Hasan Piker Mocking Charlie Kirk Is Part Of Assassination Prep

When President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania in July of 2024, the moment was assumed (perhaps naively) by some on the right to be a watershed moment. The egregious display of political violence that was the culmination of a years-long assassination prep campaign against the president and more broadly, Republicans, was certainly the last, so many thought.

It was not.

A little more than a year later, Charlie Kirk was murdered on a Utah college campus for speaking to students. And it’s more clear now than ever that even Kirk’s murder won’t be the watershed moment the country needs, as evidence by the recent viral mocking of Kirk.

Islamic Marxist Hasan Piker mocked Kirk during a live tour performance, singing the “We Are Charlie Kirk” song as his podcast co-hosts and audience laughed.

The sick mocking was just another act of assassination prep. When political opponents are dehumanized, their suffering is a “joke” and audiences and the public are gradually conditioned to treat their murders as funny, justified and even deserved. This creates a culture in which political violence becomes normalized and accepted.

Nearly one year after Kirk’s murder, the message to the radical left from the right is that it can still mock the victim before cheering crowds with no meaningful social or political consequence. That reality reflects a failure of the right to crack down on the violent moment that produced Kirk’s killer and continues to threaten Americans, the administration, and officials nationwide.

Trump announced he was designating Antifa as a terrorist organization just days after Kirk was murdered. But as I previously wrote, the administration needs to act “with sufficient and necessary force” to solve left-wing violence, but that doesn’t appear to have happened yet. That failure is both producing and accelerating left-wing violence and assassination prep, as evidenced by Piker’s cruel mocking.

And each time someone is able to add to this culture of dehumanization, it helps lay the groundwork for future political violence. Each failure to crush the organizations and networks behind political violence signals that each escalation will have few repercussions.

Take for example what has happened since Kirk’s murder. Just a few weeks after Kirk was murdered, “No Kings” protests sprung up across the country, with several protesters outright calling for the murder of Trump. Some protesters even had signs calling for political violence against ICE agents. That rhetoric (the same type of rhetoric that led to the many assassination attempts against the president) is the type that leads to the December incident in which four far-left extremists were arrested for allegedly planning a series of New Year’s Eve bombings and an ambush on ICE officers in Los Angeles.

During Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis just a few weeks later, one rioter bit off an ICE agent’s finger. In May a rioter was charged “for allegedly kicking and biting ICE officers” at a New Jersey illegal immigrant holding center, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said on X. Another individual was arrested after threatening to murder an immigration officer and his family.

Meanwhile, 31-year-old Cole Allen rushed past a Secret Service checkpoint while armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives at the White House Correspondents Association dinner this past April. He then headed toward the ballroom at the Washington Hilton Hotel, where Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other members of the cabinet were. Allen was ultimately subdued by law enforcement. That assassination attempt was a result of the years-long assassination prep campaign against the president that dehumanized him as Hitler and painted him as an existential threat that would not be solved with an election.

These incidents are part of a larger problem — left wing violence. For years the left has said Trump is Hitler, conservatives are fascists, ICE is the Gestapo, and signaled that elections are not enough to stop them. Once people accept those premises, it justifies resistance by any means necessary and up to and including violence, which we have seen.

This is why Piker’s sick joke matters. Laughing at Kirk’s murder isn’t just cruel and depraved and a sign of the devil. It reinforces this idea that murdering a conservative is a joke, isn’t that important and then signals to the next radical that their violence will be met with applause and laughter rather than universal condemnation.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2