Remember when The New York Times got so angry over a guest opinion piece by GOP Sen. Tom Cotton back in the summer of George Floyd that they chased an editor out the door as retribution for it? Those were the days.
Cotton, if you’ll recall, had committed the grave thoughtcrime of suggesting that maybe — just maybe — the chaos in America’s streets called for military intervention. This occasioned cries of racism and the resignation of James Bennet, the editorial page editor.
But when Charlie Kirk was assassinated five years later, the Times brought in one of the most notorious online leftist anti-Semites to bray about the nature of political violence (spoiler alert: it doesn’t come from the left or from him, even though the alleged assassin was apparently a leftist and has called for violence on numerous occasions) and lecture us all about why the Turning Point USA founder was really killed.
Kirk was shot and killed at age 31 at an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. He leaves behind a wife and two children.
Of all the people to not give a platform to in the wake of Kirk’s death, it’d be difficult to think of someone more odious than Hasan Piker. Piker is an incredibly popular Twitch streamer, who also happens to be a terror apologist and polybigot who believes Zionists are the new neo-Nazis.
The fact that Twitch platforms him is problem enough in its own right, but that’s a social media platform which focuses on video game streamers. The Times — which, despite its credibility crises in the 21st century, is still one of America’s two or three newspapers of record — is another matter entirely. And yet, this isn’t the first time they’ve given Piker a relatively uncritical platform to spread his rhetoric; in April, they ran a fawning piece in which they talked about how he was “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere.’“
The Times managed to not just sneak under expectations but dig a trench in the ground and burrow miles beneath them: Not only did they allow Piker a platform to discuss his opinion of Kirk’s death, they also published an interview with Piker in which he fretted for his own safety.
Piker’s opinion essay was titled “I Was Supposed to Debate Charlie Kirk. Here’s What I Would Have Said.” Another spoiler alert for you: Not “I’m sorry, this shouldn’t have happened to you,” or “it’s time for the left to ratchet down the rhetoric.”
Selections from the piece:
Should The New York Times apologize for this piece?
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 social challenges include rising rents and homelessness, the destruction caused by climate change, titanic levels of inequality, and too many others to name here. 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. 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.
This connects to my final idea.
Americans inhabit a culture of violence to which we have become habitually desensitized. There’s a connection between our culture of violence and American foreign policy. 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.
So, in other words: It was the guns, and also America, because we’re awful. But Cuba and Iraq, inter alia — those are the real victims. They published this, too. This was a real thing, pushed by the Times just three days after Kirk’s assassination.
It somehow gets worse: Joseph Bernstein of the Times also conducted an interview with Piker about Kirk where the streamer “talked about what Mr. Kirk’s death means for the kind of attention-grabbing media activism the two men have helped define.”
This anti-adversarial interview went about as you might expect. Again, excerpts:
Do you think what happened will change the way that political influencers relate to their audience and put themselves out there in crowds?
PIKER I have been the recipient of millions of death threats over the course of the past decade of my professional media broadcasting career. And it’s always in the back of your mind when you’re doing this sort of stuff, but it’s something that I’ve been able to compartmentalize. So it’s probably what I’m going to continue doing as well, because I can’t let fear dictate my life. …
It makes me wonder if there’s some kind of free-floating anger or sense of meaninglessness or helplessness among young men. I wonder whether that’s something you see.
PIKER Yes and no. I try to redirect people’s anger and resentment to systemic problems because I’m a leftist, I’m a Marxist, I’m a socialist, and therefore, I believe that everything still comes back to material conditions. And that’s what people’s anger and resentment are born out of: deteriorating material conditions and hopelessness that is instilled upon them because they don’t see a hopeful future.
Charlie Kirk got killed; Hasan Piker is the victim. Charlie Kirk thrived off of meaninglessness; Hasan Piker’s Marxism “redirects” it.
Anyone familiar with Piker probably shouldn’t be stunned at this kind of thing:
WARNING: The following videos contain vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
Dear Mr @elonmusk sir.
Hasan Piker called for the death of:
– Senator Tom Cotton (a tweet on X)
– Senator Rick Scott
– Landlords
– “fascists” (he’s made 5+ videos on youtube calling you a nazi btw)
– Zionists (he means Jews)
– said “someone’s gotta do it” regarding Trump
-… https://t.co/v2wyeWtkPa— Nux (@Nux_Taku) September 14, 2025
This is who just wrote a piece in the NYT on political violence pic.twitter.com/QaktdeNH0g
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 14, 2025
The man who talks about shanking your opponents on stage and disembowling them or letting the streets run red with the blood of capitalists is apparently the ideal Gen Z-adjacent streamer to talk about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
And it’s not just this, mind you. Here are a few of the incidents cited back in April by The Free Press after the Times ran its first ingratiating piece of drivel about him:
- In 2023, Piker played a Hamas propaganda video, with a title card which read, “We will continue Killing your Soldiers by our locally manufactured Snipers.” Piker’s comment: “Wow, there’s a little message for the Americans out there, as well!”
- Piker interviewed a Houthi rebel named Rashid Al-Haddad who took a commercial ship hostage in the Red Sea in 2024; he said that Al-Haddad had “withstood genocide” and that speaking to him was akin to”talking to f***ing Anne Frank, basically.”
- Piker has called Jews “inbred, said that “in a totally just world, regardless of your background, any kind of f***ing Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a f***ing rabid neo-Nazi,” and that “[i]t doesn’t matter if rapes happened [to Israelis] on Oct. 7th.”
- On sharing a propaganda video by the Houthi rebels in which they promised to “defeat the masses of infidels” and waved banners with the motto of the movement — “God is Great. Death to America! Death to Israel! Damn the Jews! Victory to Islam!” — Piker said that, “When the beat drops, it’s like jihad drops in your heart.”
Charlie Kirk is the one who called for nonviolent political discussion. Hasan Piker called for the streets to run red with the blood of his enemies. Charlie Kirk stood up for Israel. Hasan Piker hates both Israel and its inhabitants — and I mean that to the fullest extent that the word “hate” intimates, because it’s clear that’s how he feels.
Charlie Kirk is dead. Hasan Piker is not.
And yet: Charlie Kirk is not a victim to the New York Times; Hasan Piker is allowed to portray himself as one. Charlie Kirk was the real answer to alienation and violent tendencies among Gen Z; Piker is part of the problematic anger and violent rhetoric that claimed Kirk’s life, yet is allowed to cosplay as the solution by the nation’s most prominent paper. But nobody will get fired for this tonal faux pas, I’m almost certain. Give Tom Cotton a platform on sane solutions to violent problems, meanwhile, and it’s a different story entirely. It’s utterly revolting — and, at the same time, completely unsurprising.
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