Hasan Piker was supposed to debate Charlie Kirk. That never happened. The Turning Point USA founder was assassinated on September 10 at Utah Valley University in Orem. Piker is an unabashed leftist, and his opinion piece in The New York Times might come off as measured, but he’s anything but that. Of course, he segues into gun control here:
Even before knowing exactly why Mr. Kirk was killed, I think there are some disturbing and necessary insights that can be drawn from his horrible death, ideas that affect the way many of my viewers — and many of the people who followed Mr. Kirk — see the world.
The first of these insights is hardly new. The United States has both very loose gun laws and more violent gun deaths per capita than any other developed nation in the world. And while shootings occur most anywhere, campuses can be especially deadly. As news broke that Mr. Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University, there was a near-simultaneous tragedy at a high school in small-town Colorado, where a 16-year-old shot two fellow students. There have been 47 school shootings this year.
Though it may ultimately prove correct to classify Mr. Kirk’s death as a tectonic political murder, the shooting was not itself uncommon or extraordinary. The victim was.
The second idea is more general and is connected to perhaps why these kinds of killings happen in the first place. Violence almost never originates in a vacuum, and the killing of a high-profile political content creator — regardless of why it happened — speaks to a breakdown in our social order.
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And that’s where you can stop, because of this:
🚨 Hasan Piker sat down with Mother Jones to rail against Charlie Kirk’s “dangerous rhetoric.” I watched the full interview and pulled together a supercut with fact-checks of my own.
— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) September 14, 2025
Kirk’s views were mainstream conservative and he treated opponents with respect. Piker,… pic.twitter.com/Pk8cE5CHdW
Hasan Piker, who has justified numerous acts of political violence, including 9/11, complains that Charlie Kirk received a moment of silence from the New York Yankees.
— AF Post (@AFpost) September 11, 2025
Follow: @AFpost
pic.twitter.com/kYb1y4gMx7
NY Times just published a piece by this guy, Hasan Piker, about Charlie Kirk
— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) September 15, 2025
Piker is widely considered one of the most influential Democrat influencers today
pic.twitter.com/0WLTov389a
Don’t be fooled. Charlie Kirk had the patience of a saint to subject himself to this abuse for years. It paid off—the blue wall around the youth vote has collapsed. He was unafraid to venture into these deep blue enclaves in academia and utterly embarrass the puerile, shallow agenda of the Left. Some liberals were respectful. Some on the right were obnoxious. And yes, there were many instances of being screeched at by left-wingers. Kirk soaked it all up because not every conversation needs to be calm, collected, and respectful. Although some aspects can turn ugly, the principle of maintaining communication and engaging one another was at the core of his mission. If you wanted to yell at him, he was there. Whether it was to talk, to be yelled at, insulted, whatever, Charlie Kirk was willing to debate or have a chat. That’s a quality that’s absent on the Left. They would rather kill us.
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