After an assassin fatally shot prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Politico turned to far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who has said that “America deserved 9/11,” to attack Kirk in an interview on the 24th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
“I don’t think [Kirk] was ever debating for the purpose of finding the truth or from a position of intellectual curiosity,” Piker told Politico on Thursday. The streamer, whose videos have millions of viewers on Twitch and YouTube, has a long history of anti-America and anti-Israel rhetoric, saying that “America deserved 9/11” and denying the atrocities that Hamas committed during its Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.
“For Charlie, I think the format was more so to just humiliate his ideological opponents,” Piker went on. “And he was very successful at doing propaganda of this sort, by going to college campuses and listening to what people had to say, and then giving them the right-wing talking points on the matter. Getting a couple dunks in the process.”
Piker suggested in the Politico interview that Kirk’s political advocacy was to blame for his own murder.
“The rhetoric that came from Charlie was understandably seen by many people as also being inherently violent,” Piker said of Kirk’s support for the Second Amendment, adding, “I think when people see that, they fight fire with fire, if you will. In their minds, they think it’s fine.”
Piker also recently made news when the New Yorker invited him to its annual festival, leading a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League, which said the invitation “normalizes antisemitism, reinforces bigotry, and launders terror.”
Politico isn’t the only mainstream media outlet to have featured anti-Kirk commentary following Kirk’s assassination. MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd sparked backlash and was later fired for claiming on-air that the shooter could have been “a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration” and blaming Kirk for his own assassination. “I always go back to ‘hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,'” Dowd said.
MSNBC anchor Katy Tur described Kirk as a “divisive figure, polarizing, lightning rod, whatever term you want to use,” while politics reporter Allan Smith decried Kirk as having “been front and center on a lot of the more divisive social and cultural issues that have driven the MAGA movement.”
Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, died after an assassin shot him in the neck during an event at Utah Valley University. Police arrested 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson for the assassination on Friday.
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