There was scant time to digest the horrifying news before battle lines were drawn around how one should react to it.
On September 10, a suspect currently in custody allegedly shot and killed popular conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, cofounder and star attraction of Turning Point USA.
In the wake of this disturbing tragedy, a maelstrom of finger-pointing and recrimination surged through social media, raising the core temperature of a divided America amid an already markedly tense year.
While some, like President Trump, were quick to paint the outspoken Kirk as a martyr for free speech, supporters of the slain provocateur began demanding consequences for those speaking freely about Kirk in ways that they deemed inappropriate.
In the name of free speech, people had to be punished for exercising it.
High-profile right-wing influencers like Laura Loomer and Chaya Raichik (the latter better known as “LibsofTikTok”), surfaced social media posts that either celebrated Kirk’s death or appeared close enough to it to draw their ire.
The Federalist, a conservative online magazine, ran an aggregated list entitled, “‘Hope The Bullet’s Okay’: Here Are The Demonic Reactions From Leftists To Charlie Kirk Assassination,” giving bereft readers a focal point on which to train their outrage.
Going a step further, an anonymous activist compiled a similar trove of posts about Kirk on a hastily assembled site called Charlie’s Murderers—and provided employment information about the offending posters.
It was within this censorial atmosphere that right-wing media figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos seemed to gamify the push to extract a penance.
Their tactics proved swiftly effective. In less than 48 hours after the shooting, several people lost their jobs for their reactions to the tragedy—for posts that could be described as flippant at best, ghoulish at worst.
An assistant dean at a Tennessee university was fired for her Facebook post, after Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted a screenshot of it. (“Looks like ol’ Charlie spoke his fate into existence,” the post read. “Hate begets hate. ZERO sympathy.”)
An employee for the Carolina Panthers communications department lost his job for posting an Instagram video with the caption, “Why are y’all sad? Your man said it was worth it.” (For context, Kirk said in 2023: “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”)
As for the woman responsible for the “Hope the bullet’s okay” comment that The Federalist picked up for its headline, comic book writer Gretchen Felker-Martin saw DC Comics flat-out cancel her nascent series Red Hood as a result.
MSNBC host Matthew Dowd, meanwhile, was fired from the network for sober, if speculative, analysis.
On September 10, during a discussion about the environment in which such a tragedy could occur, Dowd said that Kirk has been one of the “especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”
After MSNBC fired the host, many on X appeared emboldened to agitate for more media firings, for even slighter offenses.
What Kirk said about free speech
This widespread mob mentality on Kirk’s behalf, however, went against Kirk’s recently stated beliefs on how to proceed in the aftermath of a horrible tragedy.
Back in June, Kirk gave a lecture to the crowd at the Oxford Union debating society in London. At one point, he lamented the British laws that led to a woman in the U.K. getting arrested last year for a social media post calling for people to “set fire” to hotels housing migrants. (Her post was in response to the July 2024 Southport attack, in which the Wales-born teenage son of migrant parents went on a nightmarish stabbing spree.)
“You should be allowed to say outrageous things,” Kirk said of the jailed woman’s plight. “You should be allowed to say contrarian things. Free speech is a birthright that you gave us and you guys decided not to codify it and now it’s poof, it’s basically gone.”
Kirk was a staunch free-speech advocate and vehement critic of what has been dubbed “cancel culture,” the tendency to demand consequences for offensive speech or behavior.
His supporters could be forgiven, however, for having some confusion around the viability of pushing for consequences in response to offensive speech, given that Kirk had previously called for the firing of various media figures with whom he disagreed.
In any case, the mission to get retribution for unkind remarks about Kirk has now become an institutional matter.
Republican Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida applauded a vow from his state’s Education Commission on September 11 to investigate any teacher suspected of celebrating Kirk’s death, while Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana tweeted his intention to “use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.”
What is there left to say?
One glaring flaw in this approach is the elasticity in defining “celebration” or “belittlement” of Kirk’s death.
While many random social media users were indeed using crude language and tasteless jokes to express a lack of remorse, some of the posts that pro-Kirk influencers have shared with their massive fandoms were merely quoting Kirk’s own words to express a complex mix of emotions around his assassination.
Their offense seemed to be simply wanting to add some friction to Kirk’s express path to sainthood, amid the president awarding him a posthumous Medal of Freedom and ordering White House flags to be flown at half-mast.
It’s worth noting, too, that many of the same people currently policing online decorum in the wake of Kirk’s murder actively participated in mocking the brutal home invasion attack on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, in 2022.
Indeed, Kirk himself was among their ranks at the time, suggesting on his radio show that a “patriot” should bail the attacker out of jail.
If making inappropriate jokes about political violence is such an inherently fireable offense—a reason to cast aside one’s stated aversion to cancel culture—why is Utah Senator Mike Lee still in office after his risible, trollish posts about the assassination of Minnesota state Senator Melissa Hortman and her husband back in June? Where were DeSantis and Higgins then?
Reacting in unkind ways to such tragedies is either a transgression that should be punishable by harassment and job loss or, as Kirk once said, “If you don’t like someone else’s views, then don’t listen.”
To grant such grace exclusively to one’s fellow ideological cohort, however, is a glaring contradiction that will only further deepen America’s already extreme polarization.