A nearly eight-year-old clip of Charlie Kirk dismantling Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker’s communist fantasy is going viral again this week — and the exchange reveals everything patriots need to know about the far-Left’s hypocrisy.
During a Politicon debate in Los Angeles on October 20, 2018, Kirk posed the question every conservative has wanted to ask every champagne socialist: if communism is so great, why don’t you live it?
“Why don’t you give 95% of your money away and go live on a commune?” — Charlie Kirk
Piker’s response was textbook leftist deflection. When Kirk pressed him to practice what he preaches, the streamer called the suggestion “absolutely preposterous.”
“I will be very honest, it’s really embarrassing especially because my boss is sitting right there, I make $60,000 a year, okay?” Piker claimed during the debate. “And that’s a really good salary.”
Kirk didn’t let him off the hook.
“I live what I practice,” Kirk fired back. “I am a free-market capitalist, I employ people, I took a risk, I have my own start-up business. Every single day, I practice what I preach. He wants other people to contribute to what he considers to be a good idea, what he considers will make the world a better place.”
The Turning Point USA founder then delivered the knockout line: “You have the freedom to go live as a socialist. Go do it, Hasan. What’s stopping you?”
The exchange devolved when Cenk Uygur — Piker’s uncle and boss at The Young Turks — began shouting at Kirk from the audience, demanding to know Kirk’s own salary. Kirk responded that he made less than Piker and lived his capitalist principles every single day.
The debate was one of many examples of how Kirk fearlessly defended conservative principles in hostile leftist environments.
Tragically, on September 10, 2025, Kirk was fatally attacked while speaking on the campus of Utah Valley University. The Turning Point USA founder was taking a question about transgender mass attackers when he was targeted. According to charging documents, the suspect texted his roommate and trans-identifying lover afterward: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
Since that 2018 debate, Piker’s hypocrisy has only grown more glaring.
The self-proclaimed communist now owns a $2.7 million West Hollywood mansion — a long way from the commune Kirk suggested he join. Fox Business host Charles Payne put Piker’s net worth at $35 million on air Wednesday, though public estimates vary widely, with Celebrity Net Worth listing roughly $8 million.
Either way, that’s a far cry from the $60,000 salary Piker claimed in 2018.
Piker has since been embraced by prominent Democrats including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This year, he campaigned with Democratic House and Senate candidates in New York and Michigan, including Michigan Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, who is hoping to become the first Muslim U.S. senator.
The streamer’s radical views have only intensified. In an April New York Times podcast, Piker said he’s “pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers,” and added that while he doesn’t shoplift himself, “if someone needs the food, they should absolutely steal it.”
Piker has praised murderous Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong and argued that America “deserved 9/11.” In March 2025, Piker was temporarily suspended from the streaming platform Twitch — his fifth suspension — after saying that if Republicans cared about entitlement fraud, “you would end Rick Scott.”
Kirk’s 2018 question remains unanswered: if socialism is the answer, why won’t Hasan Piker live it?
