Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.
Midday on Wednesday, the popular left-wing streamer Hasan Piker was live online when a commenter mentioned that Charlie Kirk had been shot at an event in Utah. Piker, who goes by the username HasanAbi on the streaming site Twitch, often spends up to eight hours a day broadcasting to his nearly three million followers. Like Kirk, he’s known for a combative style of debate against political opponents. His unvarnished take on current events has made him one of the most influential news figures for left-leaning young Americans. He and Kirk were scheduled to go head-to-head later this month at an event at Dartmouth College.
Initially, Piker was skeptical of the reports. “It’s my job to make sure I get this fucking breaking news story correctly,” he said. Then, as his viewers watched him, he studied a video of the shooting. “I can’t believe I just saw that,” he said, burying his face in his hands. “You do not want to see that.” The shock quickly faded. Within a few hours, Piker began to do the thing for which he is famous: inserting brash political commentary. “Trump has done so many insane things and Republicans are clapping along the entire time,” Piker said. “This is the obvious consequence of turning up the temperature like this.” The livestream has been viewed nearly four million times.
Around the same time, network television was struggling to find the right words to respond to the horrific events, falling into predictable patterns. Fox News held Kirk up as a martyr. CNN eulogized him, describing in anodyne terms his outsize impact on the American political consciousness and his reputation for initiating debates with his detractors. On MSNBC, a political analyst suggested that “hateful” thoughts and words may have led to these “hateful actions”—and was swiftly fired.
The streamers carry none of that burden. Their audiences know Kirk well—Kirk, too, was a product of this world, with a popular podcast and a social media presence wherein he posted prolifically, offering often extreme right-wing takes on political hot topics. Though legacy news outlets tend to pay little attention to these voices, they are a hugely important source of news for a growing swath of the American population, particularly Gen Z. Uninhibited by the professional decorum of a TV newsroom, their takes are raw, expletive laden, and perhaps more reflective of—and responsive to—the zeitgeist. (“Fox and CNN are fucking identical in how they cover Charlie Kirk’s obituary,” Piker complained at one point, as he commented on a livestream of a CNN broadcast. “Maybe my brain is broken, but I don’t think there is any reason to launder the reputation of someone in the aftermath of their untimely demise.”)
The takes weren’t all antagonistic. Some left-wing news influencers, acknowledging the shared space they occupied with Kirk, seemed devastated by the killing. The mononymous Parker (@parkergetajob), who once debated Kirk on the popular “Jubilee” YouTube series, told his followers on TikTok that he was at the scene, hoping to ask Kirk a question, when the shooting took place. “I just want people to know that Charlie’s family—his daughter is going to live without a father,” he said. “And that’s not okay. That’s horrible.” Dean Withers (@itsdeaann), another left-wing streamer, with over four million followers on TikTok, said in a livestream, “Regardless of the fact that he’s Charlie Kirk—Republican, MAGA—that is still a human, a person that I met, that I spoke with, that I had conversation and debate with.” He broke down in tears. “What happened to Charlie Kirk today is abhorrent.” Viewers offered heart and flower emojis.
Brandon Tatum, a right-wing streamer known as The Officer Tatum, also wept openly on his stream, although his response was more vitriolic. “I’m mad, man, I’m mad—over woke mind virus,” he said, staring directly into the camera. “There’s only so much that we can take.” Before it was clear that Kirk had died, Tatum implored his viewers to join him in praying for Kirk’s recovery, at one point asking that God “help us control the anger that we feel.” He added later, “I’m never gonna let this go. That man was on campus trying to preach the truth, and somebody killed him.” His stream has been viewed almost a million times.
Zack Hoyt (@Asmongold), a streamer with four million YouTube subscribers, likewise offered a dark vision for what will happen next. In a recorded video, he explained that expressions of political violence are rampant on social media platforms, which have allowed “extremist nutjobs” to post freely—although he blames most real-world violence on the left: “I think in the last five years or so, especially since BLM, it’s been 90 percent a left-wing thing, but that doesn’t mean that the 10 percent right-wing people are right.” He warns that the country will soon “see a lot more right-wing people balancing out those scales.” The video has been viewed over four million times.
As the day went on, some streamers seemed to be suggesting, at least momentarily, that the temperature needed to come down in online spaces. Adin Ross, a popular right-wing streamer whose YouTube video of an afternoon with Trump during the 2024 campaign helped supersize Trump’s popularity with Gen Z voters, told his viewers that he had round-the-clock security and would be scaling back on direct confrontations with the left. “I’m not going to bait these motherfuckers anymore,” he said. “I don’t want smoke.”
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
