t land or a mispeak, or of course sometimes its the mask slipping for a moment and the real colors showing. It takes a bit of digging sometimes to figure out which it is regarding a given flub, but Hasan is generally a pretty decent guy from what I’ve seen.