Alright, let's talk about the Hasan Piker and Ethan Klein feud

The Political Power Of A Callout Video

—by Adam Bumas

The most-commented English language video on YouTube last week, according to Playboard, was the latest salvo in an ongoing feud that involves some of the internet’s most influential livestreamers. Ethan Klein and Hasan Piker are the two most prominent figures in the feud, but the video that was getting all the comments last week was uploaded by Ian “iDubbbz” Jomha. And, ridiculous screen names aside, the feud has ballooned out into something more existential than you’d expect from your typical YouTuber drama. In many ways, the creators involved are fighting to define what being on the internet means in 2025. 

So what’s going on, and why are twice as many people talking about this as the new Fantastic Four trailer? Let’s dive in.

Piker, a leftist political streamer who’s had Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on his stream, is probably the highest-profile figure involved here. He started as a traditional pundit, but proved to be a natural born streamer. He regularly collaborated with h3h3Productions, whose founder and star Ethan Klein is a more typical comedy and reaction streamer who’s now been far outpaced by Piker. But after the conflict in Gaza began in October 2023, the two immediately ended the h3h3-produced podcast they were co-hosting after a fierce debate between the vocally pro-Palestine Piker and Klein, whose wife and co-host Hila served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Since then, both Piker and Klein have gotten into too many other fights about Gaza, Israel, and Judaism to list here. But the sniping between the two culminated in January, when Klein released an almost two hour-long callout video about Piker. Twitch’s leadership was eventually dragged into the spat and Klein was temporarily banned from the platform for “glorifying violence”.

Since that fight couldn’t continue on Twitch (Piker, himself, had just gotten back from his own temporary ban lol), it spilled over to the rest of the internet, particularly in the Reddit-based fan communities for the two streamers. Klein has been much more aggressive in this arena than Piker, threatening several different subreddits with legal action — mostly ones focused on h3h3, though he also tried to take down the gossip page r/Fauxmoi. But it isn’t just the fans. 

Livestreaming needs drama and counter-narratives and reactions to reactions to reactions, and h3h3 made its name on being a nexus point for these streamers. Seemingly everyone with a personal or professional connection to Piker or Klein (once again, too many to list here) has been dragged into the fight. Some discussed it on the air, some just posted about it, some are friends or partners who weighed in, and some tried to stay out of it — it didn’t matter, they all got fed back into the reaction ecosystem.

Jomha’s video from Thursday is a response to being in the last category. He’s another streamer and YouTuber who’s previously appeared on h3h3, but was best known for his edgy, combative “Content Cop” callout videos. In 2023, he unlisted the videos, speaking publicly about his regret for his hateful and harassing behavior in the name of content. But on March 7th, Klein called Jomha out for not publicly defending him against a former employee. According to Jomha, he reached out to Klein privately, who insisted that he release a public statement.

Instead, he made his first Content Cop video since 2017, which features appearances from Piker and several other streamers and YouTubers who have sided against Klein. It’s fascinating to watch, since it’s both a callout video from a pioneer of the form, and a heartfelt messy screed against the idea of publicly calling out personal friends, in general. Jomha tries to reconcile it by describing the video as a power move against someone who “only cares about power,” and ends by asking all of his guests to compliment Klein. It’s a lot more equivocal and conflicted than the righteous, meticulous takedown you usually expect from a video like this.

This more mature video has so much attention because it’s struck a chord with a more mature audience, one that has less investment in the drama because it moved on long ago. Instead of taking sides, the most popular comments are all reminiscing about the heyday of Content Cop videos and YouTube drama in general, before the “Adpocalypse” that started in 2016 drove more controversial, adult topics away from the platform.

Which is, finally, why this actually matters. Piker is one of the clearest examples of a modern content creator, especially in how directly he’s engaged with news and politics. A decade ago, when the internet in general and YouTube, in particular, were a lot smaller, the job looked pretty different. “Ethan and Hila Klein, Content Cop, these were commentators on the culture of their platforms, and they were self-contained to people who cared about the culture,” Puck News’ Julia Alexander told Garbage Day. 

Since then, independent streamers and creators have gotten so important that the left wing needs a Joe Rogan more than a candidate for 2028, or something. The billionaire-funded manosphere has built up their own networks that are able to promote each other through both cooperation and drama, in a way that h3h3 pioneered when the YouTube algorithm promoted and prioritized it. The conflict in Gaza is obviously much more important and far-reaching than all this relatively minor infighting, but the latter is bound up with the former in a way that shows how inherently political being a streamer is in 2025. 

“Now, the audience has gone beyond these circles, to people who care about the aesthetics and attention of controversy,” Alexander says. Jomha’s video is both a blast from the past, and one that hits a lot harder on a post-manosphere and post-James Somerton YouTube. Now that a drama video is a weapon powerful enough to create a political wedge, or to end someone’s whole career, it’s much more a matter of public interest — and the stakes are a lot higher, too.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova

Why do some ideas stay hidden despite their importance? 

In the breakout new book Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, author Nadia Asparouhova (Working in Public, Stripe Press) delves into the unseen world of antimemetics where taboos, uncomfortable truths, and important ideas go to hide. The first-ever nonfiction book mapping this territory, Antimemetics explores how ideas stay hidden, how to see them, and where they might take us. 

Preorder a first edition paperback and digital edition here, only on Metalabel. 

Published with the Dark Forest Collective.

A Good Post

The Lib Uprising Is Here, Apparently

It’s not just “centrist” “columnists” like David Brooks and Bret Stephens that are starting to muse about overthrowing the government, a bunch of other liberals seemingly hit a breaking point with the Trump administration this month. In fact, one user claims they got a visit from the Secret Service over a Substack post they wrote.

A self-described liberal PhD student named Nicholas Decker published a piece titled, “When Must We Kill Them?” And, uh, yeah, it’s pretty fiery! Decker has since added an update to the top of the piece that reads, “Violence is a last resort, not a first resort. It must come after the exhaustion of all possible remedy.” Which should hopefully make the Secret Service feel a bit better.

I’m going to go ahead and lump in Decker’s not-quite-manifesto and the right-wing meltdown and left-wing confusion it generated with the similarly polarizing Luigi Mangione fandom. Journalist Taylor Lorenz went on Fox News last week and tried to have a nuanced conversation about why young Americans are beginning to fantasize about some kind of violent social uprising and why they’re valorizing figures like Mangione. Fox News host Sean Hannity basically angrily peed his pants at the idea of it for 10 minutes straight.

But this stuff isn’t a meme and it does reflect a very real vibe shift in American politics. We are officially on Cool Zone watch.

The White House Put Up A COVID Website That Makes No God Damn Sense

The White House published a COVID-19 info page that is absolutely unhinged. Not only does the branding (screenshot above) make it look like COVID was purposely leaked from a lab by President Donald Trump, the actual text on the page is a mess too.

The White House seems to be trying to claim several extremely contradictory things. First, that COVID-19 was a bioweapon that escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China in 2019. Second, the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed was a massive success and saved the world by fast-tracking a vaccine for the virus. But, third, COVID-19 is as harmless as the common cold and masks aren’t necessary.

Now, I say that this is all contradictory bull shit, but to Trump and his supporters, finding a way to string all of these ideas together is extremely important. The conspiracy theories that power Trumpism weren’t created like normal propaganda, but, instead, crowdsourced from across the web. And this isn’t just true for COVID misinfo. So expect even absurd ways moves from the White House as they experiment with ways of dogwhistling and, more importantly, combining these ideas into semi-coherent narratives.

The Pope Met JD Vance, Then Died

Vance and his posse of weird tradcath fascists had a big Easter weekend in Rome. They took a picture in the Sistine Chapel (bad). Then Vance met with Pope Francis and, hours later, the pope died. Honestly, relatable. If I had to have a conversation with Vance, I, too, would give up on living.

Because Vance has never met a rake he didn’t want to step on, it’s not just that that the 88-year-old pope, who had been fighting off pneumonia recently, died almost immediately after meeting America’s weirdest, cringiest Catholic convert. Or that the pope only met with Vance after he had already sent a deputy to give the vice president a lecture on being compassionate to migrants. It’s that Vance fired off a post on X praying for the pope’s “good health” hours before he died. Anyways, Veep was a documentary.

Is The Europa Ice War Stuff The Next Goncharov?

Did that sentence mean anything to you? If it did, please go outside a little bit!

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, first, Goncharov was a Tumblr meme where users invented a fake Martin Scorsese film called Goncharov and spent months making art about it. There isn’t really a name for this kind of meme — recreational mass delusion? unreality posting? — but there was a ton of fan fiction and even a Letterboxd page.

The Europa Ice War is a similar large-scale act of fan fiction happening on X right now.

The meme got started thanks to some weird posts from X user @lolt64 about fictitious space battles on Jupiter’s moon Europa. It’s now going very viral on the platform and even an official NASA account has jumped on the trend.

This now marks at least the third platform-wide meme on X in as many months, which, as I wrote last week, is interesting and worth watching. There is clearly renewed activity on X and it’s generating pretty huge trends, even if they’re really silly like this one. But, also, as the Europa Ice War stuff has gone viral this week, users are now terrified that Elon Musk is going to try and get involved. Which seems unlikely, but is, also, a fascinating dynamic. Any trend going viral on X runs the risk of being snuffed out immediately if the site’s extremely cringe owner acknowledges it.

A Good Grok Alternative

Some Stray Links

• Welcome to the resistance uh… David Brooks?

• “Americans Are Obsessed With Protein and It’s Driving Nutrition Experts Nuts”

• “A Strange Stain in the Sky: How Silicon Valley Is Preparing A Coup Against Democracy”

P.S. here’s a very troubling work schedule.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***