Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker weighed in on the “horrible” assassination of Charlie Kirk, saying he wishes he could still debate the conservative activist, but “tragedy intervened.”
Piker said he found out about Kirk’s fatal shooting while livestreaming on Twitch Wednesday.
Piker, a political commentator, was set to debate Kirk on Sept. 25 at Dartmouth College, a discussion that was going to be centered on the challenges and priorities facing young voters in the U.S.
“What shocked me was not merely the graphic nature of what took place. It was the horror of seeing someone whom I know — not a friend or an ally, but a human being I know personally and have debated before — fall victim to what clearly seems to be a rising tide of political violence,” Piker wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times, which was published Saturday morning.
The Twitch streamer outlined three insights he believes can be derived from Kirk’s “horrible death.”
“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,” Piker said.
Kirk was shot and killed while talking at Utah Valley University. Authorities identified Kirk’s alleged assassin as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah resident.
The second insight, Piker argues, is that violence “never originates in a vacuum” and that the “killing of a high-profile political content creator — regardless of why it happened — speaks to a breakdown in our social order.”
“The social challenges include rising rents and homelessness, the destruction caused by climate change, titanic levels of inequality, and too many others to name here,” the left-wing political commentator wrote in the op-ed. “Our capitalist way of life — always accumulating, never evening out — leaves more and more people to deal with these problems on their own.”
“This produces feelings of isolation and resentment as material conditions worsen,” Piker said. “And considering that our society is swamped by and yet somehow stitched together by a 24/7 news cycle that too often feeds this resentment, it is little wonder that a country of stressed-out gun owners would have so many grim, needless gun deaths.”
Piker’s third takeaway is that Americans are desensitized to habitual violence, connecting it to U.S. intervention abroad.
“There’s a connection between our culture of violence and American foreign policy,” Piker wrote. “Over time, our culture of violence has targeted people around the world — anywhere from Cuba to Iraq — people who serve as literal targets for American weapons and bombs, absorbing what I think of as Americans’ excess capacity for violence.”
He added that, “Pulling a gun or launching a missile has become part of our national character, a sad reduction of morality to the time it takes for fingers to pull triggers.”
“I would have liked to ask Mr. Kirk about all these things. He and I identified some of the same problems, but our views clashed about their causes and their potential solutions,” the Twitch streamer said.
Younger Americans are feeling a sense of “growing hopelessness” due to, in part, “many” in power not listening to their struggles, according to Piker.
“I wanted to debate Mr. Kirk,” he continued. “But because of a violent act, now I can’t.”
