Diabolical Lies - April 19, 2026


Who's Afraid of Hasan Piker？


Episode Stats


Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

174.81

Word count

3,624

Sentence count

227

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.520 Today's episode of Diabolical Eyes is brought to you by Twitch, Gen Z, Cory Booker, APAC,
00:00:07.760 Ezra Klein, Charlie Kirk, Joe Rogan, The Chorus Creators Fund, and Katie's Burning Loins.
00:00:14.660 Today!
00:00:16.060 Gang's all here. Gang is all here.
00:00:19.340 Before we get into it, though, Katie, just some quick housekeeping. I want to thank everyone
00:00:23.580 for their support of me in my first week of yesteryear. I have not been in our chat or
00:00:29.580 really on Substack, but Katie has kept me apprised of some of the nice things people have said. And
00:00:34.200 I've gotten a bunch of DMs and met so many liars at our events. Katie and I did a live event in
00:00:39.880 Austin and it was so much fun. And it's just really cool to meet people in person because I
00:00:46.160 think we are very often screaming into the void and it can feel weird to engage with listeners
00:00:50.880 online. But meeting so many of you in person has just been rad. It's been so rad. So I just wanted
00:00:55.920 to thank everyone. And I would like to give a special shout out to the r slash tradwives 1.00
00:01:02.560 subreddit, the supportive space for tradwives, who did a review thread of the book and unanimously
00:01:09.500 loved it and said that their takeaway was that it was a cautionary tale about marrying a weak-willed
00:01:17.520 man. Maybe my favorite feedback you've gotten so far.
00:01:23.140 Yeah, seriously. I love it. I'm obsessed with it. Okay. Katie, today we're talking about Hassan Piker. Hassan is a popular Twitch streamer and socialist, political, and cultural commentator zaddy who has struck fear into the hearts of Democratic consultants all around the world in the last month.
00:01:39.200 He is, according to those consultants and Politico wonks, anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-woman. And if he isn't stopped, he is going to, let me see here, destroy the Democratic Party and or the entire world. Katie, what do you know about Hassan?
00:01:56.600 Hassan Dwan Piker, baby.
00:01:59.220 Where do I start?
00:02:01.380 All I know about Hassan Piker that is really relevant to this conversation
00:02:05.660 is that when Charlie Kirk got killed,
00:02:07.960 I watched Hassan stream for eight hours a day for like a week.
00:02:11.060 I think the biggest thing about Hassan Piker that makes these people uncomfortable
00:02:16.240 is that he is very anti-imperialist.
00:02:19.320 He's obviously very anti-Zionist.
00:02:21.060 my understanding of the current beef is that it sort of comes down to his anti-Zionism
00:02:28.900 and just conflating that with anti-Semitism. But I haven't been following it super closely,
00:02:35.760 honestly. Yeah. So there has been a massive meltdown about Hassan Piker. The thing that
00:02:40.360 you and I are kind of hinting at, but should just be stated explicitly, is that Hassan Piker is
00:02:44.500 extremely hot. And this is something that people really fixate on. Like, that is part of his allure.
00:02:50.520 He's gotten GQ profile spreads. He is very much like a thirst trap kind of guy. And in a world
00:02:56.940 where politics are often, let's say, dominated by like pasty white dudes who are 5'6", no shade, 0.52
00:03:03.840 but let's call a spade a spade, he's like a big buff hot dude who codes very bro. He looks like
00:03:10.140 a big buff frat dude, but he's talking about leftist issues and that has contributed to his
00:03:16.600 rise. Kind of like you and I, two hot girls talking about politics. Yeah, he's six foot
00:03:20.480 four, which is a full three inches shorter than Caroline's husband. It's true. It's true. Hassan
00:03:26.320 Piker walked so Riley could climb. Okay. So today we're going to talk about Hassan Piker mostly as
00:03:32.160 a means of making you blush for two hours straight, Katie. But in order to do so, we need to go back
00:03:37.200 in time to 2024 in those sad months where Democrats were trying to offer explanations
00:03:42.420 for why Trump won a second term.
00:03:45.380 Katie, do you remember the self-proclaimed awakening
00:03:48.120 that the Democratic Party went through
00:03:49.860 about identity politics after Trump won the second term? 1.00
00:03:53.980 Oh, that trans people had too many rights? 1.00
00:03:56.520 That one? 1.00
00:03:57.560 Yeah, exactly. 1.00
00:03:58.660 We'd spend too much time on the trans folk. 1.00
00:04:00.960 What if... 0.98
00:04:01.580 What if Liz Cheney was too far left for our base?
00:04:08.120 Yes, this was when, after Kamala Harris's political campaign, 0.54
00:04:11.860 where she was like, Gaza who? 0.53
00:04:13.580 I love guns. 0.94
00:04:14.580 And Liz Cheney endorsed me.
00:04:15.920 I have a Glock.
00:04:17.300 They were like, too far left.
00:04:19.120 Too far left.
00:04:20.580 We've covered on this podcast
00:04:21.940 that the whole idea that the Democratic Party
00:04:24.680 is responsible for the controversy over trans rights 1.00
00:04:28.320 is total bullshit. 1.00
00:04:29.700 Like the Republican Party astroturfed that. 1.00
00:04:31.420 They spent hundreds of millions of dollars
00:04:33.420 making people care about trans rights
00:04:35.460 and then claiming that Democrats
00:04:36.820 were talking about it nonstop
00:04:38.220 when in fact Democrats didn't talk about it all.
00:04:41.180 Kamala Harris,
00:04:41.560 did not talk about trans people during her campaign. But regardless, what happened after
00:04:47.240 Trump won his second term was there was this whole flurry of think pieces and conversations
00:04:52.240 where people were saying we needed to reorient, right? So I'm going to have you read a few of
00:04:56.140 these, including this Politico piece that talks about Greg Cesar, a Texas House rep who has
00:05:01.980 recently made chair of the Progressive Congressional Caucus. He made a big stink about this,
00:05:07.080 I think, early 2025, and I want you to read it.
00:05:10.100 It's a notable departure from the approach the progressive wing of the Democratic Party had in
00:05:14.800 recent years, when it wrapped itself in slogans like abolish ICE, incredibly popular position,
00:05:20.580 by the way, and defund the police, while demanding ideological purity on a range of issues during
00:05:26.560 the 2020 presidential primary. It also comes as Democrats confront a deep brand problem,
00:05:33.080 you don't say, with public and private polling and focus groups showing voters believe it is weak,
00:05:39.580 overly focused on diversity and the elites. Quote, our best path to being able to defend
00:05:46.040 vulnerable people and take on righteous but maybe not yet popular causes is to win the votes of the
00:05:52.400 overwhelming number of working people and to be known as the party of the everyday person first,
00:05:57.860 Cesar said in an interview in his congressional office. Quote, I believe that progressives need
00:06:03.040 to make sure that we are connecting our causes to the broadest base of people possible, end
00:06:08.740 quote. To win again, Democrats must, quote, make sure that the central brand speaks to everyone,
00:06:15.960 Cesar said. Yeah, yeah, I mean, like, broadly, yes, of course. It's such a nothing-burger
00:06:23.560 statement. He's like, we should talk to Americans. It is. It's kind of like I manage
00:06:28.380 billionaires money by not losing their money and that's my secret you're like all right yeah i bet
00:06:35.320 so during this time a number of other heavy hitters talked this way as well like pete
00:06:40.940 budajaj who is certainly gearing up for a presidential run was talking about the need
00:06:44.980 to drop identity politics he says something similar to this guy being like we gotta care
00:06:50.500 about the identities by not talking about the identities and whatever gavin newsom started a
00:06:56.200 podcast and brought on charlie kirk steve bannon newt gingrich jane fonda ken burns and others at
00:07:03.920 l if you will as a means of i don't know crossing the aisle i feel like can i just say like there
00:07:11.100 is a version of that argument that i would agree with which is like sure yes in our current
00:07:18.580 paradigm, if you will, identity politics often serve as a way to distract from class-based
00:07:28.600 politics by getting people to focus on other issues, basically, that are more easily co-opted
00:07:35.300 by corporations. And so, in that respect, I would agree that, like, yes, this can be a problem
00:07:43.620 because it's distracting from essentially the more inconvenient conclusion that you could be
00:07:49.420 drawing right now, which is that something actually meaningfully needs to change about
00:07:53.540 the balance of power in this country. But I have a feeling that that's not what these people mean
00:07:58.400 when they say we shouldn't be talking about identity politics.
00:08:02.540 Right. And also, I mean, identity politics is politics. Like, it's a total nonsensical term.
00:08:09.140 even class politics are a form of identity politics. If you're talking about a certain
00:08:13.740 class of people, you are in essence talking about an identity. Anyways, the whole general
00:08:18.180 message from Democrats as Trump was gearing up to literally destroy the Constitution was,
00:08:25.380 we got too woke. We need to quit with the urge for purity politics. We need to focus on a message
00:08:30.480 of economic populism. So I think a lot of people like you and me might have been like, okay, cool.
00:08:35.160 Like, I don't know if you're going to get all the way, but like, yeah, actually focusing on a
00:08:38.520 message of economic populism might get us somewhere. We negotiated the price of 20
00:08:44.460 pharmaceuticals. Exactly. Please clap. They also recognized a crucial outcome, which is that they
00:08:50.940 lost young men. Young men under 45 swung 16 points to Trump compared to 2020. They voted for him with
00:08:56.780 a 28 point margin in 2024. And so then there was this whole thing of like, we need a liberal Joe
00:09:03.000 Rogan. Okay, that's what we need. We need someone who's talking to young men. We know what we need.
00:09:09.840 We need a message of economic populism. We're going to stop talking about trans people. We're 1.00
00:09:14.340 going to start talking about real Americans. And we need a liberal Joe Rogan kitchen table issues.
00:09:20.520 Kitchen table issues. There were rumors of a $20 million strategic plan to fund research for the
00:09:27.100 Manosphere. Can you imagine that that's where your money goes? Give me 10 of it. I'll boil it down.
00:09:33.000 in five minutes for you.
00:09:35.120 Okay, I'm going to have you read
00:09:36.300 this New York Times coverage
00:09:37.320 from May 2025.
00:09:39.460 Okay.
00:09:40.600 I'm already annoyed.
00:09:41.980 And this was an article about
00:09:43.180 like the effort to fund
00:09:44.700 a new wave of influencers
00:09:46.780 and people in the social media space
00:09:48.340 to fix this messaging problem.
00:09:50.880 Well, and we know where that went.
00:09:52.960 Okay.
00:09:53.840 Six months after the Democratic Party's
00:09:55.920 crushing 2024 defeat,
00:09:58.200 the party's mega donors
00:09:59.400 are being inundated with overtures
00:10:01.300 to spend tens of millions of dollars
00:10:03.320 to develop an army of left-leaning online influencers.
00:10:07.940 Which, by the way, will put my ACH info in the show notes
00:10:11.800 if y'all want to float some of that our way.
00:10:16.000 At donor retreats and in pitch documents
00:10:18.700 seen by the New York Times,
00:10:20.300 liberal strategists are pushing the party's rich backers
00:10:23.340 to reopen their wallets
00:10:24.980 for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats.
00:10:27.740 As the cliche now goes, quote,
00:10:29.920 find the next Joe Rogan. The proposals, the scope of which has not been previously reported,
00:10:35.540 are meant to energize glum donors and persuade them that they can compete culturally with
00:10:40.440 President Trump, if only they can throw enough money at the problem. The first out of the gate
00:10:45.740 has been Chorus. Yes, we are finally going to talk about Chorus. Oh, no! All right, Chorus.
00:10:53.600 Rolls up sleeves. A well-publicized liberal nonprofit group co-founded by the Democratic
00:10:59.880 influencer Brian Tyler Cohen. But others have stayed under wraps until now. In November,
00:11:06.060 Ms. McBride and other liberal operatives gathered in Washington for a series of meetings
00:11:11.420 to survey the election wreckage. At the headquarters of American Bridge, one of the
00:11:16.840 largest Democratic donor networks, they eventually hatched a plan for a for-profit media company
00:11:22.120 called and media which stands for this is so like it's so democrat lobbyist coded it's so good
00:11:33.380 it's honestly it's kind of it's pete budigieg mckin's resurrecting the mckinsey playbook
00:11:39.500 coded quote achieve narrative dominance the company incorporated in march says it is aiming
00:11:47.780 to raise $45 million over the next four years. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Meanwhile,
00:11:54.600 meanwhile, you've got like Theo Vaughn on the other side who just like sits in his garage and
00:12:00.580 talks to people about doing coke. Trips over his shoelaces on the way to a podcast microphone.
00:12:05.560 How did he do it? Right. How did he how did he sway the election? It's just so good to be like,
00:12:11.360 we need a focus group. Okay. The company incorporated in March says it is aiming to
00:12:16.980 raise $45 million over the next four years. The group hopes to have a $70 million budget over
00:12:22.900 that time frame based on predictions of $25 million in revenue. It says it has raised $7
00:12:29.120 million so far. Ms. McBride and—okay, oh my god, there are so many—I have so many thoughts. Let
00:12:34.940 me try to get through this. Ms. McBride and Christian Tom, who led digital strategy for
00:12:40.920 the Biden White House, have pitched the company to American Bridge donors as a broad cultural
00:12:45.980 project. Hoping to move away from the, quote, current didactic hall monitor style of democratic
00:12:52.600 politics that turns off younger audiences, slay, and media will focus on direct, this is another
00:13:00.120 abundance drop, and media will focus on directly funding influencers and co-producing their content,
00:13:09.000 opening a creator talent agency, and starting by, quote, inking deals with four flagship creators,
00:13:15.440 according to a business plan shared with the Times.
00:13:18.380 Okay, okay.
00:13:19.260 All right, give me your thoughts.
00:13:20.340 Number one. 1.00
00:13:21.100 Katie's agitated.
00:13:22.040 Katie's activated.
00:13:23.100 If you are going to raise $70 million a year, 0.99
00:13:28.240 you should just go fucking buy the senators at that point. 1.00
00:13:31.660 You don't have to do any of this shit. 1.00
00:13:33.460 Just do what the Republican Party is doing 1.00
00:13:35.200 and just buy the Congress people.
00:13:37.080 Cory Booker can be bought for much less.
00:13:38.840 We'll talk about that later.
00:13:40.020 Literally, I'm like,
00:13:41.880 we know that a senator in Texas costs, what, half a million?
00:13:45.060 You don't have to do this whole, like, roundabout, we need influencers thing. 0.55
00:13:50.100 Number two, the nature of that money and the size, those donors are going to want something in return for that money.
00:13:57.240 Who are donors?
00:13:58.720 More often than not, they are associated with corporate interests.
00:14:02.580 So, like, right away, you are making a Faustian bargain.
00:14:06.160 There's no way these are just altruistic people who are going to hand you a $10 million check and don't care what happens to it.
00:14:13.240 They have interests, right?
00:14:14.800 This is the entire problem with like this mode of trying to shape culture and shape politics is that you immediately from the jump are beholden to special interest groups.
00:14:26.760 And then point number three is that this idea that you can, like, manufacture political influencers kind of misses the point of why those bro podcasters swung the election for Trump, which is that they're not political influencers.
00:14:42.140 They're just guys who talk into microphones who have millions of fans who just had Donald Trump on their show and their fans listen to them. 0.94
00:14:52.320 Not to, like, knock what we do, but I'm like, the people that listen to our shit probably care about politics more than, like, your average person does. 0.97
00:14:59.220 We aren't reaching the swing voter, you know? 0.96
00:15:02.460 I think to add to that, I understand that there is a desire to mirror what is a very, very well-funded infrastructure on the right.
00:15:12.020 Like, that is absolutely true. It is true that people on the right, billionaires, are absolutely funding the extension of these networks. Charlie Kirk, astroturfed, right? Astroturfed by a billionaire. But I think that what this misunderstands is two things. Number one, you cannot buy talent. And number two, most people in the manosphere are just guys talking.
00:15:32.960 the people who are like Charlie Kirk, who really were astroturfed and did kind of become a farmed
00:15:39.820 operation, what they had that Democrats don't have was an ideology. So they basically had a
00:15:45.680 Google Doc outline of here is what you are going to argue. Here is what your personality is going
00:15:50.360 to be. Here is what your set of beliefs are. Democrats don't have that, right? At this point,
00:15:55.160 it's kind of famously a joke that Democrats cannot describe what they want to be. They can only
00:15:59.860 describe what they do not want to be. And so it felt perfect to me in that article that they're
00:16:03.980 only capable of describing the influencers they don't want. They don't want Hall Monitor-style
00:16:09.180 democratic politics. They don't want to turn off younger audiences, but they have no fucking clue 0.99
00:16:14.820 what turns on younger audiences. Or if they do, they are not willing to say it publicly. 0.94
00:16:19.980 Diabolical lies. No, I'm just kidding.
00:16:21.420 Yes.
00:16:21.980 And even on the Charlie Kirk thing, per the Womanosphere episode, we have reason to believe 0.90
00:16:27.560 that much of the fan base that was bought in ideologically was essentially at this women's
00:16:35.580 conference, for example, paid to be there or flown in for free. I don't know how organic a lot of
00:16:42.420 that was. And I think the fact that like, we see those clip farming outrage bait, his stuff on
00:16:48.440 YouTube got a lot of views, sure. But like, we don't really know how that translated to actual
00:16:55.120 electoral success. Like, that evidence to me is just not as clear as, like, when you look at—
00:17:01.500 And there's a lot of incentive to elevate his legacy right now.
00:17:04.880 I really just think we'd be talking about Charlie Kirk's influence very, very differently had he
00:17:09.940 not been killed. I think that there were a lot of people who, when that happened, didn't even know
00:17:14.440 who he was. Whereas if Joe Rogan were killed, would have been like, oh my god, Joe Rogan. Like,
00:17:20.040 who know who Joe Rogan is. And so I think, again, if your message is specific and ideological and
00:17:26.840 political, your base is naturally going to be much smaller than if your message is, I don't know,
00:17:33.200 I just talk to people that want to come on my podcast and talk to me.
00:17:37.180 Yeah, completely. So again, we have a Democratic Party. They're lost in the wilderness. They claim
00:17:41.940 to want to talk about economic populism. They claim to be ready to consider the economic issues
00:17:48.140 that Americans are facing. They're ready to take on influencers. To seize the means of production.
00:17:54.200 No. Oh, wait. No, not that. Not that part. The Democratic Party is ready to talk about
00:17:59.400 moderate tax reform, and they want influencers to help them do that. So let's talk about chorus
00:18:05.980 for a second. Katie, do you want to describe the Chorus Creators Fund? Not at all. I don't want to
00:18:12.980 do that even a little bit. Can we phone a friend? Yeah, this was a very dramatic event that happened
00:18:18.780 last summer. The TLDR on this is that the journalist Taylor Lorenz released a report in
00:18:23.620 Wired about the Chorus Creators Fund. Chorus is a non-profit as described by the New York Times,
00:18:29.640 but that it was funded by essentially a dark money liberal group, which is called the 1630 Fund.
00:18:36.000 Dark money means that you don't have specifics about who's funding it. They don't have to
00:18:39.160 release reports. You don't know who's funding it. You don't know if it's corporations. You
00:18:42.700 don't know if it's billionaires, whatever. This became a whole thing. So the influencers who were
00:18:46.760 accused of being a part of this alleged group and being paid upwards of $8K a month to amplify
00:18:51.700 Democratic messaging, they essentially accused Taylor Lorenz of lying, of offering a number of
00:18:57.060 factual errors, and of essentially having a kind of vendetta against them. They also insisted that
00:19:01.760 none of this was in fact a secret and that all of it was out in the open. And, you know, in
00:19:06.000 opposition, Taylor stood by all of her reporting. The last I checked, Wired has not made any massive
00:19:11.400 corrections to the originally reported piece, which makes me think that for whatever reason,
00:19:15.620 whether, you know, they couldn't or they didn't want to, the influencers did not provide like
00:19:19.680 actual factual evidence that disputed her reporting. But the part of this drama that's
00:19:24.420 relevant to what we're talking about is how it became a whole debate really about not just
00:19:29.300 whether it matters that these people were, you know, given gag orders, were they allowed to talk
00:19:33.500 about Gaza, who was paying for them, what policies were they being paid to amplify, but whether it
00:19:38.560 matters if people on the left are being paid. And there was this whole conversation of like,
00:19:42.460 100%. Yeah, like, why should we even care? Why should we care that people on the left are being
00:19:46.540 paid? Yeah, it's like, well, the right does this all the time. Exactly. I mean, I just said, yeah,
00:19:51.040 you have $70 million, just go fucking buy the Congress people. Like, who cares? I'm certainly 0.99
00:19:55.040 not above fighting dirty. But I think, again, to me, it comes back to the second point that I made,
00:19:59.960 which is that if you don't know where the money is coming from, you don't know who is actually
00:20:03.260 driving the ship here and whose agenda this ultimately serves, which feels relevant.
00:20:07.640 it. Yeah, I think it wouldn't surprise anyone who listens to this podcast that you and I probably
00:20:12.100 believe it's perfectly relevant to know if an influencer is being paid on either side of the
00:20:16.160 spectrum by a lobbying group. But the point is that these influencers in this program have since
00:20:22.080 gone on and are currently some of the most significant ones that are kind of anointed
00:20:25.740 and supported by the Democratic Party. So these are the influencers that I guess we could say
00:20:30.560 the Democratic Party has been looking for, right? These are the ones who are spreading the message.
00:20:35.220 So I want us to watch like a minute or so of a few of these influencer clips. 1.00
00:20:42.120 Dude, you're going to get us fucked. 1.00