Hasan Piker on Charlie Kirk

At the time of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Hasan Piker was in a sense doing the same thing as Mr. Kirk: making content.

News of the attack reached him as he was streaming from his home in Los Angeles, which he does for many hours most days. Mr. Piker, 34, who identifies as a socialist, had very different politics from Mr. Kirk. But they did have some things in common. They were stars of a new political media class, major figures in the contest to win the hearts and minds of young Americans and unafraid of courting controversy. Mr. Piker and Mr. Kirk had debated several times before and were scheduled to debate again, at Dartmouth College, later this month.

These men were foes, but they shared an arena.

On Saturday, in a guest essay for New York Times Opinion, Mr. Piker wrote of “the horror of seeing someone whom I know — not a friend or an ally, but a human being I know personally and have debated before — fall victim to what clearly seems to be a rising tide of political violence.”

In a separate interview with The New York Times, Mr. Piker talked about what Mr. Kirk’s death means for the kind of attention-grabbing media activism the two men have helped define from opposite sides of the political divide. He also said that while he will continue with his own activism, the assassination has been a “wake-up call” about his own personal safety.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

There’s always been a question of, to what extent are online political influencers sincere? Does what happened Wednesday change your understanding of how serious the political situation is in the country right now?

HASAN PIKER I care about the communities that I advocate for. I’ve never seen myself as assuming a particular role for entertainment purposes, although I do consider myself to be an entertainer with a political ideology around a well-defined vision for a better future.

It feels very real for me because of the proximity that I had to Charlie, someone who was on the opposing side, someone who I oppose quite vehemently, but someone who I knew as a human being for almost a decade at this point, someone whose career started alongside mine. We were there as ideological opposites in the numerous times that we debated one another at Politicon, and we were slated to debate one another again at Dartmouth after many years of not doing so.

You brought up Charlie and yourself as sort of parallel figures who came up at the same time and made your bones at the same time. Did you have an offstage relationship with him?

PIKER We did not have any close and personal relationship outside of publicly sparring in debates and then also on Twitter. That’s it.

What was unique about Charlie from your perspective as a political influencer?

PIKER The biggest difference with Charlie was that he already had a network and infrastructure built around Turning Point USA, which had limited success in actively galvanizing the youth vote to go and vote for Donald Trump — or any Republican, for that matter — until TikTok. But he already had a network on college campuses because of the design of Turning Point USA, so I think he used that network to turn out the same kind of “SJW own” (or “social justice warrior”) compilation videos that Ben Shapiro had done, which helped him skyrocket to success in the first Trump administration. I think that the difference with Charlie Kirk was that, one, he did it on TikTok, which actually did reach a massive audience that was looking for the exact same kind of slam dunk compilations. And the major difference here is that Charlie already had an infrastructure so he had a foothold on all of these campuses and took advantage of that I think very well.

Do you think what happened will change the way that political influencers relate to their audience and put themselves out there in crowds?

PIKER I have been the recipient of millions of death threats over the course of the past decade of my professional media broadcasting career. And it’s always in the back of your mind when you’re doing this sort of stuff, but it’s something that I’ve been able to compartmentalize. So it’s probably what I’m going to continue doing as well, because I can’t let fear dictate my life.

I can’t speak for others, but I suspect there will probably be more security in the future for everyone involved, and people will probably continue doing this kind of stuff. I don’t think they’re going to stop doing it. As a matter of fact, a lot of people are already trying to take over the mantle of “the person who debates college freshman” because they see that as a very successful vehicle to deliver a right-wing message to a much broader audience on the internet.

There’s been reporting about the messages that the shooter engraved in the shell casings that reveal he was almost certainly steeped in online culture. Does that tell us anything, or does it just tell us he’s a young man in 2025?

PIKER Going forward, I think we’re going to see a lot more indecipherable politics around meme culture and what my generation considers to be “brain rot.” It is very hard to clearly define what were the ideological markers, the ideological motivations that led this person to do this thing, this assassination. But that confusion I think is being utilized by many, including people in positions of power, like the administration and many other prominent Republicans in Congress, to enact some sort of vengeance or political persecution of all political dissidents that have spoken out against either Charlie Kirk, or even the Trump administration.

It makes me wonder if there’s some kind of free-floating anger or sense of meaninglessness or helplessness among young men. I wonder whether that’s something you see.

PIKER Yes and no. I try to redirect people’s anger and resentment to systemic problems because I’m a leftist, I’m a Marxist, I’m a socialist, and therefore I believe that everything still comes back to material conditions. And that’s what people’s anger and resentment are born out of: deteriorating material conditions and hopelessness that is instilled upon them because they don’t see a hopeful future.

There is clearly an affordability crisis. There’s this notion brewing among the youth because they’re never gonna retire at a reasonable age, they’re never gonna be able to own a home. Fifty percent of our salary is going back to the rent, right? The price of a college education has skyrocketed, and it’s not even a guarantee that you will have a decent job with decent wages and benefits that your parents had.

So all of that I think feeds into this and what I try to do is explain to people that when all seems hopeless, that the best possible thing you can do is reach out to one another and organize your communities to be the change that you want to see in the world to claw back some sense of autonomy.

There’s been a lot of debate online about the right way to remember Charlie Kirk. How do you think we should remember him?

PIKER I think we should be honest and reflect honestly when discussing Charlie Kirk’s output as a shrewd political operative. I think it’s a disservice to his memory to offer blanket statements, to make it seem as though he was just a political activist. I think it’s important to remember his contributions. And if people consider that to be negative, then they consider those contributions to be negative.

But I have seen a lot of people simply talk about Charlie Kirk from a technical aspect, as someone who was incredibly skilled and even someone who valued free speech. When in fact the administration that he associated with and its policies that he was defending and supporting are definitely not pro free speech. Whether it be the college campus lists, the professor watch list that he had put together to even scare professors that he considered to be radical, that he considered to be ideologically opposed to his worldview. Or whether it even be the potential deportation of Mohammed Khalil for criticizing the state of Israel. These I think are not simple footnotes, but important aspects of the complicated legacy of Charlie Kirk.