Gym Kampf — fast twitch fascism, and the unnecessary politicization of fitness

"Piker? I hardly Know 'er!"

Muscle is MAGA now

This New York Times article about Hasan Piker is one of the best things I’ve read in a while.

For those wondering, Hasan Piker is a political twitch streamer — which might naturally lead you to ask the question: why should we care about his thoughts, opinions, or popularity?

To answer that, think about who Dana White thanked when he was up on stage at Trump’s inauguration: the Nelk Boys, Joe Rogan, Adin Ross, and Theo Von.

People have abandoned the traditional media pundits, and instead turned to podcasts, streamers, and other forms of alternate content creators to understand what’s going on in the world.

Personally I get all my news from Sasha Grey, as her analysis on social and political trends are penetrating, to say the least.

We can even see the shifting sphere of influence spill over into our personal corner of the Internet; currently there’s a massive ideological war going on, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the trenches of World War I.

The two sides of this war are between the YouTuber “shoe on head” and our own resident Aristotle, Bentham's Bulldog. What exactly was John Bolton’s role in USAID? Only these two intellectual juggernauts know for sure.

Credit to Simon Laird

And of course, who could forget that other incident on Substack where the guy was so autistic that he had to be visited by the Secret Service.

GMU Econ bloggers taking tone deaf to a whole new level

Jokes aside, there was a legitimate discussion as to whether or not Kamala's refusal to do Joe Rogan ended up costing her the election, and even the traditional news outlets briefly had a moment of clarity where they realized they were no longer as relevant as they once were.

Whether we like it or not, these alternate creators have an ungodly amount of political influence — which brings us back to the New York Times article.

First, the tone of the article — oh my god, the tone

Do you remember a little while ago when ChatGPT made an update and all of a sudden it started glazing you to an uncomfortable degree?

It legitimately feels like the author of the Piker article took that same energy and cranked it all the way up to 11. What makes it even weirder is the pseudo detached nature of the article itself, which makes it seem like they’re doing a Jane Goodall style anthropological analysis of a straight white man.

Some of the sections are legitimately baffling; take this one for example:

Last year, when a gay content creator asked Mr. Piker if he was an “ally” in an interview at a Pride event in Los Angeles, he jokingly said no, then playfully added, “I’m a foe.” Mr. Piker then spanked the interviewer, who was wearing an American flag Speedo swimsuit, in front of a bus emblazoned with the logo for Grindr, the gay dating app.

This one is even funnier:

Alec Flynn, a 28-year-old comedian in Los Angeles, whose material draws from his life as a straight man, said he did not religiously follow Mr. Piker.

To be clear, this quote is not taken out of context. At no point do they establish who Alec Flynn is, what his relationship to twitch is, or why his opinions matter. It legitimately feels like they pulled some random straight guy off the street and said “hey what do you think of this streamer?”

The entire article is magnificent like this — but it nevertheless…

Points to a much bigger problem

The original title of the article was called: “A progressive mind in a MAGA body.”

The deep implication running throughout the article is that working out, being healthy, and being masculine is inherently right coded.

It’s such a weird ideological line to draw. “Do you do kettlebell swings and count your macros? Fuck you, you republican shill.”

(Edit: I have no way of proving this, but I wrote the above joke before this Vanity Fair article came out — you cannot make this shit up)

For as much as progressives want to break down traditional gender stereotypes, they seem to be equally invested in creating new ones.

Even in the article itself they have to acknowledge that the only reason Hasan is able to act the way he does is because he has “Jock Insurance” – that is to say, he's able to pull off this gay counter signaling because he's already traditionally masculine.

They don't seem to understand how this reinforces gender norms for the other 99% of people who aren't already a 6'4 rich guy.

What’s more…

The article is dripping with condescension to every demographic

First, it’s implicitly condescending to regular guys — as if a guy doing chest presses on a hammer strength machine is somehow taking an ideological stance in the culture war.

It’s even more condescending to gay people and suburban women — who I assume are the intended audience for this piece. It’s condescending to their intelligence, because it assumes these demographics are so mentally fragile that they need to be told that a guy like Hasan Piker “is one of the good ones” because he occasionally paints his nails and wears fur coats.

Imagine if the New York Times talked about black guys like this? “Yes, his name is D’Shawn, but he occasionally wears turtlenecks and knows what a Nash equilibrium is, so actually he’s OK.”

Additionally, being gay coded is not a cover for legitimate criticisms of this guy. There are entire compilations on YouTube of Piker glazing terrorists, most prominently his bold declaration that America deserved 9/11. This is something they pretty much gloss over in the article.

Nevertheless, I can see why they’re glazing this guy so hard; the left is trying very hard to…

Create their own version of Joe Rogan

But the fact that they chose Hasan Piker of all people just goes to show how completely out of touch with reality they are.

Piker didn’t develop his “MAGA body” by doing manual labor, or working the fields. He’s able to spend all of this time on his muscles and fashion sense because he is one of the ultimate children of nepotism.

Piker is the nephew of Cenk Uyger, another political commentator for The Young Turks. From a very young age Hasan has had an uncommon degree of access to the political and media ecosystem.

To be clear, I don’t blame Piker for being a child of nepotism; the fact that he remained relevant is a testament to his own skills. Yet, to try and make him into the next Joe Rogan is to misunderstand why Joe Rogan got so popular in the first place.

I haven’t listened to Rogan’s podcast in a very long time, nor do I find his comedy funny. But there is an undeniably impressive aspect about him; despite coming from a working class background, he was able to conquer podcasting — all the while being a UFC commentator, the fear factor guy, and a legitimately impressive martial artist.

For Low Human Capital™ like myself, people like Rogan are an inspiring testament to the things that you can achieve through time and perseverance, even when you don’t have the approval of traditional institutions, or a great degree of intelligence.

Piker ain’t it, chief

When surveying Piker’s audience, they find:

About 70 percent of participants identified as male, more than 60 percent identified as being younger than 30, and about 40 percent identified as having a sexual orientation other than straight.

Considering the baseline rate of LGBT people in the American population is somewhere between 6% and 9% depending on the survey, it becomes clear what the article is trying to portray: a guy like Piker is a gay guy’s idea of a straight guy.

The condescending nature of this New York Times article ties back to one of the points I was trying to make when I said that toxic masculinity is here to stay.

The people on the left want to move beyond dumb apes like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. They want some sort of “evolved masculinity”. And yet the person they champion as the face of this evolved masculinity is a man who makes his living by doing twitch streams for 8 to 12 hours a day. A man who makes millions playing video games, and has never had a real job in his life.

The uncomfortable truth about guys like Andrew Tate is that, as toxic as they are, they give good advice. And importantly, they give more realistic advice.

All these manosphere guys tell young men to clean their rooms, get jacked, make a lot of money, and understand the various sorts of status games that we play in this world. Yes, I’m fully aware that this is the opening gambit for any cult, but that is what makes cults so effective for a certain type of person — they reel you in by giving actual advice.

Meanwhile, the new wave of progressives are basically saying: “Yeah, actually we want all of those same things as Tate, but please act gay 25% of the time so we know that you’re on our team. And also please have the emotional skills of a therapist — no we’re not going to tell you how to develop those skills, by the way. And if you fuck it up we’ll call you an incel.”

Now, to be fair, there has been a vibe shift on the left – sort of

If you’ve looked at guys like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias lately, you might’ve noticed that both of them have started to present themselves like they’ve actually hit puberty.

This is not an accident; they’ll never openly say it because it’s impolite to directly talk about signaling games, but they probably looked at guys like Mark Zuckerberg and saw how quickly he rebranded himself from an autistic alien to a jiu-jitsu dork.

The point is that aesthetics matter — which is why the New York Times article on Hasan is so misguided; if they’re constantly going to say that a masculine aesthetic is inherently problematic and right coded, then they can’t be mad when they end up alienating those very same people.

I think this note summarizes the phenomenon nicely:

Ultimately, the content of the Hasan article is deflecting the more important question, which is not “how do we create a Joe Rogan of the left?”

Rather, it’s “What are we doing so that the Joe Rogan’s of the world are no longer of the left?”

See, that second question is a lot harder for the left to confront, because that would require taking some degree of…

Personal accountability

And this right here is the heart of the problem.

To understand, let’s take a step back and actually ask ourselves: how did working out become right coded?

It’s because the act of working out is fundamentally an act of personal agency. It’s looking at yourself in the mirror and saying: “I don't like what I see. I’m going to fix this.”

This is one of the most repulsive aspects of modern day progressivism. It’s this idea that actually solving problems and finding solutions for yourself is something that only a republican can do.

As a result, people subconsciously go: “Hey, wait a minute, I like finding solutions and fixing things. I guess that makes me a republican?”

(And quite frankly I think this is the baseline thought process which ultimately created the tech right).

This equivocation between muscle and MAGA is one of the most unnecessary own goals that I’ve ever seen — and it’s one of the things Klein himself is trying to rectify in his abundance agenda. The book is just one long declaration to his own team, something along the lines of: “Hey, can we stop being so limped dick about these issues? Can we start getting solution oriented around some of this?”

And once more I want to point out that the New York Times article is equally condescending to women and progressives, because it assumes that they are so stupid they can be won over by the most superficial pandering.

There’s additionally an implication that to be a proper progressive/feminist is to look at the world exclusively through systems — and by extension, adopt a defeatist mindset whenever you have to improve upon your own life. That going to the gym, or somehow taking any personal responsibility is against your core values.

Ultimately, articles like this are a perfect example of how the New York Times end up conveying the exact opposite message of what they're going for. And that’s why I would rate the article…

10/10, would read again.

It truly is just an exquisite piece on a lack of self-awareness, and continues to reinforce my belief that the New York Times/Washington Post crowd truly refuses to engage in the reality so many Americans actually live in.

Anyways, I’m off to the gym — today’s fracking day.