Julie Strebe, a 55-year-old sheriff’s deputy in the small Bible belt town of Salem, Missouri, was on a date with her husband at a Buffalo Wild Wings when her husband slid his phone across the table. On Facebook, people were demanding Strebe’s immediate termination, calling her a “wacko” with “extreme mental health issues”.
It was the afternoon of 13 September 2025, just a few days after Charlie Kirk had been killed by a sniper’s bullet on a college campus. Shortly after his assassination, Strebe had posted on her personal Facebook page: “Empathy is not owed to oppressors.” In comments underneath, she did not mince words. She called Kirk a racist, a sexist, an antisemite and the kind of person who wants to see gay people, like her own son, stoned to death. “I don’t feel bad,” she says, months later, speaking from her home. “I refuse to feel bad for this man, and the hateful things he stood for.”
When she heard people were calling for her to be fired, Strebe told her superiors that she would take her offending posts down. But it was too late. Her posts had escaped containment. On Facebook, and in phone calls to her workplace, she was called a lunatic with a badge and gun or a “corrupt cop”, who couldn’t be trusted to execute her duties as law enforcement. Some locals apparently worried that if Strebe pulled them over for a routine traffic stop, she might fire her weapon at them if they were wearing a Maga hat.
People from her home county of Dent, which voted overwhelmingly to re-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 election, used homophobic slurs against her son online. Her husband’s woodworking business was targeted too, as was the Facebook page for his charitable side gig, where he dresses up as the Grinch and visits children’s hospitals over the holidays.
“I’ve been a cop for 19 years,” Strebe says. “I believe that everybody should be treated fairly. And that’s what I’ve done my entire career. And this one statement was completely just twisted. It’s very frustrating.”
Strebe is one of a group of Americans who endured similar ordeals after Kirk’s death. Some were called out for their unkind, even giddy, social media reactions to news of the far-right activist’s assassination. Others were harangued for merely quoting Kirk’s own words – particularly his comments about how a certain number of gun deaths are an acceptable cost to maintain the gun rights vouchsafed by the second amendment. A website, titled Charlie Kirk’s Murderers, collated the names and personal information of such alleged offenders. The site has since been decommissioned – but it aided Kirk acolytes in mounting complaints to employers against those they deemed to be not sufficiently reverential.
By November of 2025, a Reuters investigation estimated that 600 people had been terminated, disciplined, investigated, suspended or otherwise admonished for their Kirk posts, likening the reaction to an ideological purge.
That’s how the Strebes felt when they started to notice people lurking outside their house. They set up security cameras on the perimeter. A large truck parked on their block with a dinky, Sharpie-on-cardboard taped to its side that read: “Julie Strebe Supports the Assassination of Charles Kirk.” “He could have done a much better sign,” laughs Strebe, as she prepares to pack up and move out of the town where she has made a life for 20 years. “It looks like a third-grader wrote it.”
Strebe was suspended, then fired. According to Strebe, superiors claimed that because she made her posts on the clock and did not disclaim they were her personal opinions, there were grounds for termination. She also says that her bosses argued she had a history of making controversial social media posts while serving the public, but the only previous example they were able to cite was a 10-year-old post about shoddy local roadwork causing flat tires. When approached for comment, the Dent county sheriff’s office told the Guardian that “we are prohibited by law from disclosing any information regarding that former deputy”.
“Basically they screwed me because of the mob mentality,” Strebe says. “This is everything I’ve ever done in my adult life. And they took it from me … I could have retired in six and a half years. Full pension. Can’t do that now.”
Demands for the termination and professional castigation of Kirk’s critics, people like Strebe, were amplified by some of the biggest megaphones in the United States. When JD Vance guest-hosted an episode of Kirk’s podcast in the week after his death, the vice-president told listeners: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance said. “And, hell, call their employer … Get involved! It’s the best way to honor Charlie’s legacy.”
For years, Kirk had cast himself as a roving tribune of free expression, touring college campuses to provoke arguments with liberal students and faculty, and warning that political correctness was strangling the first amendment. To civil liberties lawyers, the wave of firings and suspensions following his death became an opportunity to test those principles. Many believed they could help some of the fired get their jobs back.
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The Philadelphia-based lawyer Greg Greubel was one of those people who felt Charlie Kirk was upholding the principle of free speech. As a senior attorney working with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), Greubel had helped Turning Point USA, the conservative, Christian non-profit co-founded by Kirk, set up some of their college chapters. When he heard about Kirk’s shooting, he was devastated. Kirk, to his mind, was an advocate of free expression who had been violently gunned down while exercising his first amendment rights.
But it didn’t take long for Greubel to spot retribution for those that didn’t share his view. “The fallout from this was easy to predict, unfortunately,” Greubel recalls, speaking from Fire’s Philadelphia office. “Within 24 hours we started seeing calls for terminations.”
Greubel and other Fire members immediately sprang into action. Greubel’s expertise is the free speech of public employees. He set out to find a clear, obvious example that would demonstrate how many of these employees were unfairly targeted for expressing themselves. He and his colleagues pored over cases of people who had been targeted, and even fired, for social media reactions to Kirk’s death, scanning social media and following tips submitted to Fire’s website. Before long, they had reviewed more than 200 cases. “And that number just kept going up,” Greubel says.
He thought Monica Meeks of Clarksville, Tennessee, might prove a compelling test case. She was fired from the Tennessee department of commerce and insurance on 12 September for calling Kirk a “White Supremacist” in a comment responding to a friend’s Facebook post. In a statement published online, her employer claimed that Meeks “revealed bias and disregard toward the very people she was tasked with serving”.
A disabled 20-year veteran who served honorably in the United States army and longtime public employee, Meeks struck Greubel as especially sympathetic. “She has an impeccable record,” he says. “She is really dedicated to public service. And for someone to get fired that quickly, it was such a disgrace.”
In December, Greubel filed a lawsuit for wrongful termination on behalf of Meeks, seeking reinstatement and damages. (Kevin Walters, communications director at the Tennessee department of commerce and insurance, told the Guardian that the office does not comment about ongoing litigation.) Greubel is optimistic. He points to a settlement from January, when Tennessee’s Austin Peay State University reinstated a professor, Darren Michael, who was fired for a social media post, and paid him a $500,000 settlement.
“I was heartened to see the outcome of that case,” says Jack Cohoon, a South Carolina attorney defending another client fired in the post-Kirk purge. “It demonstrates that there is a price to be paid for depriving someone of their first amendment rights.”
Cohoon is representing Lauren Vaughn, a South Carolina teachers’ aide at an elementary school who was sacked for social media posts about Kirk’s death. Vaughn’s case is unusual in that she offered precious little actual critical commentary about Kirk, instead repeating Kirk’s own words about gun violence on her personal Facebook account. According to the lawsuit, her post read, in part:
“I think it’s worth to [sic] 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. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.” – Charlie Kirk. Thoughts and prayers.
In her termination letter, River Ridge elementary school claimed that Vaughan had violated an internal social media policy, which held that all employees “must be respectful and professional in all communications”. Her legal team disagrees. They are suing on the basis that the termination and the social media guidelines are unconstitutional.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) request from Vaughan’s lawyers, asking the district to produce “All complaints, received from any source, regarding Lauren Vaughn from September 10, 2025 to the present”, the school district revealed that it did not actually possess “any written complaints that would be responsive to this request”.
“They were anticipating harassment in advance,” says Cohoon of his client’s school district. “It’s a sacrifice to the wolves.” The district did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
Fire lawyer Greubel says that often employers were responding to anonymous social media complaints. He says that one of the people that commented on the Monica Meeks case, in a tweet to her employer, had the screen name “Bonerville Asskicker”. “The Bonerville Asskickers of the world are not there with her at work. They’re not her clients. They’re no one.”
Despite this anonymity of complainants, or no complainants at all, the number of people fired in similar circumstances is legion. A staffer at the University of Mississippi was terminated for calling Kirk a “reimagined Klan member”. A University of California at Los Angeles faculty member was suspended for a social media post stating, in part, “You can’t force people to mourn someone who hated us.” The MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd lost his job after commenting on air: “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” A Las Vegas realtor was fired by his company for saying Kirk was “an evil POS”.
In October, the Associated Press reported that half a dozen unidentified foreigners had US visas revoked for their post-Kirk assassination remarks. “Aliens who take advantage of America’s hospitality while celebrating the assassination of our citizens will be removed,” read a statement from the US state department.
Many who found themselves in these situations seem less inclined to muscle their way back to their previous employers. One person, who was fired from a full-time job in the private sector after posting a joke about Kirk’s assassination on a personal Instagram account, told the Guardian they had no intention of pursuing litigation. “I didn’t want to resubject myself or my family to that trauma,” they explained, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “I also want to work in my industry once again and feel that a statement would do more harm than justice at this point.”
“There is a path back for employees affected by this,” says the lawyer Cohoon. “I think it’s essential that some of these individuals fight it out in court. That’s the only way the first amendment can be vindicated.”
Strebe, Vaughan and Meeks were full-time public employees, and thus subject to certain employment standards. Others who have lost work, or opportunity, for their comments can’t necessarily rely on the same rights.
Writer Gretchen Felker-Martin proudly identifies as a “dirty communist transexual”. The day of Kirk’s shooting, she fired off a number of posts from her Bluesky account. She called Kirk a “Nazi bitch”, and expressed mock sympathy for the assassin’s fatal bullet.
She was soon barred from her Bluesky account. And she had a contract terminated with DC Comics, where she had been hired to write a series following the adventures of Red Hood, a lesser-known character in the Batman comics universe. “I believe their wording was that what I said was indefensible according to their moral code,” Felker-Martin says.
She is no stranger to this kind of online controversy. Her 2022 debut novel Manhunt is set in an apocalyptic future where any person with too much testosterone is transformed into a cannibalistic beast, leaving cisgender women, non-binary people and trans people to fend for themselves. Some of the survivors are hunted by a militia of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (Terfs) and there’s a scene where the gender-critical author JK Rowling is killed. The novel drew plenty of heat online, along with critical plaudits.
When Felker-Martin landed the Red Hood gig, she cautioned DC Comics brass that she risked bringing unwanted attention to the company due to her beliefs, identity and general predilection towards being outspoken about both. “I said I’ve been a controversial figure online in the past, and probably will be again.” She says her editors didn’t seem bothered – at first. When the Israeli advocacy group StopAntisemitism subsequently named Felker-Martin their “anti-Semite of the Week”, for her criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza, she says her editors asked her to keep a low profile.
While she expressed sympathy for colleagues who may have lost work on the Red Hood comic as a result of her social media posts, Felker-Martin stands by her original remarks. “A very organized rightwing junta is currently killing and disappearing people en masse,” she says. “And for whatever reason, the liberal elite of America is still under the impression that they can just keep their heads down and be polite, and they can probably get through it.”
In a statement made at the time of Felker-Martin’s firing, DC Comics said: “The tone of Gretchen’s posts, not her personal views, was of concern for DC and that was clearly communicated to her on August 13. DC does not moderate the personal opinions of its talent, however, when personal statements are directly tied to DC stories or characters, or uses language that can be seen as non-peaceful, we review and act if necessary. Gretchen’s choice to continue her rhetoric despite this feedback was her own. Our decision to cease publication was a result.”
As a contractor with a private publishing company, Felker-Martin’s first amendment privileges are much trickier to enforce, but she still accuses DC Comics of being gutless. “Frankly, I do think it’s cowardice,” she explains. DC Comics did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
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Fire lawyer Greubel identifies a distinctive tit-for-tat culture at play in these firings. He remembers when conservatives and rightwingers came under fire for opinions expressed after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. For many, he believes, Kirk’s killing and the subsequent social media outcry offered an opportunity for these same people to exact a form of revenge. “There’s a race-to-the-bottom element to all of this,” he says. “It’s a real problem, writ large, in America.”
Many people interviewed for this story express a fundamental exasperation with the perceived hypocrisy at play. In life, Charlie Kirk and his allies at Turning Point USA advocated for the sanctity of freedom of speech. At the same time, Turning Point curated a public watchlist of so-called “radical professors” who were accused of “advanc[ing] a radical agenda in our lecture halls”.
“The far right screams free-speech absolutism,” says historian Mark Bray, one of the alleged radical professors identified by Turning Point’s watchlist. “And yet they’re trying to shut down all kinds of speech.”
Bray is a Rutgers University historian and author of the bestselling Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. “What happened to me had everything to do with Charlie Kirk’s killing and the response to it,” Bray says. “After Kirk was killed, the boogeyman term du jour became ‘antifa’.”
After Kirk’s death,Trump issued an executive order declaring antifa, a decentralized leftwing political ideology, a “domestic terrorist organization”. Bray felt the pressure from rightwing activists including the Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA. A petition circulated calling for Bray’s firing. (Neither Turning Point USA’s national office nor its Rutgers University chapter responded to requests from the Guardian.)
On Saturday, 4 October, while watching a Yankees-Blue Jays game, he received one of many death threats. This one singled out his home address. Twenty-four hours later, he was making plans to relocate his family to Spain, where he now teaches remotely. As he says, “living in fear is not how I want to live”.
Speaking over a cup of tea at a cafe on the edge of Madrid’s El Retiro Park, Bray says that even though Kirk was a supposed free-speech advocate, one consistent feature of far-right political movements is that they rarely take their own hypocrisies seriously. “One of the hallmarks of fascism, from the beginning, has been denouncing rational consistency as bourgeois, or effeminate,” Bray says.
Despite these reprisals, even those who don’t have a direct legal path back to employment are finding ways to make the best of their ordeals. Despite losing the DC Comics gig, Felker-Martin is optimistic about placing an original horror comic with another publisher who is more sympathetic to her political beliefs. Bray admits that exile has boosted his professional profile. His Anti-Fascist Handbook shot up bestseller lists.
Julie Strebe of Missouri is interviewing for new jobs in blue counties. She, too, is considering legal action. Not because she wants to be reinstated, or be paid damages. But because she believes she’s right. “I was not even a deputy for the money,” she says. “I made $20 an hour. It’s the principle for me.”
