Inside Yale’s Hasan Piker Spectacle

Piker finally walked in about 20 minutes after leaving his hotel room stream and was, according to a post by “StopAntisemitism,” “orgasmically welcomed” by the audience. (Piker, on Wednesday, reshared StopAntisemitism’s characterization of the crowd, asking, “Did you bust?”—a question that was viewed almost 400,000 times.)

Piker’s team, who had arrived before him, started a new stream that was being watched by 15,000 viewers and would go on to be viewed more than 600,000 times. He passed through one of the aisles, and climbed the stairs to the stage, finally settling in a chair between the Yale Political Union’s president and its speaker.

While he was being introduced, several onlookers noticed that Piker tucked a Zyn behind his lip, uncapped a dark shiny pen, and made notes in the margins of his prepared remarks. For a moment, he hadn’t yet looked up at the crowd. Then he did.

“I’m sad to see that Senator Rick Scott did not make it.”

The stomping was almost immediate, as the applause had been when Piker entered the room and when he had been introduced. At the Yale Political Union, approval is stomping and disapproval is hissing, and on this night, there was a raucous, near-constant, demonstration of both—sometimes before the end of a sentence, sometimes before the sentence had begun.

What Piker had come to argue was not exactly the resolution as it had been advertised to the people in the room and the streamers at home: “End the American Empire.” Piker instead argued something adjacent. He argued that the United States is already in terminable decline. He asked, “How do you end something that’s already in the process of dying?”

He quoted Lenin. He quoted Mao. He said Benjamin Netanyahu was the real American president. He said the US maintained roughly 800 military bases abroad, each representing not just a presence but a possible place where it might stage invasions. Then he called the fall of the Soviet Union one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century, and the hissing was deafening.

His comment about the USSR had gone viral by the next morning. According to X’s own count, there were more than 59,000 posts about the speech. The people who had most loudly used “free speech” to explain the importance of tolerating campus speakers seemed to have set that aside. Yale is poison, more than one post said. Yale is disgusting, another post said. Yale students have been indoctrinated, more than a few posts said and many more implied. A great many of the posts, for reasons that remain unclear, mentioned tuition. It seemed these people could not believe that students whose parents had spent so much money on their education would choose to attend a political debate at the Yale Political Union.

When Piker’s speech ended, five students split speeches between the affirmative and negative. The first in the negative, Kai-Shan Kwek-Rupp, spoke deliberately, taking the resolution at face value. Ending the American empire, he argued, would not eliminate global domination but change it. Power does not disappear. It is assumed by others. The hissing and stomping still came for Kwek-Rupp, but later than they had come for Piker, at the ends of sentences rather than the middle of them.

When it came time for Piker to conclude, his earlier sympathy for the USSR had become a little sullied, maybe by how long the debate was dragging on for, or maybe by how warm and stuffy the room was getting. Capitalism, he said, had built things worth keeping. Skyscrapers, infrastructure, the Internet. But those things had been built through labor, and the fruits of that labor had not been evenly distributed. He ended with a line that brought raucous applause: “If a dictatorship is inevitable, I’d rather have it be a dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The room did not clear immediately. Students stood in the aisles attempting to rush the stage for photographs. The Yale Political Union’s president, a member of the Party of the Right, told me he was pleased with how the night had gone. In recent weeks, he said, the union had hosted figures from across the political spectrum, including Kevin Roberts, one of the architects of Project 2025. “We have people on the right and people on the left,” he said, “and they stayed until the end and they asked questions and they were respectful.”

By then the members had already voted: 54 to 31 in favor of the resolution. For 53 students at Yale, and Hasan Piker, who also got to vote, the American empire was something to be brought to an end. 

The event had drawn to a close. Piker had left the gothic revival hall. The federal government had not cut Yale’s funding. The people who had used “free speech” to argue that a private institution should not allow a speaker to speak had not mobilized soon enough. But everything that had made the spectacle matter remained intact and, certainly, did not conclude with the vote.