As a matter of preference, Mehdi Hasan likes a smart opponent. “It’s no fun interviewing village idiots,” he says, for instance, of Marjorie Taylor Greene. He recounts some of his favorite interviews during his three years as the host of The Mehdi Hasan Show on MSNBC and Peacock with the pride of a grizzled prizefighter: the short-lived Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Texas congressman Dan Crenshaw, Elon Musk’s newfound mouthpiece Matt Taibbi. Many of them began as Twitter arguments. They would trade barbs and hyperlinks and quote-tweets, and invariably Hasan would bait them into saying something like “Why don’t you invite me on your show, then?” — the cable-news version of “Catch me outside.” There was a schoolyard braggadocio about it, a crotch grab with a bachelor’s in political science. (Yes, they were usually men.) Someone like Taibbi might have fanboys gathered around jeering, “Nahhh, dude, he’s scared of you.” But of course this was exactly what Hasan wanted all along —a worthy adversary and an audience — so by the time his subject was seated with the earpiece plugged in, the public pantsing could commence.
“Other people have, you know, horse riding or basketball,” he says. “I argue in interviews. This is what gets me going. Imagine an action movie with a debate with Jason Statham. That’s like heaven for me.” The one he’s telling me about now, with Mark Regev, a senior adviser to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defined the end of his MSNBC tenure. “The Israeli government is very good at putting out a spokesperson. Regev is one of the smoothest operators. Probably one of their best media performers. And that was, for me,” Hasan says, clapping and rubbing his hands together, “a challenge.”
Hasan had been following Regev’s career for the past 15 years. Up until their interview on his Peacock show on November 16, Regev had made 13 appearances on MSNBC and NBC’s Meet the Press alone since the Hamas attack on October 7. He methodically laid the rhetorical groundwork for Israel’s siege of Gaza, including the strike on Al-Shifa hospital, which has since been reduced to rubble. In his interviews, Regev said the Israeli military would be “surgical” and do “minimum harm to civilians,” while repeating lines about Hamas using “human shields” and “beheading babies.” The anchors who had him on, such as Kristen Welker, Andrea Mitchell, and José Díaz-Balart, would lob softball questions in a serious tone: “What specifically is your understanding of what’s happening there?”
The moment Hasan knew he had Regev on the ropes was when he said that an estimated 11,000 people had been killed by the siege, citing numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry. Regev interrupted Hasan and started shouting, “That Hamas controls! You have to say that!” To which Hasan replied, “I don’t have to say what you ask me to say.” Still, he had been prepared for this, so he pulled up a graphic onscreen that compared the Palestinian death toll from the past two major conflicts, in 2009 and 2014, as reported by the Gaza Health Ministry and Israel — similar. When Hasan brought up the images then circulating online of Palestinian children being pulled from the rubble, they had the following exchange:
REGEV: Because they’re the pictures Hamas wants you to see.
HASAN: And also because they’re dead, Mark. They’re also people your government has killed. You accept that, right? You’ve killed children?
REGEV: I do not. First of all, you don’t know how those people died.
HASAN: Oh, wow.
Hasan pressed on through his list of questions: whether Israel would bomb a school with Israeli children inside if Hamas had taken it over (“We wouldn’t allow them to take over a school in the first place”); the propagandistic tweets from Israeli leadership, including a video of an Israeli soldier falsely claiming that the days of the week on a calendar written in Arabic were the names of Hamas terrorists (“Have you made a professional mistake, ever?”); and the Israeli administration’s genocidal language (“I know my Jewish history”). For people looking for accountability from an Israeli official, the exchange provided a brief flash of sanity. Even though the interview aired on Peacock, the NBC streaming service barely anyone watches, it went viral once Hasan tweeted it out to his million-plus followers. Two weeks later, MSNBC canceled his show.
Hasan and I are having lunch at the José Andrés restaurant Zaytinya in D.C. He was a regular at the chef’s other places before he “knew José,” who appeared on his show a couple of years ago to talk about his organization World Central Kitchen feeding people in Ukraine during the war. It’s the edge of spring, weeks after Hasan announced that the last episode of The Mehdi Hasan Show, which aired on January 7, would also be his last day at MSNBC. When the network announced the cancellation of his Sunday-night MSNBC show, as well as his streaming show on Peacock, in November, it couched it as a broader reshuffling of its weekend schedule. It gave him the option of finishing his contract at MSNBC, which extends through the 2024 election, as an on-air analyst and guest anchor. But he couldn’t sit on the sidelines while the biggest political stories of our time — the ongoing war in Gaza and a Trump-Biden rematch — were happening. So he asked if MSNBC would release him from his contract early.
The mysterious, Ziploc-sealed circumstances around his exit led people to speculate that the network had canceled his show for his criticism of Israel and its officials. Everyone from Mark Hamill to Representative Ro Khanna tweeted their displeasure. “It is deeply troubling that MSNBC is canceling his show amid a rampant rise of anti-Muslim bigotry and suppression of Muslim voices,” wrote Representative Ilhan Omar. The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill called it a “clear political move.” With the winds of gossip and outrage at his back, Hasan, 44, decided to launch his own media company on Substack, Zeteo, joining the growing ecosystem of writers building their fiefdoms on the bones of mainstream media. (Zeteo is a Greek word meaning to seek through thought and reason.) He hopes to create something on the left along the lines of what Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss have done on the Zionist, cancel-culture-obsessed, the-teens-aren’t-all-right right. He’s studied their models because he feels they’re accomplishing what the left has yet to. Is he a paid subscriber? “I’m a free subscriber because I don’t know if I can bring myself to pay either of those people,” he says. “I don’t have to agree with people to see what they’re doing and what works.”
Hasan is in entrepreneurial-pitch mode, and he talks volubly, quickly, and confidently, at one point clocking in at more than 250 words per minute, as though he were delivering a Shonda Rhimes Scandal-era monologue. He’s hoping the audiences he’s accumulated at Al Jazeera English, The Intercept, MSNBC, and X, alongside an “Avengers-style” group of contributors including Naomi Klein, Greta Thunberg, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, will be big enough to launch the platform. He has a lean team at the moment — five full-timers, and he’s planning on at least ten total. “Look, was I disappointed when they canceled my show? Of course,” he says. “But in hindsight, it was a blessing. I can say whatever I want in a way a lot of folks who have employers can’t. I think being self-employed is gonna be the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”
Hasan has evaded direct questions about his exit while doing the promotional rounds. His postmortem descriptor is that it was “amicable” — a cute, legally permissible way of suggesting there’s a bigger story behind the divorce. Was it because he signed an NDA? “How do you define NDA?” he asks, uncharacteristically coy. “I signed an exit agreement with mutually agreed terms to leave.” When I ask him again, in another way, he says he and MSNBC “both agreed that looking back is not the right way forward, and it’s better to look forward.” So is that a “yes”? “You’ve turned me into a politician now with these questions,” he says, laughing. “Yes, we’ve both agreed we’re not going to spend time going over what happened in the past or critiquing each other.”
Hasan came of age in Harrow, an affluent neighborhood in North West London. His parents were classically professional Asian parents — a doctor and a civil engineer — who emigrated from Hyderabad in southern India. They’re Shia, which placed them slightly outside the dominant British Asian and Muslim communities. Islamic faith informed Hasan’s politics — economic equality, care for the poor. His father, an engineer for the U.N., was deeply invested in the British Establishment and the Labour Party. Hasan might get some of his rhetorical provocativeness from him. His father would keep a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the novel the Supreme Leader of Iran put a fatwa on him for, on a bookshelf in their dining room to get a rise out of their guests. “It was a disputatious household,” Hasan says.
We’re chatting in the lobby of the Courtyard Marriott in Carrollton, Texas, where he’s set to speak at a fundraiser for the Indian American Muslim Council, which is raising money for journalism grants on the subcontinent. It’s a group he feels connected to because of his family, but he loves any opportunity to talk. When it comes to the contours of his childhood and upbringing, however, Hasan is remarkably unspecific. His family in general — including his wife and two daughters — is a no-fly zone. He often resists questions that require introspection, such as the deeper motivation behind it all or if there was a time when someone really changed his mind about politics. His main nonwork consumption involves action movies. He doesn’t go to museums or have, as he puts it, “this wonderful, intellectual hinterland” within him. He reads a lot, but not novels: tweets, articles, and reports.
Growing up, his parents sent him to Merchant Taylors’, a tony day school a short train ride away in Moor Park. “My parents bought privilege for me,” he says. He had a reputation as a smart loudmouth: good grades but a chronic interrupter. He would get sent to the hallway for disciplinary reasons. “I had heard stories about him getting into trouble because he’d demolished a teacher in an argument,” says the actor Riz Ahmed, who was a few years below him. Hasan would go outside during the national anthem because he refused to sing “God Save the Queen.” “My issue was with the royal family,” he says. “I support the England football team. I’m not some anti-British person.” This pattern repeated itself when he was freshly out of university and emceeing an event for a community paper called The Muslim News where Prince Charles was presenting an award. Hasan was supposed to introduce him but balked at saying “Your Highness.” “They took me out of their schedule,” Hasan recalls, “because I said, ‘No one’s higher than me but God. And my parents.’ So that was the lefty in me.”
Hasan got into Oxford — not only that, he went to Christ Church, which has one of the largest endowments of the 39 colleges and a reputation as a kingmaker of British politics. Not incidentally, it was largely white, conservative, and Christian. He studied PPE — politics, philosophy, and economics — as have many U.K. politicians, including prime ministers David Cameron, Liz Truss, and, most recently, Rishi Sunak. His faith made fitting in difficult. He doesn’t drink, for one, which foreclosed rowdy nights at the college bar. “It was hard because you’re surrounded by people who don’t share your politics,” he says. “I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by people who don’t share my politics. Maybe that’s why I debate so much: because I always feel I’m in the minority, whether it’s politically, ideologically, religiously, culturally.”
Like his peers, he was ambitious; he wanted to be a public figure. His 18-year-old self aspired to become the first Asian prime minister of the U.K. (When Sunak achieved that milestone, Hasan’s longtime friends messaged him: “Guess it wasn’t you then.”) In his first year, he found his footing at the Oxford Union, the famed debate hall, a place he would regularly return to once he became the host of the debate show Head to Head for Al Jazeera English. There’s footage of Hasan challenging Boris Johnson on the floor with youthful swagger. Afterward, he walked up to Johnson, who was then a columnist for the conservative magazine The Spectator, and asked for an internship, which he got. “Know your enemy,” he says of that decision.
In 2001, in his first election as an eligible voter, Hasan voted for Tony Blair. Not necessarily his favorite (he’s more of a Tony Benn guy, “the Bernie of the U.K.”), but he thought Blair was smart. Then, a year and a half later, he saw the Labour Party–led U.K. follow the U.S. into the Iraq invasion. “Bush and Blair are my villains. They formed my politics,” he says. “The Iraq War was a moral catastrophe like nothing we’ve seen before — until Gaza.” The stream of lies, the uranium hoax, the embarrassment of Colin Powell, the branding of the “Axis of Evil,” and underlying Islamophobia were all ways the political Establishment colluded with the media. “I genuinely believe Blair would not have been able to invade Iraq had the media not been complicit,” he says. “And that shaped my view of the media.”
His first job out of school was behind the scenes at ITV Studios, doing research for the British radio and TV host Jonathan Dimbleby. When he was 29, he became the politics editor of The New Statesman. That’s when it all started to click: TV producers began sending cars and booking him to come and speak on panels. He became a regular on BBC shows like Question Time and Sunday Morning Live and gained a reputation as an animated debater. “I was like, Oh, this is what I was made to do,” he says. “Why has it taken so long to get here? ”
More often than not, producers booked him to represent the “Muslim side” in a post London-bombing England that was paranoid of Islamic terrorism. It was a role he was eager to play because when he did say “no” and watched whoever did it instead, he was underwhelmed. “I, perhaps semi-arrogantly, think I can do a better job than the person who’s currently doing it,” he says. He would frequently get paired with Douglas Murray, a neoconservative who regularly warns of the dangers of Islam and immigration. “British TV producers, it seems, enjoyed seeing sparks fly between us live on-air,” he writes in his how-to book on debate, Win Every Argument, adding that it is “something I now look back on with quite a bit of regret and embarrassment.” Today, he wouldn’t appear on Fox News, he says, because he thinks the channel is beyond the pale and has a “cult audience,” but he would consider debating Ben Shapiro on Israel. He recently went on Piers Morgan’s show and found the host “fair.” He still keeps one foot in mainstream media; he would go on MSNBC if the network invited him back. “I can’t change things unless I can get through to the most people,” he says. “So I’ve always looked for a big platform. I’ve never been ashamed of that.”
Hasan joined NBCUniversal in the fall of 2020. Phil Griffin, then the MSNBC president, first reached out to Hasan in 2019 to discuss a possible job there, but nothing came of it; he figured the whole “British, Muslim, brown, lefty immigrant” thing was too much for them. Griffin called again a year later because, Hasan suspects, “they had more freedom to hire someone like me” after some people at the top left. He’s likely referring to Andy Lack, the former chair of NBC, who had a penchant for hiring Republicans like Megyn Kelly. He left in a haze of scandal in 2020 after news surfaced that he had killed Ronan Farrow’s Me Too reporting.
The year Hasan joined, the leadership turned over: Lack was replaced by Cesar Conde as head of NBCUniversal, which oversees NBC News and MSNBC; he promoted Rashida Jones to president of MSNBC to replace Griffin. The two divisions are separate yet semi-permeable, sometimes sharing staff, but with NBC taking prominence as the older, more important sibling. Whereas Griffin had chummy relationships with talent, the perception of the new administration is that it’s more secretive and more interested in the ledger than the story. A byzantine layer of senior vice-presidents adds to the directionless feeling. “No one knows who’s making decisions,” says one employee. “A lot of people feel unmotivated by the lack of vision.” At NBC, the recent hiring (and eventual firing) of former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who supported Trump’s election-fraud lie, triggered an on-air mutiny led by Chuck Todd on the NBC side and Rachel Maddow on the MSNBC side. The hosts were blindsided by the announcement; usually they get a heads-up when a big hire is happening. It has been seen by some as evidence of the growing disconnect between management and everybody else. “We thought this used to be an Andy Lack thing,” says one employee. “But the new people are just like the old people. They’re obsessed with Republicans.”
For Hasan, joining the network, even as “the most left host,” as he saw it, was a “no-brainer” — a chance to do what he did on a bigger stage. While The Mehdi Hasan Show featured the usual mix of monologues and interviews, it was the latter, particularly when they were adversarial, that popped online. He brought a distinctly British style of debate to the network: stern, forensic, bombastic, and relentless when zeroing in on mistakes, equivocations, and contradictions. When he was hosting Head to Head, he and his team did extensive research to put together what they called “The Document,” which would include questions and a decision tree that anticipated the various answers his interlocutor might give. “I would position Mehdi very much in a U.K. media landscape,” says the feminist writer Mona Eltahawy, who taped “Do Arab Men Hate Women?,” one of the most popular episodes of Head to Head, with him. “When Mehdi came to the U.S., people did not know what hit them because the U.S. media consistently fails in its ridiculous deference to officials.”
The MSNBC show’s ratings were middling for one of the network’s weekend programs; more notable were his interviews with Republican operatives like John Bolton and Dan Crenshaw, which often generated their own headlines. One such moment happened in September during an interview with Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old biotech CEO with a Johnny Bravo hairstyle who was seeking the Republican nomination for president. The interview originated as a fight on social media, but when Ramaswamy was seated, Hasan heard him ask, “What show is this?,” at which point he thought, Okay, didn’t do your homework. He laid into him, asking why he had accepted a Soros-family fellowship for the children of immigrants while lambasting affirmative action. Ramaswamy tried to say he needed the money, but — aha! — here were his tax returns (which, whoops, Ramaswamy made public). Had he really needed a scholarship given he made $477,942 that year?
The interview went viral with a flush of praise — New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan called it “a mini masterclass of keeping eyes on the ball and refusing to be spun.” Hasan took a victory lap, doing interviews about the interview the next day, first on Morning Joe and later in the afternoon with Chris Hayes, who told him he was “the best interviewer in American media at that kind of thing.” Internally, Hasan had the respect of his peers, and his interviews were beneficial to the network when the target was someone the average MSNBC viewer would want to see skewered. “He was a star in the making on October 6, because he had taken down Ramaswamy,” says one of his former colleagues. “On October 8, he was a villain.”
The weeks following the Hamas attack on October 7 were a tense and surreal time at MSNBC. On October 9, the Monday after a weekend of breaking-news coverage, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, appeared on Morning Joe. “I love this show,” he said. “And I love this network. But I’ve got to ask, Who is writing the scripts — Hamas?” His vague criticism appeared directed at the three Muslim anchors who had worked that weekend: Ali Velshi, Ayman Mohyeldin, and Hasan, who had all long been targets of various Zionist media-watchdog groups like Camera and HonestReporting, which regularly accuse them of spreading lies about Israel. (An ADL spokesman denies Greenblatt was referring to those three hosts and says he was speaking of the coverage “writ large.”) In 2014, Mohyeldin had been working as an NBC News correspondent when he was abruptly pulled out of Gaza after reporting on an Israeli attack that killed four boys playing soccer on a beach, only to be reinstated after a social-media outcry. In 2022, Semafor reported executives had expressed “discomfort” with Mohyeldin’s and Hasan’s coverage of violence between Israel and Palestine in the year prior.
The weekend of October 7, MSNBC interrupted its recap show Morning Joe Weekend to go directly into breaking news. Velshi was the first to anchor the desk, and he brought on Mohyeldin to talk. “What is the broader context?” Mohyeldin asked Velshi, explaining how Hamas viewed the attack as retaliation for ongoing settler violence in the West Bank. “The important thing to understand in all of this is that this is not a conflict that started today.” Hasan appeared as a commentator on Sunday night, when his show would normally air, while Alex Witt anchored. In a six-minute appearance, he spoke about everyday life on the Gaza Strip, describing it as an open-air prison and stressing the population density, poverty, and high number of children. Meanwhile, Greenblatt was privately meeting with NBC executives to urge them to do something about what he saw as anti-Israel coverage (which the ADL equates with antisemitism), a fact revealed on air that Tuesday when he appeared again on Morning Joe alongside Al Sharpton. “I know you had very positive conversations with people here at the top of the network,” Sharpton said to Greenblatt. “And I think that the leadership here understood that in your conversations.”
Afterward, anchors were told by management not to give their opinions or offer context around the Hamas attack or Israel’s subsequent siege of Gaza — a directive that did not seem to apply to hosts like Joe Scarborough, who would regularly affirm his support for Israel on air and online. “Everybody put the screws to NBC and MSNBC to change the tenor of our coverage,” says one employee. “Around October 7, context was not welcome,” says another. “Context was a bad word. Empathy for Palestinians almost felt forbidden inside MSNBC.” Some employees began lodging complaints to HR about staff they felt were expressing views that were “too pro-Palestinian,” says one employee.
Meanwhile, a series of “editorial boards” were held to educate executives and staffers on Israel-Palestine. That Monday, Martin Fletcher, a former NBC correspondent in Tel Aviv, gave multiple editorialwide talks in which he made charged statements about Arabs, such as that “the original Palestinians were actually the Jews” and that the term Palestinian did not exist until after 1967. “There was a lot of controversy around how he was framing the history of the conflict,” remembers one employee. “They were the most factually incorrect, obnoxious, blatantly racist, anti-Arab editorial briefings,” says another. Afterward, the company brought in the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett. Then, to counterbalance that, they hosted the Palestinian ambassador to the U.N., Majed Bamya.
That weekend, Velshi, Ayman, and The Mehdi Hasan Show were all iced in favor of “Special News Reports” anchored by José Díaz-Balart, Lindsey Reiser, and Kate Snow. Meanwhile, anchors like Alicia Menendez and Jen Psaki worked solo during their regularly scheduled times. While Velshi appeared during his usual time slot on Sunday morning, he was paired with Witt. Over the next two weeks, Mohyeldin and Hasan would instead appear as correspondents or co-anchors on other shows.
Behind the scenes, there had been talk of changes to the weekend schedule since the summer. Everyone knew, for instance, that the Peacock shows, which were poorly branded and marketed, were not long for this world. Neither were Menendez’s and Symone Sanders-Townsend’s shows; both had been in contract renegotiations to form the panel show The Weekend. Still, prior to October 7, there had been no indication that Hasan’s MSNBC show was in danger, and it was a shock to the newsroom when it happened.
In fact, according to someone with knowledge of the newly proposed weekend schedule, before October 7 The Mehdi Hasan Show was always part of the lineup. “They needed a sacrificial lamb. There was remarkable pressure on MSNBC to say, ‘We’ve done something,’” they say, referring to compounding pressure both inside and outside the company. “They needed to show that someone lost something of value because of the Israel-Gaza stuff. You get the most bang for your buck by getting rid of him.” (According to an MSNBC spokesperson, the cancellation was a “standard programming decision.” The network added that it wished Hasan “the best of luck in his new venture.”)
Hasan was the logical choice: He was relatively new compared to Velshi and Mohyeldin, who had been at the company since 2016 and 2011, respectively, and he didn’t have the same kind of reporting background. He started during the pandemic and worked remotely from his home studio in the D.C. suburbs, which meant he wasn’t forming relationships around the watercooler at 30 Rock. He was also the loudest of the three. For his first episode back as host on MSNBC, he brought on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to discuss whether Israel was committing war crimes. On November 2, he did a monologue on “the G-word,” analyzing whether what Israel is doing in Gaza constitutes a genocide. (He ultimately says it would be up to the ICJ to decide.) The perception among management was that Hasan was “uppity,” one person says, and not a team player and thus harder to defend. “It was, ‘Mehdi doesn’t seem to be grateful for the fact that he has a job here or to understand that we need him to stop saying certain things,’” as one employee puts it.
Plus he was annoying on X. Even as social media made Hasan a star, executives found his constant tweeting a nuisance. Rebecca Kutler, an SVP who arrived in 2022 from the wreckage of CNN+ and is rumored to be the heir apparent to Rashida Jones, was known to be particularly averse to hosts expressing their opinions about the conflict online. Even while he wasn’t hosting his show, Hasan continued to track developments in Gaza and offer his perspective online. “We all feared for Mehdi because he remained Mehdi,” says one colleague. “He still questioned authority, and once the authority he was questioning was Israel, suddenly you could feel that he was in trouble. You thought, Oh God, Mehdi, don’t say another thing.”
Canceling his show was a demotion and, in a perverse way, maybe a test to see if he could be housebroken. Some employees suspect it was a form of constructive dismissal — that is, creating a situation where someone would want to resign. Others felt he should wait out the rest of his contract, play the game, fill in when other hosts were out, and see if he could get back in management’s good graces. “It probably would have been better for him at the time to demonstrate that he could play by their rules,” says one of his former colleagues.
At the IAMC event, where more than 500 Muslim Americans in Greater Dallas have gathered, Hasan is a rock star. He’s giving the keynote speech; it’s one he’s given before, warning of the interconnected rise of right-wing authoritarianism and global Islamophobia from Narendra Modi’s BJP in India to Trump in the U.S. to Netanyahu in Israel. When he bounds off the stage, it’s a free-for-all meet and greet. Salman Bhojani, one of the first Muslim Americans elected to the Texas legislature, gives Hasan his card; the artist Ambreen Butt gives him a copy of her book What Comes to My Lips. A young hijabi asks him if he’s taking any interns. There are at least 100 selfie requests for someone’s mother, father, sister, or uncle. The organizers step in after this has gone on for more than an hour. Hasan has another engagement, they say, trying to usher him out — but before he leaves, could he do a final group photo?
His calendar has been packed with Ramadan events. He crisscrosses the country like a politician stumping for votes, only in this case he’s recruiting subscribers for Zeteo. There was another IAMC event in Atlanta the previous week; he was at a mosque in Maryland the week before that, and tomorrow he’s flying to Houston for a fundraiser for Emgage, a Muslim American voter-engagement organization. “I love doing events like this because you meet real people. I’m addicted to Twitter. I have to come up for air and go, ‘That’s not real life,’” he says. He tells a story about an event he did in San Francisco where he met a Palestinian woman who had lost dozens of family members in Gaza and said to him, “You and Ayman have been our voices on TV, allowing Palestinians to speak.” “That means more to me than a thousand tweets, obviously,” he says.
Still, the tweets get to him. When he was younger, it wasn’t unusual for him to lose half a day fighting with an egg avatar. He has more restraint now, but he still has a chronic need to win every argument. Of course, criticism from the left gets under his skin the most. “Right-wingers attack me every day. Who cares,” he says. “You’re always going to be more upset when your own people come after you.” These are usually the people he refers to as “purists,” who he feels lose sight of political victories while chasing moral ones.
Take Emgage, where Hasan has done events for years. The Muslim organization has a controversial history with pro-Palestine activists, and Hasan is taken aback when I ask about it. “I didn’t even know you’d heard of Emgage,” he says. “It’s very interesting, that specificity.” A pair of investigative pieces in Electronic Intifada and the Middle East Eye exposed shady ties between many Emgage leaders and Zionist organizations like AIPAC, the ADL, and the Muslim Leadership Initiative, which would sponsor prominent Muslim Americans to go on what have been criticized as “faithwashing” trips to Israel (basically Birthright for Muslims). During the 2020 election, according to Middle East Eye’s count, Emgage endorsed at least 20 pro-Israel candidates and didn’t consider Palestinian rights as one of its core causes. Critics contended that the organization repeatedly sold out Palestine for political clout and wrote an open letter asking other individuals and organizations to “drop any affiliations” with it.
“Somebody might say to me, ‘Why are you speaking with Emgage when they’re anti-Palestinian?’” he says. “I’d say, ‘You don’t have the full facts.’” He rattles some off: Emgage has supported the candidacies of politicians who have been good on Palestine, like Summer Lee, and it has called for a cease-fire; the event he was speaking at was an iftar that would donate money to the Palestinian relief agency UNRWA. “So I’m comfortable that they are on the right side of this thing when it comes to Gaza,” he continues. “Do I agree with everything they do? No. I don’t agree with everyone anyway.” Hasan’s perspective is that it’s better for the left and Muslim Americans to build a big tent. He gets touchy when he feels like the left is eating itself (or eating him) with “purity tests” and “circular firing squads” — even as he admits to having his own “hygiene tests.” He was annoyed when people accused AOC of being a sellout when she said she would vote for Biden in spite of Gaza. He felt the same after José Andrés announced that seven employees of the World Central Kitchen had been killed by Israeli strikes and a number of X users pulled up a tweet of Andrés’s from October in which he defended Israel’s right to defend itself.
“It’s not a productive use of energy,” Hasan says. “He was wrong in October. That’s undeniably true. But now, from a purely tactical point of view, is the moment you go, ‘Hey, José Andrés is on our side. He’s on the pro-Palestinian side. He’s on the side of justice.’ Take the win.”
Hasan is embracing the “canceled” label for the hard launch of Zeteo. The Substack Politics team has thrown him an official kickoff on the seventh floor of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., where friends, subscribers, reporters, and various politicians have gathered for a live, press-the-flesh evening. Vox’s Kara Swisher is interviewing him; later, he’ll interview AOC. “The right spent the last two decades talking about cancel culture,” he says onstage. “What they didn’t tell you is the greatest victims of cancel culture are if you speak out on Palestinian issues.” Swisher asks why he decided to go with Substack. “I was trying to judge the landscape and say, ‘Where could I have the most impact with financial viability and without having to worry about an advertiser coming after you or a big tech company trying to shut you down?’”
Zeteo is already one of Substack’s star pupils. According to Hamish McKenzie, one of the platform’s co-founders, it has done “freakishly well.” “The success it’s had so far is unlike anything we’ve seen to date,” he says. It hit 150,000 total subscribers the day before the event and has passed 20,000 paid, putting it at No. 5 on the Substack Politics leaderboard, which ranks by revenue. (Bari Weiss’s The Free Press is No. 1.) It has an international reach with 195 countries represented; almost half of its subscribers come from outside the U.S., and 16 percent are from the U.K. Hasan raised an initial $4 million for Zeteo, but he’s keeping mum on the current operating budget or investors. Unsurprisingly, he is already addicted to the Substack back end, which feeds him a constant intravenous drip of information: He can send something out and watch the subscriber number go up, up, up. The hard-core freedom-of-speech philosophy and direct-to-consumer aspect was a big selling point. It’s his list, his followers, and he can leave with them if he wants.
Hasan is the most prominent personality to be regularly producing video content on the platform, a pivot away from the text-based missives it’s been known for. Zeteo’s initial thrust of contributors will be focused on commentary with Hasan’s global sensibility — that includes progressives, Muslims, Never Trumpers. This week he’s made more contributor announcements: former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood in a clear play to the center, Pakistani writer Fatima Bhutto doing a column called “The Global South,” and a biweekly podcast called Two Outspoken with British writer Owen Jones. Hasan is keeping one toe across the pond — he has an interview with London mayor Sadiq Khan in the tank. “I wonder what demographic of people will ultimately be Mehdi’s consumer base,” says one launch attendee, observing the crowd, which is largely brown and Muslim. “It’s going to be interesting to see if he’s good at breaking out beyond the community or just coalescing the community with a few sprinkles of diversity.”
After Swisher interviews Hasan, it’s AOC’s turn. It’s an interview in the key of celebration; no one’s grilling AOC tonight. There’s always been strong brand synergy between the two of them as outsiders who made it inside (she was his first guest for his MSNBC premiere). Her presence lends star power and legitimacy to the proceedings — this won’t be Tucker Carlson talking about alien conspiracies. And it’s content. The interview goes out to Zeteo subscribers the next day with clips cut for social media.
When Ocasio-Cortez walks into the green room afterward, she skillfully avoids making eye contact with me. I get the sense she doesn’t want to talk but has maybe trapped herself within a smiling, accessible, of-the-people persona. Why did she decide to do the event? “We’re in a time of so much uncertainty,” she says. “And one of the best things we can do is support new efforts that can help evolve the state of journalism to a better place.” She’s skipping the after-party.
On the third floor, other members of the Squad are holding court at the VIP reception, including Representative Rashida Tlaib, who was censured for speaking out about Palestine. I ask if she’d be willing to chat about Hasan. “No,” she says, smiling and turning away. The crowd is as much media as it is Beltway: Hasan’s old MSNBC friend Mohyeldin towers over everyone; CNN’s Brian Stelter poses for a photo with Hasan. There are print journalists like the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah and digital ones like Prem Thakkar from The Intercept, many of them perhaps wondering how viable Zeteo might be as the ice floe of traditional media continues to melt beneath their feet. “I told Mehdi, ‘Hey, if you need anything …’” jokes Attiah.
Naturally, where there are schmoozers and operators, there are also shit-talkers. One attendee asks if I noticed that Wajahat Ali, a friend of Hasan’s and a Daily Beast columnist, had the gall to ask a question about how to combat both-sides-ism during Hasan’s interview with AOC. “I was like, Are you kidding me? Because this bitch did this program called MLI,” they say, referring to the aforementioned “faithwashing” program that had ties with some Emgage leaders. Ali was one of the organization’s prominent attendees (he wrote about it for The Atlantic in a story titled “A Muslim Among Israeli Settlers”). “He was met with so much criticism from the Muslim community, and instead of turning around and saying, ‘That really made me think about it,’ he paints the attacks as baseless and senseless,” they say. “There is definitely a chasm in the community between people who value having a seat at the table and are willing to compromise and people who are absolutely not.”
And Hasan would like to have it both ways: to speak to both the activists for whom no one is good enough and the compromised careerist whose annual highlight is the White House iftar (although probably not this year). And if people are coming at him from all sides, he’s ready. His biggest gripe with the left is that there isn’t enough bare-knuckle brawling. More than anything, he loves the fight. “People are like, ‘Are you liberal, are you left, are you progressive Democrat, are you in the Squad …’ All not as important as the one overarching key, which is where I believe the Democrats and progressives have failed — which is fighting,” he says. “Do you have fight in your belly, or do you not?”
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the April 22, 2024, issue of New York Magazine.
Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the April 22, 2024, issue of New York Magazine.
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