Fired After the Charlie Kirk Revenge Purge, They’re Still Unemployed

The grief Emily Taylor had been holding at bay finally washed over her in January. It had been four months since a lone gunman shot Charlie Kirk in the throat at Utah Valley University, killing the conservative commentator in minutes. That winter “was the first time in my entire life that I didn’t go back to school,” said the former English professor, holding back tears.

Taylor had resigned from her tenured position in December to save her tiny college in South Carolina from a political witch hunt in which lawmakers threatened to pull her school’s funding because she’d written a brief essay acknowledging that before his violent death, Kirk had employed violent rhetoric.

“I was a first-generation college student, and I worked my entire life to be an English professor,” said Taylor, who has spent most of the last year scrolling bare job boards since leaving Presbyterian College. “The chances that I ever have tenure-track employment again doesn’t seem likely.”

She’s one of the more than 600 people who had their lives upended in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, when a free-speech crackdown led by the Trump administration sought revenge on anyone critical of the deceased far-right podcaster. 

A year after Kirk’s killing, The Intercept spoke with five people who lost their jobs in the wake of the Kirk firings and four attorneys representing seven more clients, most of whom are still not back at work after finding themselves ensnared in one of the biggest mass censorship campaigns in modern history.

Their stories represent a chilling sea change that has become a hallmark of the second Trump administration: an inversion of the assumption that, for the most part, Americans are protected by their right to free speech. They illustrate what happens when an overzealous online army propped up by some of the most powerful people in the country are given free rein to terrorize their perceived political enemies.

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“One of the things that was really interesting and very destructive about the post-Charlie Kirk purge was how coordinated and manufactured the outrage was,” said Allen Chaney, who serves as legal director of the ACLU of South Carolina and represents both Taylor and fired Clemson University professor Joshua Bregy, who was reinstated in January.

While the U.S. has suffered speech crackdowns before — like in the McCarthy and post-9/11 eras — the saturation of online life seems made to supercharge a backlash. “I don’t think any other era has had the tools to do the sort of purging that is available now,” said Chaney.

Taylor was waiting for her children to finish their piano lessons on September 10, 2025, when she heard the news that Kirk was shot while answering a question about a conspiracy theory he perpetuated suggesting there is an epidemic of transgender mass shooters. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” were his final words.

Soon there were murals and memorials. President Donald Trump called Kirk “our greatest evangelist for American liberty” to a packed crowd at his memorial service. And Vice President JD Vance said anyone perceived to be “celebrating” Kirk’s murder should be targeted. “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance said on his podcast. “And hell, call their employer.”

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Online troll accounts and politicians alike took up the cause to begin targeting anyone even mildly critical of Kirk. Lists circulated naming people accused of “celebrating” Kirk’s death, making it easy to harass people en masse. Less sophisticated users could simply search the name “Charlie Kirk” on X and harass anyone who made a negative post. Big accounts like Libs of TikTok doxed critics and amplified hate to their millions of followers.

Jimmy Kimmel’s show was temporarily pulled off the air by ABC, after the host quipped in a monologue that MAGA was weaponizing Kirk’s death. Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah was fired for pointing out Kirk’s deep anti-Blackness.

Kimmel is back on, and Attiah was recently reinstated by an arbitrator. But most of the people who were targeted, doxed, fired, and harassed were not public figures.

“My clients really were not high-income earners; we’re talking about support staff,” said Melody Fowler-Green, an attorney who represents several people fired in the wake of the Kirk killing. “A lot of the people who lost their jobs, they are people who are not in positions of power.”

Kimberly Hunt, then a 31-year-old HR professional from Scottsdale Arizona, made a short video questioning the assertion that Kirk “didn’t deserve” his fate.

“He said a few deaths a year are worth it if it meant preserving our God-given right to bear arms. He actively fought against women’s rights. He’s openly Islamophobic, and he spreads anti-trans rhetoric,” Hunt said into the camera, accurately capturing Kirk’s rhetoric. “How many hate crimes happened because of him? Spare me the empathy because he didn’t believe in it either.” She said she had sympathy for his children but not his wife, Erika, who is now the CEO of his organization Turning Point USA.

Hunt said she never listed her job on her social media, but internet sleuths found where she worked, and the phones began to ring off the hook. When her boss asked her to meet, she knew the writing was on the wall. “He explained that I had put him in a tough position because there were so many phone calls coming into our business that it was disrupting their operations,” she recalled, “And that he had to let me go.”

The harassment didn’t stop. Hunt said at one point she received a call from her local sheriff that she was said to be on a “hit list.” Officers surveilled her home for two weeks.

None of the employers of the people who were fired or placed on leave in this story responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

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Taylor had no way of knowing what was to come when she sat down to draft a response to the shooting the morning after, on September 11, 2025. “My initial reaction to it was just so angry that the students on campus were subject to another school shooting,” said Taylor. “I was also sad that he died because I don’t believe in violence, and I don’t think anybody should be murdered.”

In her essay, “Dying to Be Men: American Masculinity as Death Cult,” Taylor argues that the type of “violent discourse espoused by Charlie Kirk, and many and others” ultimately led to his tragic shooting in front of thousands of traumatized students.

“I’m sorry for Charlie Kirk and all the other men like him that have been raised in this America and with these ideals of masculinity,” she wrote. “I’m sorry that he decided to adopt this hateful ideology and to profit from it. And as the mother to a boy and a girl, my heart breaks for the America these children are growing up in. Here’s hoping we can save ourselves.”

She sent the piece to an editor at Ms. Magazine, the publication founded by recently deceased feminist leader Gloria Steinem, and within hours it was online. The hate began to roll in.

Republican state Rep. Thomas Beach targeted Taylor on social media, and Republican Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette called for Taylor to lose her tenure. People began to dox her online.

Presbyterian College had to hire an outside firm to manage crisis communication and student safety. “They were telling me I needed to get personal security for my home,” said Taylor, “which you’ll be surprised to hear I couldn’t afford on a professor salary.”

Taylor said she bought security cameras, and after she received a death threat, the local police began to regularly check house. She called the principal of her children’s school to talk about what to do in case someone tried to harm her kids.

On September 18, 29-year-old Republican state Rep. Luke Rankin, who did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, called for the state to pull its funding from the small private Christian college. His colleagues co-signed a letter to formalize their threat.

Presbyterian College only has about 1,000 undergraduates. It would be devastated by that kind of hit, said Taylor, who walked away from a job that could support her family and offer future tuition benefits for her children. “I also support my mom. So, walking away was really hard,” she said. “But I also couldn’t have lived with myself if they had taken away money from students.”

For Dave Handler, the message from HR came as he was getting ready to teach a class on the First Amendment to his students at Minnesota Connections Academy, an online high school where he was a teacher until Kirk was killed.

On Facebook, Handler had written that he was not going to mourn a “Nazi” in a since-deleted post. He shared an article listing some of the offensive things Kirk had said over the years, then deactivated his account.

By that point, it was too late. According to Handler, he was told that someone had emailed the corporation who owned his school to complain, and soon he was out of a job.

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Handler said his girlfriend, also a teacher, has been able to help support them both, and he has been able to find some part-time work, but his firing still stings. “I post basically 10 words and an article, and I lost my career,” he said. He doesn’t have the money to hire a lawyer.

Some who did manage to get attorneys have gotten their jobs back — like Phillip Michael Hook, a tenured art professor at the University of South Dakota who was placed on leave after calling Kirk “a hate spreading Nazi” on Facebook.

“I’m sorry for his family that he was a hate spreading Nazi and got killed. I’m sure they deserved better. Maybe good people could now enter their lives,” Hook wrote. “But geez, where was all this concern when the politicians in Minnesota were shot? And the school shootings? And Capitol Police?”

Hook was “really lucky,” said his attorney, Jim Leach, because they were able to get into court before he was officially fired.

“You contrast him to all these other people who did lose their jobs, and now are in this really long legal process,” said Leach, “maybe they have some relief, or maybe they don’t, but they’ll never have what they had, which is the ability to do their work and teach. Which for most teachers, I think it’s what they always wanted to do with their lives and what they love doing.”

Karen Leader, a tenured art history professor at Florida Atlantic University, said she first became familiar with Kirk for a relevant project of his: the “Professor Watchlist,” a list that he started in 2016 of purported left-leaning professors on college campuses. Despite the activist’s purported insistence on free-speech, the list drew harassment toward left-leaning professors for their views.

“Seeing this kind of whitewashing narrative made me mad, and I wasn’t going to have it,” said Leader. She said she began quote-tweeting people’s posts sharing racists, sexist, and transphobic things said by Kirk, with the caption “This is Charlie Kirk.”

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Leader said she probably reposted roughly 48 posts about Kirk. On the Friday after his death, former Ron DeSantis staffer Jordan Chamberlain screenshotted her posts and tagged Florida Atlantic University, asking, “do these statements represent the views of your university?” She was placed on leave by 5 p.m. Saturday. Libs of TikTok shared a post of Leader’s headshot with the caption, “Another one bites the dust!” By Sunday morning, Leader’s home address was shared, and she was inundated by death threats.

Leader has been reinstated, but she says she is a long way from being made “whole.”

“I always, for the rest of my life, will be looking over my shoulder in case one person is still stewing over this who has my address,” Leader said. “It’s a year now Thursday, a year since this all started, and I’m not 100% back.”

“I think everyone was eager for an excuse to punish people for making them uncomfortable,” said Gretchen Felker-Martin, a horror author who lost a contract with DC Comics after her posts calling Kirk a “Nazi bitch” had gone viral. “When something like Kirk’s assassination happens, you see a really regressive crackdowns from authority figures who just don’t want to think about this shit anymore.” 

Shortly after she lost her work, Felker-Martin said her personal phone number was leaked, and she began to receive phone calls from people threatening to come kill her.

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But like most of the people who spoke to The Intercept for this story, Felker-Martin said she didn’t regret what she’d posted, despite the consequences.

“I think it’s unconscionable to throw your artists to the Nazis to appease these people,” Felker-Martin said.

Leader agreed. “I used my privilege, which is a lot of privilege to be forthcoming and honest about what was really going on,” she said. “He did enormous harm, and his organization continues to do enormous harm.”

In March, Taylor filed a lawsuit with the ACLU of South Carolina against the four state lawmakers who threatened to deny funding to her college. The lawsuit asks the court to declare the lawmakers’ actions as unconstitutional, force them to rescind the letter and threats, and provide compensation for back pay, lost benefits, and compensatory and punitive damages. In response, Rankin and the other lawmakers denied having an impact “on her quote employment status,” arguing that she chose to resign.

Lawsuits like these have already resulted in big payouts — at least $2 million in disclosed settlements for employees fired or penalized in the wake of Kirk’s death so far. And in June, Rankin, Taylor’s lead antagonist, lost his primary reelection by roughly 20 percentage points.

“That’s the only thing our justice system can offer, right?” said Fowler-Green, whose client is still fighting for restitution — which, if it arrives, will come from public dollars. “Paying money can influence people’s behavior. One concern I have, though, is that the people who are making the decision are not paying the money. It’s not their money; it’s my money.”

Hunt, who said she hasn’t been able to find a full-time job since September “would have done it again,” she told The Intercept.

“I don’t think dying absolved him of the stochastic terrorism that he inflicted on people,” Hunt said. And in her view, the backlash was clarifying, too. “I think it painted a bigger picture of the right and the mob mentality.”