By: Jeffrey Blehar – nationalreview.com – September 15, 2025

A throng of infuriated conservatives has trained its attention on those who posted comments on social media celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Ladies and gentlemen, it seems we are in the midst of a Great Cull. In the days since the fateful bullet that took Charlie Kirk’s life flew, a throng of infuriated conservatives has trained its attention on the many people stupid enough to have posted TikToks or tweets or Instagram comments celebrating his murder. Outlets like the New York Times have already written stories about the ravening horde of MAGA fans out hunting for retaliatory scalps, and for once I have to say they aren’t overselling the phenomenon. People really are under a lot of stress right now, and they’re lashing out.

My social media feed — which I am responsible for curating, to be fair — is a very weird place at the present moment, full of negative energy. Seemingly 40 percent of the tweets I see are calls to fire some person or another for their reaction to the killing. (Another 20 percent of the tweets I see are from people gloating over these people being fired for their reaction to the killing.) Pictures are posted with names and the companies they work for, and readers are exhorted to contact their employers.

I have very mixed feelings about all of this. The sentiments I see people being targeted range from wicked and appalling to utterly milquetoast. “I didn’t like the sorts of things he said but it’s a shame he’s dead” should not be a firing offense, and yet that is precisely the sort of statement I am now seeing underneath all-caps commands to “MAKE HER FAMOUS.”

Nobody should feel compelled to like Charlie Kirk, even in death. A large number of people being singled out right now by the social media mob shouldn’t have to apologize for anything, but now they have been branded as infamous and had their careers threatened, collateral destruction in a war they had no idea they were even participants in.

I understand that certain public-facing jobs really do come with speech restrictions: If you’re a PR employee with an NFL franchise, for example, you deserve to be fired out of a T-shirt cannon into the upper decks of the stadium for being stupid enough to chortle about the killing in public. And if you’re Matthew Dowd or Karen Attiah, you can go straight to hell on a rocket sled — people who abuse their mainstream media platforms to spread disinformation and hatred are precisely the ones who deserve to lose them. (Attiah’s well-deserved firing by the Washington Post also led to the Joke of the Week, from a friend: “Karen Attiah turning down the WaPo buyout offer is this generation’s ‘Blockbuster turning down Netflix.’”)

I am also deeply uncomfortable with the number of schoolteachers who have been found voicing repugnant sentiments in the aftermath of the killing, for the simple reason that their prescribed role in our society is literally to inculcate future generations with proper civic values. I recognize that the online right is currently engaged to some extent in a mere variant of the time-honored tradition of “nutpicking,” but I also can’t help but notice how many of these nuts happen to be placed in positions of trust over children, either.

But calling nonstop for the professional ends of random people who said crappy stuff about the Kirk assassination online feels petty, pointless, and ultimately like a perversion of the American spirit. I grant that it’s important not to say stupid things in public. (This turns out to be excellent life advice overall, and yet so few people seem to take it.) And I think ultimately there has to be some kind of social sanction for applauding political assassinations. I just wonder at the wisdom of using social media as the mechanism of enforcement.

Because I don’t really care whether the guy working the fry-cooker at my local McDonald’s has the right opinions on Israel’s war with Hamas. I don’t care if my auto mechanic thinks Luigi Mangione (or Ted Kaczynski, for that matter) made a few good points. I don’t care if the shopgirl at Anthropologie showed proper respect to Charlie Kirk’s widow. (I might care whether my dentist was a committed Hitler supporter, but only because that would then mean I was potentially trapped in a remake of Marathon Man.)

Perhaps a few professional scalps is the price we must pay for a more polite society. Perhaps, come the next assassination, people will remember this and be more circumspect about expressing their glee. (I always bet on disappointment, myself.) Mike Solana of PirateWires summarized it as well as anyone I’ve seen over the past few days: “I am not fighting for a strong taboo against celebrating the assassination of political figures because I believe in ‘cancel culture.’ I am fighting for a strong taboo against celebrating the assassination of political figures because the alternative is The Purge.” We are now getting a taste of its bitter fruits.

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Source: Calling for Cancelling People Who Celebrate Charlie Kirk’s Murder Feels Petty and Pointless | National Review