Hasan Piker Headlines NYC-DSA Rally in Bushwick Two Days Before Start of  Early Voting

Leftist streamer, influencer, and political commentator Hasan Piker joined the slate of candidates endorsed by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America for a rally titled “A City to Win” last Thursday, two days before the start of early voting.

“New York is the tip of the spear in terms of revolutionary politics that will change the dynamic in the entire country in a better trajectory,” Piker said. 

Nine of the 10 candidates endorsed by NYC-DSA were present at the rally, which took place at a Bushwick event space: Claire Valdez, Aber Kawas, Conrad Blackburn, Christian Celeste Tate, Eon Huntley, Samantha Kattan, Diana Moreno, David Orkin, and Illapa Sairitupac. Piker, the nine candidates, and a slew of other speakers were joined by a crowd of more than 200 people, most of them DSA members.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is running to represent New York’s 13th congressional district in Upper Manhattan and parts of the West Bronx, was unable to attend the rally but was present in the form of a life-size cardboard version of herself.

Piker, who rose to fame by streaming on Twitch and boasts more than 10 million followers across various platforms, has been traveling around the United States this year, mobilizing his online following to support socialist and progressive candidates challenging establishment Democrats across the country.

The speakers — candidates and DSA-affiliated advocates alike — consistently emphasized the core issues shared by DSA and their endorsees: affordability, housing, healthcare, war and genocide, abolishing ICE, and taxing the rich. Most speakers included calls to action in their remarks, encouraging audience members to sign up for canvassing shifts.

Complementing speakers’ repeated calls to action, the rally’s emcees regularly paused between speeches, directing the audience’s attention to the various DSA organizers in the crowd who were holding up clipboards with QR codes linked to sign-up pages for canvasses and phonebanks.

“The way socialists make change is getting millions and millions of people to know what the hell is happening in these elections, and we have to talk to our neighbors, so who’s going to sign up to canvass today?” asked former NYC-DSA co-chair and rally co-emcee Jeremy Cohan.

Piker, 34, delivered the last speech of the night, where he connected the slate of NYC-DSA candidates to a broader movement for socialist and anti-establishment politics in the United States.

“From the student movements to the door knockers to the old white suburbanites, from the disenchanted liberals who voted for Hillary Clinton, who now say Bernie was right, to the excited socialists who are always there, more and more people recognize the extraordinary times that we are living through, and they want something different,” Piker said. “People, in other words, are demanding a politics that works for them.

“I thought we were so far away from socialism,” he added, “and we might still be far away from socialism, but we do have an opportunity right here, right now, more than ever before, and we must seize that opportunity, and you all must continue your own disciplined organizing for that to happen. That is the challenge.”

Piker then made the case for disciplined and sustainable organizing that goes beyond electoral efforts. “It’s more than just elections. It’s work like organizing tenant unions. It’s work like international solidarity movements,” he argued. “But it’s also work like labor organizing or work like political education of yourselves and others.”

Piker echoed the collectivist sentiment shared by many of the rally’s speakers, hoping that the NYC-DSA slate “will do even more than Zohran can. I hope that although Zohran was the first in New York City, by the end of these midterms, Zohran will seem unremarkable — because by then we will have elected so many brilliant fighters into legislative offices throughout New York City and state.”

In his speech, Piker also seemed to acknowledge his somewhat controversial status: “I’ve been under a lot of attack as of late.” Because of his uncompromising criticism of Israel, Piker has angered Democratic Party elites even as he has built a massive following among younger voters who drifted away from the Democrats in 2024.

After the rally, The Indypendent spoke with five of the nine DSA candidates present: Kawas, Blackburn, Celeste Tate, Moreno, and Sairitupac.

The candidates expressed gratitude for Piker’s support, and some took it as proof of NYC-DSA’s success. Moreno said that she saw the influencer’s backing as a “testament to the work that NYC-DSA has built over the years … it’s a big deal, because he is very much the pulse sometimes of the left … I’m so glad that he came out to support us, and also, as he said, to remind us that we are the vanguard of the movement against fascism.”

Every candidate interviewed shared unbowed excitement for their respective campaigns, leading into the final stretch. When asked about balancing the goals of DSA with the needs of their respective districts, candidates emphasized the interconnectedness of local and national issues. 

Blackburn, for instance, doesn’t “see it as having to balance the needs, because our needs are all the same. We need stable housing. We need to be able to afford groceries. We need to be able to afford healthcare.” 

When asked whether they would endorse and campaign for future slates of NYC-DSA-endorsed candidates, each of the five candidates The Indypendent spoke with committed to doing so.

“I will endorse, I will support. I know what solidarity is,” said Blackburn.

Celeste Tate built on Blackburn’s sentiment: “That’s part of what movement building is. This isn’t about me. I’m a stand-in right now. This is about uplifting all of us together.”

“This is not an individual project, this is a movement project,” said Moreno.