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The defining art form of our times might be the reaction video. You\u2019ve 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\u2019s big twist. The point is to bottle unpredictable, sizzling human emotion into rewatchable content. Scrolling on one\u2019s phone can be a deadening experience, but here\u2019s someone feeling, or at least pretending to feel, a genuine feeling\u2014even if the abundance of these videos surely numbs us further.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cThere\u2019s a closer footage of Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck here as well where you can clear\u2014\u201d and here he recoiled as the video played out of sight from the audience\u2014\u201cOhhhh, he\u2019s dead. Oh my God, he\u2019s definitely dead. Oh my God. I can\u2019t believe I just saw that.\u201d<\/p>\n
A string of pearl-like beads peeked out from beneath Piker\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Kirk was a political operator, a campus organizer, and a close confidant of Donald Trump\u2014but 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.<\/p>\n
If Kirk was an influencer, his influence was not just what he said but how he said it\u2014and 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<\/span>. It looked like he was having fun, right up until the moment when he was shot.<\/p>\n In some ways, Piker is his closest counterpart on the left. He\u2019s not nearly as enmeshed in his political party\u2019s institutions as Kirk was, but since last year\u2019s presidential election, the 34-year-old Piker has received heaps of mainstream-media attention for possibly being an answer to Democrats\u2019 inability to connect with young men: He\u2019s a jacked, funny bro who loves Elden Ring<\/em> and universal health care. But he\u2019s been in the discursive arena for about a decade now. \u201cCharlie Kirk and myself gained prominence in American politics at about the same time,\u201d he said on the stream, pointing out that he\u2019d debated Kirk multiple times over the years. They were set to debate each other again later this month at Dartmouth, on the topic of \u201cthe politics of youth.\u201d<\/p>\n I tuned in to Piker\u2019s livestream on Wednesday shortly after news of the shooting broke. He was doing his typical streamer duties\u2014clicking 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. \u201cI go out to public settings like this all the time,\u201d he said, referring to Kirk\u2019s event. \u201cThere\u2019s a level of closeness in that regard because of the nature of what I do.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n His chat room\u2014a continual stream of comments from fans\u2014expressed a range of reactions to Kirk\u2019s death. Some viewers urged Piker to take a day off, to get security, to condemn the shooting (he did, calling it \u201cunacceptable\u201d and \u201cabhorrent\u201d). Some said that Kirk deserved what he got, which incensed Piker. \u201cYou guys are saying things right now that is completely fucking ridiculous,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re saying things without even assuming how it reflects on yourself, how it reflects on the left, how it reflects on people like myself\u2014deliberately 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.\u201d<\/p>\n That last statement will sound rich to any critic of Piker\u2019s. This year, he was temporarily suspended from Twitch for saying that Republicans who care about Medicare fraud should \u201ckill\u201d Rick Scott; in 2019, he caused outrage when said that the United States \u201cdeserved\u201d 9\/11. In his telling, these were overheated and \u201cinappropriate\u201d word choices that distracted from the points he was trying to make. (The 9\/11 comment\u2014a claim that U.S. foreign policy had motivated the terror attacks\u2014resurfaced 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 \u201cwar\u201d on the left, he seemed to be contemplating the impact that careless rhetoric can have.<\/p>\n Using lingo native to his audience, he explained the self-defeating logic of political violence. Kirk\u2019s death would likely inspire \u201cadventurists\u201d to go on \u201cvengeance quests\u201d (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 \u201cinsane shit.\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019t matter. He was mostly just warning that certain tactics would make liberals and leftists lose.<\/p>\n Since the shooting, Piker has modeled a different tactic: using the attention he\u2019s receiving to amplify his own side\u2019s worldview. In a New York Times<\/em> column, he wrote that America\u2019s 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 \u201cthe way many of my viewers\u2014and many of the people who followed Mr. Kirk\u2014see the world.\u201d Left unsaid in the article is that what unifies his and Kirk\u2019s viewers is not just the country they live in but also the media ecosystem in which they participate.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2014or do much worse to\u2014the people on our screens.<\/p>\n But part of Kirk\u2019s importance was that he was not merely a figure on a screen\u2014he 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 \u201cIRL\u201d efforts seem newly risky: \u201cI have a policy of not living in fear. But we\u2019ll see. I might have to reconfigure certain things.\u201d 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\u2014a button combination that, in one video game, drops a bomb on your opponent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s big<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21607,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1903,3964,1210],"class_list":{"0":"post-21606","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-dangerous","9":"tag-fame","10":"tag-kind"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}