More than 30 employers have sanctioned or fired employees in reaction to their statements about Kirk’s killing. Photo / Getty Images
The wave of American companies and other institutions firing or suspending employees over what they’ve said in reaction to last week’s killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk has expanded in recent days.
It comes as some of his supporters in and outside the United States Government amp up a push against speech they say crosses lines.
The Secret Service, several US airlines, Office Depot, and Nasdaq said they were among more than 30 employers that have sanctioned or fired employees in reaction to their statements about Kirk’s killing.
Roughly three dozen workers are reported to have been suspended or fired over their responses to Kirk’s killing, including employees of Clemson University, MSNBC, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Carolina Panthers.
Several local fire departments and school districts said they had also suspended or terminated employees over their remarks.
On Tuesday, while hosting Kirk’s podcast, Vice-President JD Vance suggested people tell bosses if they see someone celebrating Kirk’s killing.
“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance said. “And hell, call their employer.”
A website, which calls itself the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation, went viral on social media after publishing a searchable list of thousands of people accused of posting critical messages of Kirk after his killing.
On Monday it said the list, which it subsequently took down, had grown to more than 63,000 people. The backers of the website did not identify themselves and declined to comment when contacted via a message on X.
At a time when people have unprecedented ability to share their instant reactions with vast audiences on social media, the actions by employers have stirred debate.
It covers employees’ speech rights, the role of public pressure campaigns, and what is appropriate public commentary on a violent event like Kirk’s killing.
Robby Starbuck is a conservative activist who was a longtime friend of Kirk and has previously waged social media campaigns against big companies over their diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
He said he has been amplifying social media posts calling for worker firings over comments about Kirk’s killing because he wants to send a message “that this behaviour is intolerable in a sane society”.
Rejecting any comparison to what he called “left-wing cancel culture”, he said: “The left cancelled Dr Seuss because the books offended them and they tried to get people fired for not getting the Covid vaccine. We’re demanding action because people mocked or celebrated an assassination in broad daylight.”
Adam Goldstein, vice-president of strategic initiatives at the non-profit and non-partisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has argued against incursions on free speech, said the pattern of some people facing condemnation for being “mocking or insufficiently sympathetic” plays out “again and again after every tragedy”.
He noted similar dynamics played out after 9/11 and the 2024 assassination attempt on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
With people’s statements after Kirk’s death ranging widely in tone and substance across social media, Goldstein raised concerns about treating all comments critical of Kirk with the same broad brush.
“When we talk about people at this scale, they’re doing very different things, saying different things and saying very different things to different audiences,” he said. “To put them all in the same bucket and say all these people should be cancelled, really?”
Goldstein said while many of the firings may be permissible because the US First Amendment only protects people’s speech from government intrusion, he questioned whether they were wise.
“If you create this precedent, do you think it’ll be the last time it’ll be used?” he asked.
“If you start purging employees every time the public demands it, how many employees will you have left after five or 10 years?”
The debate has been playing out at a range of institutions over the past few days.
The US Secret Service confirmed it is investigating an agent, Anthony Pough, who wrote on Facebook, “If you are Mourning this guy ... delete me”, in reference to Kirk’s killing, among other comments accusing Kirk of spewing “hate and racism”.
The agent is currently on administrative leave, the service confirmed in a statement. Pough did not respond to request for comment.
Pough, whose post also seemed to attribute Kirk’s death to “karma”, serves on a protective detail but not the President’s, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
Internal misconduct investigations by the service can sometimes take months, but service leaders are facing pressure to fire Pough outright.
Several prominent conservative activists circulated the post after it went up on Friday and called for the agent‘s immediate termination.
Senator Marsha Blackburn (Republican-Tennessee) sent a letter to Secret Service director Sean Curran demanding that he fire the agent and root out other “bad actors” from the protective agency.
In South Carolina, Clemson University said in an X statement that it had terminated one employee and placed two professors on leave pending investigation over “inappropriate social media content”.
The employee had tweeted that people should “be a Tyler Robinson or a Luigi Mangione”, referring to the man charged with killing UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in December.
Some Clemson students, alumni, Republican members of South Carolina’s congressional delegation and activists such as Starbuck expressed outrage over the Clemson employee’s actions and called for their firing.
Neither the employee nor Clemson responded to requests for comment. It wasn’t clear what the professors allegedly said.
At Englewood Health, a New Jersey hospital and healthcare network, a surgeon resigned last week after an investigation into comments he made in front of co-workers immediately after Kirk’s killing, the hospital said in a statement.
According to a lawsuit brought by nurse Lexi Kuenzle, who reported him, the surgeon said: “I hate Charlie Kirk. He had it coming. He deserved it.”
She said on television that she brought the suit because she was briefly suspended during the investigation of the incident. Kuenzle, who had recounted the surgeon’s comments on social media, did not respond to a request for comment.
“We have accepted the physician’s resignation, and the nurse is expected to work her scheduled shifts,” Englewood Health said in a statement.
In Texas, more than 100 teachers are facing investigation and the possible loss of their certification to teach in the state over social media reactions to Kirk’s killing, Governor Greg Abbott said in an X post.
The state’s education agency sent out a letter late last week warning that it would investigate staff who posted or shared “reprehensible and inappropriate content on social media related to the assassination of Charlie Kirk” that could have violated its code of ethics.
That received stiff pushback from the state teachers’ union.
“What started with lawmakers weaponising their platforms against civil servants has morphed into a statewide directive to hunt down and fire educators for opinions shared on their personal social media accounts,” Zeph Capo, the union president, said in a statement over the weekend.
A columnist for the Opinion section of the Washington Post, Karen Attiah, said on Tuesday in a Substack post that she was fired last week over comments she made on the Bluesky social network after Kirk’s killing. A Post spokeswoman declined to comment on a personnel matter.
Whether an employer is public or private could make a big difference in regard to an employee’s speech rights. Government employees can expect to have more protections than private employees, according to employment and free-speech experts.
In the past, the Supreme Court has backed government workers who made similar comments.
After the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, the Supreme Court said a Texas county constable’s office violated the First Amendment rights of a clerical employee who was dismissed after she was heard saying, “If they go for him again, I hope they get him”.
“In a normal administration, your opinions about political topics are your opinions, as long as you are not making them at work or in the context in which it might create the appearance that you were speaking on behalf of the government,” said Erik Snyder, a lawyer at Gilbert Employment Law who represents federal workers.
“In the current administration, my advice to my clients would be not to say anything at all because whether or not it is legally permissible for the administration to take action against them, as we have seen, they will do it anyway.”
The Charlie Kirk Data Foundation site, was launched hours after Kirk’s killing under the name “Expose Charlie’s Murderers”.
The landing page initially read: “Is an employee or student of yours supporting political violence online? Look them up on this website.”
On Tuesday, after it took down the list of alleged offenders, the landing page read: “This is not a doxxing website”.
“We lawfully collect publicly available data to analyse the prominence of support for political violence in the interest of public education.”
Yesterday, the website wasn’t functioning.
Right-leaning voices have been encouraging the wave of firings.
“So many people have been fired. I’m so proud of you guys,” the online activist Laura Loomer posted on X on Tuesday.
Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 as a “free speech absolutist” and later changed its name to X, pledged in 2023 to defend workers who were disciplined for their social media posts.
“If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill,” he wrote on the platform he renamed X.
“No limit,” he said in a post that X users pointed to over the weekend. “Please let us know,” Musk added.
In recent days, Musk has been rallying his following of more than 225 million behind a different cause.
On Sunday, he shared what one user said was “a spreadsheet of people who’ve said vile things about Charlie Kirk’s assassination”, complete with names, home states, occupations, employers and job status.
“They are the ones poisoning the minds of our children,” Musk said.
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