National Public Radio was very concerned Saturday about angry leftists losing their jobs for gleeful posts about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on a college campus in Utah, even citing McCarthyism, in “Charlie Kirk critics are being targeted online and losing jobs” by Huo Jingnan, Jude Joffe-Block, and Audrey Nguyen.
Over thirty people across the country have been fired, put on leave, investigated or faced calls to resign because of social media posts criticizing Charlie Kirk or expressing schadenfreude about the conservative influencer’s assassination earlier this week, according to an analysis by NPR.
And more may be to come: some GOP lawmakers and officials are signaling their readiness to punish people for their speech. Conservative activists are collecting and publicizing social media posts and profiles that they say “celebrated” his death and are calling for them to lose their jobs.
As if the “celebration” of Kirk’s death is not obvious.
After bringing up the firing of MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd for his loathsome suggestion that Kirk may have brought about his own killing, NPR agreed about Kirk’s “incendiary” rhetoric, including “that some gun deaths were worth it to have the Second Amendment.”
NPR let law professor David Kaye whine that people who want to criticize Kirk upon his death “are essentially being silenced.”
While online battles around social media posts have arisen in other murders or attempted murders of public figures in recent years, the campaign this time around appears more intense, in part due to a website, set up anonymously, called Expose Charlie’s Murderers. The site corrals social media posts and the names, locations and employment of people deemed to have been “celebrating Charlie’s death.” No one behind the site responded to NPR’s request for comment.
As of Friday morning, the site featured over 40 people, and the organizers claim that it “is being converted into a mass searchable database of over 20,000 entries.” WIRED reported that some of the people featured on the homepage have received death threats.
NPR fretted, “Lawmakers and officials at the state and federal levels also vowed to use their positions to punish anyone appearing to celebrate Kirk’s death.” Next came the pathetic Joe McCarthy comparison.
Loretta Ross, a community activist and Smith College professor who researches authoritarian movements, told NPR that Kirk’s assassination was a tragedy that is now being used to clamp down on free speech.
She referenced the McCarthy period, when “people were punished, fired, blacklisted for having opinions that the government didn’t like,” and warned against an overreaction.
Did NPR cry McCarthyism over the many people condemned or fired for mildly criticizing Black Lives Matter online during the hysteria of 2020?
Also compare NPR’s current angst over the firing of vengeful leftists to its favorable May 2024 story about left-wing list-makers using TikTok to boycott celebrities for the crime of…saying nothing about Israel: “Here’s how activists used the Met Gala to call out stars for Gaza silence.” National Public Radio’s “Culture Desk” reporter Chloe Veltman went all-in in support of anti-Israel cancel culture targeting the outlandish Met Gala in New York City.
A collective effort on TikTok and other social media platforms to push celebrities to speak publicly about the conflict in Gaza went into overdrive this week after The Met Gala.
Veltman’s indulgent description of the Gaza list maker clashes with the cool description of the “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” site.
“I made a Google Doc of every celebrity that attended the Met Gala, and now I’m going through and writing if they’ve been silent, or if they’ve been using their platform to speak up about the genocide in Gaza,” said TikTok user silentcelebs8 in a video displaying a long list of celebrity names against a black background with the word “SILENT” in red next to some, including Zendaya, Nicki Minaj, Keith Urban and Andrew Scott. “Some of these celebrities have not been completely silent,” the Tiktoker continued. “Zendaya did make a post back in October on her story supporting Palestine, but has been silent since. So I went ahead and put ‘silent.'”…
After admitting doubts about how much impact such crusades have, Veltman gave the cancellers an A for effort.
And even if the many, much-viewed videos aimed at canceling celebrities don’t help to bring about a change for the people of Gaza, there’s at least an emotional reward for those doing the canceling.
