This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
The defining art form of our times might be the reaction video. You’ve surely seen a few: some influencer gasping, or screaming, or doing bug eyes as they take in a much-hyped new song or a movie’s big twist. The point is to bottle unpredictable, sizzling human emotion into rewatchable content. Scrolling on one’s phone can be a deadening experience, but here’s someone feeling, or at least pretending to feel, a genuine feeling—even if the abundance of these videos surely numbs us further.
Last week, a video of Hasan Piker reacting to the sight of Charlie Kirk getting shot during a discussion at Utah Valley University on Wednesday quickly accumulated millions of views. It was unwittingly made: Piker, a leftist commentator and video-game influencer, was broadcasting live on the streaming platform Twitch on Wednesday, browsing around the internet in an attempt to nail down the truth of what had happened. In an automatic-thinking patter, he said, “There’s a closer footage of Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck here as well where you can clear—” and here he recoiled as the video played out of sight from the audience—“Ohhhh, he’s dead. Oh my God, he’s definitely dead. Oh my God. I can’t believe I just saw that.”
A string of pearl-like beads peeked out from beneath Piker’s midnight-blue collar; he took his thick glasses off his face and rubbed his eyes. His backdrop was a colorful tableau of posters, a neon sign, and a dozing dog. He looked the part of a hot celebrity living a comfortable and fun life in Los Angeles. Yet he was processing, in real time, a gory murder that held personal implications. Kirk was his peer in an ascendant content-creator class now under mortal threat from the very culture it helped shape.
Kirk was a political operator, a campus organizer, and a close confidant of Donald Trump—but to many people who knew of him, he functioned as an entertainer. Whether at in-person debates or on podcasts and YouTube, he cut through the gray sameness of political commentary with boyish and bouncy verve. His activist group Turning Point USA helped update the young-Republican aesthetic, swapping bow ties for T-shirts and making rallies feel like rock concerts. Last year, his Jubilee Media debate video went mega-viral in part because of its cinematic value: Kirk delivered explosive opinions with a twinkle and a shrug, absorbing the repulsion of his opponents without dropping his upright posture and cheery grin.
If Kirk was an influencer, his influence was not just what he said but how he said it—and the way that style served to draw more people into politics. He made debate look cute and sporty and admirable, like a game anyone could play. On Wednesday in Utah, Kirk was in his typical folksy-performer mode, sparring with college students while wearing a white T-shirt under a tent that said PROVE ME WRONG. It looked like he was having fun, right up until the moment when he was shot.
In some ways, Piker is his closest counterpart on the left. He’s not nearly as enmeshed in his political party’s institutions as Kirk was, but since last year’s presidential election, the 34-year-old Piker has received heaps of mainstream-media attention for possibly being an answer to Democrats’ inability to connect with young men: He’s a jacked, funny bro who loves Elden Ring and universal health care. But he’s been in the discursive arena for about a decade now. “Charlie Kirk and myself gained prominence in American politics at about the same time,” he said on the stream, pointing out that he’d debated Kirk multiple times over the years. They were set to debate each other again later this month at Dartmouth, on the topic of “the politics of youth.”
I tuned in to Piker’s livestream on Wednesday shortly after news of the shooting broke. He was doing his typical streamer duties—clicking between news footage and social posts, offering bursts of monologued commentary. But he was clearly shaken; he sighed, and fell into silence again and again. “I go out to public settings like this all the time,” he said, referring to Kirk’s event. “There’s a level of closeness in that regard because of the nature of what I do.” At one point, his phone lit up with a notification. Someone had left a comment on YouTube saying it should have been Piker who was killed.
His chat room—a continual stream of comments from fans—expressed a range of reactions to Kirk’s death. Some viewers urged Piker to take a day off, to get security, to condemn the shooting (he did, calling it “unacceptable” and “abhorrent”). Some said that Kirk deserved what he got, which incensed Piker. “You guys are saying things right now that is completely fucking ridiculous,” he said. “You’re saying things without even assuming how it reflects on yourself, how it reflects on the left, how it reflects on people like myself—deliberately putting someone like myself in the fucking crosshairs, in the line of fire. There is never going to be a moment where I will ever advocate for fucking political violence of this sort.”
That last statement will sound rich to any critic of Piker’s. This year, he was temporarily suspended from Twitch for saying that Republicans who care about Medicare fraud should “kill” Rick Scott; in 2019, he caused outrage when said that the United States “deserved” 9/11. In his telling, these were overheated and “inappropriate” word choices that distracted from the points he was trying to make. (The 9/11 comment—a claim that U.S. foreign policy had motivated the terror attacks—resurfaced last week in the New York City mayoral race when Andrew Cuomo attacked Zohran Mamdani for his association with Piker.) But Piker, like many other streamers, is accustomed to speaking glibly about serious matters. In his stream on Wednesday, as GOP figures began calling for righteous “war” on the left, he seemed to be contemplating the impact that careless rhetoric can have.
Using lingo native to his audience, he explained the self-defeating logic of political violence. Kirk’s death would likely inspire “adventurists” to go on “vengeance quests” (or: inspire hotheads to take revenge). He talked about how it would be used to feed the political meta-narrative in ways that benefited the right, giving it pretext for “insane shit.” His interest in deescalation seemed earnest and pleading. But Piker was speaking of politics as it is so often spoken of now: as a game. He didn’t seem to be trying to pull his audience back from a view of the world that thinks in terms of wins and losses, and that turns the other side into non-player characters whose lives don’t matter. He was mostly just warning that certain tactics would make liberals and leftists lose.
Since the shooting, Piker has modeled a different tactic: using the attention he’s receiving to amplify his own side’s worldview. In a New York Times column, he wrote that America’s rapacious capitalism, support for international wars, and lack of gun control created the conditions for what happened in Utah. This confluence of factors, he argued, builds resentment and a taste for violence, eventually affecting “the way many of my viewers—and many of the people who followed Mr. Kirk—see the world.” Left unsaid in the article is that what unifies his and Kirk’s viewers is not just the country they live in but also the media ecosystem in which they participate.
To be a public figure is to be at risk, and both political leaders and entertainers have long been subjected to threats, stalking, and even assassinations by unwell people who have developed an obsession with them from afar. The means by which that kind of obsession can be cultivated are more potent than ever, and many of today’s most influential public figures foster a sense of accessibility, and intimacy, that would be unthinkable for previous generations. If we are, as is frequently said, living in an era of extraordinary political violence, it cannot be understood as separate from the rising cultural hunger to reach out and touch—or do much worse to—the people on our screens.
But part of Kirk’s importance was that he was not merely a figure on a screen—he built power in real life, insisting on face-to-face dialogue, using the format of adversarial debate to challenge online echo chambers. His death may have a chilling effect on similar efforts, pushing politics even further into the virtual realm, creating more radicalism and dehumanization. Piker noted that his “IRL” efforts seem newly risky: “I have a policy of not living in fear. But we’ll see. I might have to reconfigure certain things.” On Friday, the inscriptions on the bullets found with the gun that killed Kirk were revealed. They included an up arrow followed by a right arrow and then three down arrows—a button combination that, in one video game, drops a bomb on your opponent.
