Hasan Piker is deeply envious of Charlie Kirk.
The hard-left influencer debated Kirk in 2017 and was set to do so again before Kirk was murdered last year.
Yet now Piker is going around mocking Kirk's assassination, leading a crowd last weekend, during his live podcast tour, in a sarcastic singalong of an AI-generated song called "We Are Charlie Kirk."
"We are Charlie Kirk, we carry the flame. We'll fight for the Gospel, we'll honor his name," Piker sang off-key, the crowd howling along, while the celebrity socialist's co-hosts guffawed and waved their arms in the air.
This wasn't satirizing a political opponent -- Kirk has been dead nearly a year.
Why make him the subject of this derision?
It's because Piker knows his audience, and they're not looking for thoughtful politics. They want a hatefest.
Readers of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" might remember the totalitarian leftist party that runs the dystopian state in that novel regularly held events called a "Two Minutes Hate" to whip up hostility against the regime's enemies.
Piker has improved on that -- his podcast and live events like this offer more than an hour's hate.
And nobody stirs the Piker crowd into a frenzy like Charlie Kirk.
The slain Turning Point USA founder represents everything they're against, and not just because he was a widely successful conservative organizer who won young Americans away from socialism on the unfriendly campuses where he spoke — and where he ultimately died for his beliefs.
Kirk's faith in God, his devotion to his family, his happiness all infuriated his enemies.
His self-sacrifice did, too, and more than anything else:
Kirk knew the risks he took by going where he wasn't welcome and speaking truths the left didn't want to hear — and was determined to prevent anyone else from hearing.
Yet Kirk did it anyway, fearlessly, and put his life on the line because of the strength of his convictions.
That's what Piker's mob hates most: Charlie Kirk shamed them by showing them how much better a human being could be.
So Piker knew just how enthusiastic the response to his mockery would be.
He could count on Kirk's memory to incite a jeering frenzy.
Yet there's something more going on with Piker himself.
Kirk was the man Piker can never be, and as the audience reaction shows, Kirk remains important, even to his enemies, in ways that Piker isn't.
People care deeply about Charlie Kirk's memory, whether they cherish it or resent it.
Piker, a guy who broadcasts his banal existence for up to eight hours a day on the streaming platform Twitch, craves the kind of attention Kirk still commands even in death, and even among his enemies.
It's not that Piker isn't trying — he's even resorted to animal cruelty, seemingly shocking his dog with an electric collar on camera, to get views.
(Piker denies the collar was electric; he claims it was vibrate-only, and the dog yelped in pain for some totally other reason.)
One place the firebrand leftist influencer does get the notice he wants is in the Democratic Party, though Democrats are starting to feel queasy about the attention they receive from campaigning with Piker.
Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan Democrats' nominee for the U.S. Senate, evidently feels embarrassed enough by his appearances with Piker during the primaries that he's now issued a statement insisting Piker's not an official campaign messenger: "Nobody speaks for this campaign besides me and my campaign spokespeople."
But that's a far cry from disavowing Piker outright, even after the streamer recently threatened, "If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews."
What might that mean coming from someone like Piker, who gets cheap laughs off the victim of a political murder?
Piker has also said "America deserved 9/11," a belief his buddy El-Sayed had to squirm away from on "Meet the Press" earlier this month.
"I think Hasan himself would say that was a dumb statement," the Senate hopeful said — tellingly, trying to get not only himself but also Piker off the hook for the reprehensible remark.
El-Sayed isn't the only Democrat who's campaigned alongside Piker and welcomed his support.
The Piker audience is a Democratic audience, and the party wants his support, even if Democratic candidates don't want to take responsibility for what Piker and his followers actually believe.
But it's all on open display — on the Twitch stream and on stage.
Hasan Piker is exactly the opposite of Charlie Kirk:
He's not an apostle bringing reasoned argument to audiences who disagree with him; he's a man who trades on resentment, vitriol and not just the prospect of political violence but its lethal reality.
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