He Was Supposed to Debate Charlie Kirk in a Few Weeks. He’s Worried Our Discussions of Kirk’s Death Are Missing Something Vital.

Hasan Piker is a talker.

He spends up to eight hours^[1] a day in front of a microphone and a camera, streaming on Twitch. He talks so much that he doesn’t even remember what he was talking about last week when he started to hear that Charlie Kirk had been shot.

Watching Piker^[2] stream is a little like watching a cable news commentator who is simultaneously an air traffic controller. He has a whole lot of feeds up at once. His audience can message one another and him in real time. He’s often inhaling the entire internet and spitting it back out with his own particular spin, in real time.

His spin is unapologetically leftist. It made him an epistemological rival of Kirk’s. On Wednesday, Piker told his viewers that if the rumors about the Charlie Kirk shooting were true, there must be video. Which is when they started sending links. First, from a distance—crowds running. Then, closer. Having covered so much violence, like the atrocities in Gaza, he thought he was desensitized. But the video struck a chord with him. “Being close to the situation, being that this was a person that I knew, a person that I had also debated,” he said, “just all of your fears as a political commentator become real in that moment.” In fact, Hasan Piker was scheduled to debate Charlie Kirk at Dartmouth University later this month, a left vs. right Vidal vs. Buckley^[3] for the streaming age. But now, travel, public speaking—it all feels different.

On a recent episode^[4] of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Piker about who Kirk was, what he stood for, and the reactionary political project he was working to advance. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: You were set to debate Charlie Kirk at Dartmouth a little later this month. And you’ve known him for years. Did you feel you knew him personally, in addition to professionally? 

Hasan Piker: I wouldn’t say I knew him personally. We’ve only been around one another in very limited environments, never like a personal friendship or anything like that. He was very cordial with the people he debated. For a lot of civility fetishists, that’s seen as the ultimate thing. That’s why you’re seeing a lot of glowing profiles being written about Charlie right now, because this was a horrifying tragedy that requires people from every part of the political spectrum to try and actively bring the temperature down to the best of their ability, even though there are some in positions of power who are doing the exact opposite, like President Donald Trump, who’s used this tragedy to go after his political enemies or those he perceives as a real threat. But a lot of liberal institutions have reflected on Charlie Kirk’s output as simply a political activist who always wanted to have open-minded conversations with people.

He was a shrewd political operative and very successful in that regard. Most of his success did come from TikTok. The first time he was actually reaching real audiences of the youth was in the aftermath of his big TikTok push. He already had the infrastructure built across high schools and college campuses with Turning Point USA, but that had reached a limited success despite the endless amounts of money that it was getting from wealthy Republican institutional megadonors. By using the format of debate, even though it was just very successful Republican propaganda, he garnered a lot of attention from Gen Z voters.

Now you see that format everywhere, like with Jubilee. I’m wondering, as someone who was prepared to go into debate with Charlie Kirk, would you say anyone won or lost the debates you had? Was that the point? ^[5]

I’m not the biggest fan of the debate format in general, because there are a lot of limitations to it in terms of arriving at the truth and truly changing people’s minds. But it can be a good starting point for a lot of people. I have this opinion that 40 percent on either side already have their minds made up. They just want to see their champion ritualistically humiliate their opponent and the opponent’s ideology. But there’s 20 percent in the middle, 10 and 10 on either side, that are in the margins that can be convinced, right? And debates are successful for that, to get that 20 percent on your side. They’re also successful in terms of teaching your side the appropriate talking points.

The structure of debate, especially quippy one-liners, messaging discipline, and a litany of logically fallacious arguments that you present and that you rationalize in that very moment, makes it much easier for Republicans to dominate in this sphere.

It’s entertaining and it’s galvanizing. And an earnest back-and-forth, especially with a skilled orator championing this cause, can be an eye-opening moment for many.

Ezra Klein of the New York Times wrote this op-ed basically saying Charlie Kirk was “doing politics the right way.” Do you agree with that?^[6]

I don’t. This goes back to the blind side that many liberals, especially institutional liberals, have. And the broader readership of the New York Times is not even in agreement with Ezra Klein on this one. Only focusing on the technical side of Charlie Kirk’s machine of political commentary is a disservice to the readership, because ultimately, what matters most is his political output, and his political output as a political commentator was not moderate at all.

Can you think about things that Charlie Kirk advocated for, policies, statements he made, things that you think maybe haven’t been highlighted by mainstream media and in the wake of his death?  

A lot of anti-Black sentiment, anti-brown sentiment, and anti-immigrant sentiment. These are not issues that Charlie shied away from. He debated those positions pretty vociferously. Openly. He was also anti-Islam: He implied that Zohran Mamdani and Muslims were responsible for 9/11 and it was a real danger that now Zohran was going to potentially become the mayor of a city that experienced 9/11. This is just transparent bigotry. No matter which way you cut it.

Were you surprised by who the alleged shooter turned out to be?

No, not at all.

We still don’t know the exact ideological profile or the motives of the suspect. But the reason why it was unsurprising to me is that more often than not, it is a statistical likelihood that the shooter in the United States of America is going to be a straight white man with indecipherable politics.

That is all too common. Even in this past year and a half, there was a female school shooter, there was a Black school shooter, but both were radicalized in a network of far-right neo-Nazi Telegram channels.

This shooter was writing things on bullet casings, too. And in the beginning, the rumors, which were wrong, were that it had to do with “transgender ideology.” When you read about what was actually theoretically on these bullet casings, it was memes. It was incredibly online references to video games. Did you recognize this stuff when you heard it? Does it tell you anything about the motivations here? ^[8]

I recognized all of the references as soon as I read them. One is a Helldivers code. Helldivers is a very famous shooting game online.

The worst part about this is that it doesn’t reveal motivations. “Bella Ciao” being written on one of the casings, under normal circumstances, would lead me to believe that this person is most likely a leftist, because this is an international call for anti-fascists. But from what I understand, the dynamic is unclear.

There is an increasing movement of ultra-nihilistic, oftentimes still esoteric, neo-Nazi-adjacent, so obviously far-right instances of stochastic terror that are coming from some of these groups that actively try to radicalize and groom very young people who have significant mental health complications into committing these atrocities. And they consider them to be like heroes. This is a growing concern. And they operate within Roblox, they operate on Telegram channels, and I think we are woefully incompetent in dealing with this kind of internet radicalization.

Do you think there’s someone on the right who’s going to take up Charlie Kirk’s mantle? 

There are already people on the right salivating at the prospect of taking on that position. I’ve seen Ben Shapiro talk about how he’s going to carry that mantle for Charlie, almost immediately after Charlie’s death. A lot of people on Twitter are now celebrating that Nick Fuentes is going to be this new beacon that will move the youth.

Would you debate Nick Fuentes? 

I can’t say, because the way that I bracket off people who have openly denied the Holocaust and things of that nature, and don’t shy away from the moniker of fascism, is that not platforming them is probably the appropriate way to go. However, if their platform grows to such a size that they become a real figurehead of a movement, then the dynamic changes, and that calculation changes a bit for me.

That seems to be the problem we’ve locked ourselves into. Like, yes, it would be better to not platform people with these ideas, but when they have this much power, you have to engage with them, and then you’re in a cycle.

No, absolutely. But whether we agree with it or not, it does seem like, at least for the online youth wing of the Republican Party, it’s moving in that direction. And the reason why I say this is because Charlie Kirk would not have been considered a moderate person 10 years ago. Like, saying the Civil Rights Act was a mistake or talking openly about how they would be fearful of a Black pilot—these are things that were outside of the permission structure for regular mainstream conservatives and conservatism in general. They might have believed it, but they just wouldn’t entertain it.

Or say it out loud. 

They wouldn’t say it out loud. Now we’ve moved into that space where a lot of mainstream conservatives are saying the quiet part out loud, which, of course, normalizes even more extreme rhetoric on that side.

It sounds like you’re saying Charlie Kirk was killed, but Charlie Kirk–ism is alive and well. 

The spirit of contemporary conservatism is still very much in action. The project that Charlie Kirk played a formative role in is still continuing.

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