Keyboard warriors have reacted to this week’s assassination of self-anointed champion of “free speech” Charlie Kirk by launching an online campaign to get anyone who criticizes him fired from their jobs.
A website established three days ago under the somewhat overstated banner of “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” claims to have already collected over 30,000 social media profiles. The team behind the site now promises to create “a searchable database… filterable by general location and job industry.”
“This is a permanent and continuously-updating archive of Radical activists calling for violence,” the site adds. “This is the largest firing operation in history.”
The online effort kicked off after Kirk’s fellow far-right activist Laura Loomer announced on X that in response to his killing at a Turning Point USA event in Utah Wednesday, she would “make everyone I find online who celebrates his death famous.”
Other contributors to the campaign have been posting their efforts directly to X, along with commentary on the emotional toll of their online labors, earning themselves the moniker “Nazi Karens.”
“I’ve officially contacted 471 employers. Still more to do. My fingers hurt. My eyes hurt. I’ve never had screen time this high,” Olivia Krolczyk, a self-described “Catholic, Patriot, Public Speaker,” wrote on the platform. “But I’m alive to complain about it. It’s all worth it. All for Charlie.”
Krolczyk posted that she believed in “free speech” and claimed she was free to get those criticizing Kirk fired.
The campaign to silence Kirk’s critics was created in reaction to the “free speech” activist’s fatal shooting at a campus event in Utah on Wednesday. / Cheney Orr / REUTERS
“And you think you’re a Catholic patriot? Shut up Nazi Karen,” one social media user posted in response to Krolczyk’s efforts.
In another post, Krolczyk claimed she was “struggling to keep up with the submissions of liberal scum” from her followers, while elsewhere somewhat confusingly adding that “my heart hurts for those who are overrun by Satan.”
Scott Presler, another activist who boasts in his bio he “helped defeat” Donald Trump’s former presidential opponents Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, even appears to be encouraging Kirk supporters to target businesses owned by his critics. “It would be a shame…(peacefully),” he wrote suggestively of one New York-based IT company.
Meanwhile Matt Wallace, a crypto promoter and conspiracy theorist with more than 2.3 million followers who has come under repeated fire for posting fake news and misleading takes on current events, claims he and his “team” have already gotten “at least 25 people fired from their jobs for celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk.”
“Should we keep going?” he added, in an apparent bid to boost engagement.
Presler was also met with the “nazi-karen” label.
Several high-profile firings have already been made over the past couple of days. MSNBC contributor Matthew Dowd was let go by the network on Thursday, after comments suggesting Kirk’s notoriously inflammatory rhetoric may well have contributed to the climate of hostility that eventually claimed his life.
Several professors at Middle Tennessee State University, Cumberland University, and the University of Mississippi have also been fired for online comments. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has charged Pentagon staff with hunting down negative posts about the activist by active military service members, with the Trump administration at large pledging action against “foreigners” deemed to be “praising, rationalizing or making light of” Kirk’s assassination.
The targets of those efforts so far are not exactly taking this lying down. “Don’t you dare come at me with your hypocrisy,” Aaron Sharpe, owner of a popular Ohio barbecue restaurant chain, wrote after coming under fire for calling Kirk a “piece of s–t” earlier this week.
“If you think that threats of social media attacks on me or my business will in any way keep me silent about what I believe, you are sorely mistaken,” he added.
Others have doubled down on the perceived hypocrisy at play among Kirk’s supporters, given the activist had long framed his bigoted, racist rhetoric against the wider backdrop of supposed encroachment on First Amendment rights.
“Imagine whining about free speech every day, then building a blacklist of people exercising free speech,” one user said on X. “MAGA logic is undefeated.”