What Hasan Piker Told His Millions of Followers After Charlie Kirk Was Shot
For all the obvious reasons, hearing that Charlie Kirk had been shot was shocking for Hasan Piker, the progressive influencer and Twitch streamer with a massive following. But there was another explanation for why his stomach sank.
Not only had he personally known Kirk, he was set to debate him at the Dartmouth Political Union about young people and politics — left vs. right — in just two weeks.
And soon after, Piker watched as his own death threats started to arrive.
“That is the one fear that’s always in the back of your mind when you engage in any sort of political advocacy when you do these events,” Piker told POLITICO Magazine. “As a recipient of millions of death threats at this point over the years, watching that unfold in real time was devastating.”
Piker said he would likely “wait for the temperature to lower a little bit” but would ultimately keep doing public events; he doesn’t want to live in fear.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Piker also talked about his worries of a new era of “decentralized violence” in the United States, why Kirk found an audience among Gen Zers and whether our political discourse can be healed.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m so sorry that we’re talking under these circumstances, but I wanted to talk with you about Charlie Kirk’s death, and your first reaction.
It was pure horror. I had a couple people say [while I was streaming] that there was a guy on Twitter being like, “Charlie Kirk just got shot in the neck at the event I’m at.” And I was like, “There’s no way.” I investigated a little bit further. I knew these kinds of events are filmed by many different points of view, because there’s a lot of people. Charlie Kirk’s whole team is there, they’re filming. I was like, “There’s no way that this is happening and no one knows about it, or no one is showing footage.”
When breaking news stories normally unfold when I’m live, especially if it’s like a shooting, there’s a lot of misinformation that gets thrown around. So, I usually will wait for official confirmation, whether it’s a journalist or whether it’s the police coming out and releasing a statement or whatever. But in this circumstance, I knew that there were a lot of cameras that would be at an event such as this one. So I just started, with my community, scouring the internet, and very quickly arrived at a couple different livestreams that showed a bunch of people running around, one shot being fired. There was one other video that was filmed from above that showed the moment of impact, but not too much else. But it was very clear that a shooting had taken place, and he had been shot in the neck. And then I saw the actual close-up footage of it, and it was truly horrifying.
I think it’s interesting, because I cover all of the atrocities unfolding in Gaza all the time, every day, and there are so many. And as a part of my profession, I see a lot of horrible images in general, throughout global conflict. I think seeing someone who I know — not someone I’m fond of but still, someone that I’ve known for years, someone I’ve debated before, someone that I was supposed to be debating in two weeks, someone who I guess is in the same field as myself, someone who does basically what I do, but on the right — that is the one fear that’s always in the back of your mind when you engage in any sort of political advocacy when you do these events. As a recipient of millions of death threats at this point over the years, watching that unfold in real time was devastating.
Read More Here: Politico
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