The post was up on Natalie’s private Facebook page for 20 minutes — a crude joke about Charlie Kirk’s death. When her husband suggested the comment was a bit much, she deleted it. The next day, Natalie received the first email telling her to kill herself. It didn’t even take 24 hours to go viral.
In the 20 minutes the post was live, someone had taken a screenshot of it. She doesn’t know how the screenshot got to the right-wing influencer who posted it. Natalie, who owns her own small business, was on a client call as the death threats started to roll in. She told herself to focus on the call, but she was shaking so hard that she was having trouble holding the phone. “My body was having this reaction I couldn’t control,” she says. “I couldn’t breathe. It’s a traumatic thing, and you think, God, over a fucking Facebook post?”
The first day, she got 400 threatening calls, a deluge of emails, and an influx of one-star reviews of her business. She deleted profile pages of the business in response. Someone sent a photo of Natalie herself, altered to make it look like she was burning alive in her car. Another texted her that they were traveling to her neighborhood this week and would “pop by for a meet-and-greet.”
“That was the text the detective was most interested in,” Natalie says, after reporting the harassment to the police. It was the most specific, actionable threat. But it was hard to get the police to take what was happening to her seriously — she had to hire an attorney for local law enforcement in her largely conservative area to remember that doxxing is actually illegal in her state.
The ultimate goals of the Republican Party seem broader than merely harassing the populace for wrongthink
I am using a pseudonym to describe Natalie’s experience — and obfuscating exactly what she said — to avoid triggering a second round of harassment. She says things are dying down now, but she’s been left with lingering paranoia. “For the past five days, I’ve been scared to go to my car.”
Natalie isn’t a public figure. But she’s been caught in the crosshairs of a broad right-wing harassment movement — one sanctioned and encouraged by the government.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) threatened to “use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.” Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), specifically targeted private citizens, amplifying the broader harassment campaign. Blackburn wrote on X that an employee of Middle Tennessee State University should be “removed from her position” because the employee wrote that she had “ZERO sympathy” for Kirk’s death. The employee was fired. South Carolina Representatives Nancy Mace and William Timmons highlighted the identity of a teacher who posted, “Thoughts and prayers to his children but IMHO America became greater today. There I said it.” The teacher was fired. Vice President JD Vance, who was guest-hosting The Charlie Kirk Show, encouraged people to report any uncouth comments about Kirk’s death to the commenters’ bosses. “Call them out, and, hell, call their employer,” he said.
The administration is using Kirk’s death as a way to weaponize citizens against each other
The ultimate goals of the Republican Party seem broader than merely harassing the populace for wrongthink. Mace has also posted about urging the Department of Education to cut funds “from any elementary, secondary, and post-secondary educational institution” that won’t fire its employees for being insufficiently respectful of Kirk’s memory. Vance, along with presidential advisor Stephen Miller, outlined plans to “bring the weight of the federal government down on what they alleged was a left-wing network that funds and incites violence,” The New York Times wrote.
Since Kirk’s killing, the Trump administration and right-wing influencers have been quick to blame “the radical left” for the rise in political violence, despite the majority of shootings being committed by right-wing extremists. (In describing the rise of politically motivated killings, Trump also conveniently ignored the murder of Minnesota House speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat who was slain in her home in June.) Instead, the administration is using Kirk’s death as a way to weaponize citizens against each other, its chilling effect suppressing free speech on the left.
It helps when one of the right wing’s strongest allies is a billionaire who owns the social media platform that has historically enabled online harassment campaigns. So-called “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk is trying to get random Microsoft employees fired, snitch-tagging their CEO, Satya Nadella, with screenshots of social media posts Musk finds objectionable. Some of the screenshotted posts seem fairly far afield of even criticizing Kirk’s views — for instance, one is a person calling DC Comics “weak” for canceling the Red Hood comic, written by trans writer Gretchen Felker-Martin. The comic was scrapped after Felker-Martin made comments such as “Thoughts and prayers, you Nazi bitch” after Kirk’s death.
Other employees weren’t even taken to task for their own wrongspeak, but for reposting — a central mechanic of the X platform. The comment thread that Musk linked to even called out benign posts, such as a repost of journalist Radley Balko saying on Bluesky, “When a right-wing man murdered Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, progressives asked MAGA to tone down the rhetoric to prevent more violence. Within hours of Kirk’s murder, motive still unknown, the right is demanding that the government wage a campaign of violence against their enemies.”
“There were people trying to ruin their lives.”
Right-wing harassment campaigns are not exactly new. The most famous iteration, Gamergate, targeted women who criticized misogyny in video games; it began in 2014 with a video game developer’s breakup and ended at the UN. The harassment campaign was also the emergence of the so-called alt-right, with figures such as Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulous moving the rhetoric away from video games and toward punishing “social justice warriors.” The move was deliberate, according to Steve Bannon, who hired Yiannopoulous at Breitbart: “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and [Donald] Trump.”
This time around, the doxxing sites haven’t been 4chan — or 8chan — but X and charliesmurderers.com, a site put up by right-wing activists targeting anyone who posted about Kirk’s death in a way conservatives found unacceptable. There are X accounts celebrating “trophies” — that is, people being fired from their jobs for saying things the right wing deemed unacceptable about Kirk’s death. In some ways, the doxxing site was a fitting tribute to Kirk’s memory, since his Turning Point USA group kept a “Professor Watchlist” of academics to harass.
“Until it happens to you, you just hear, oh, the North Carolina Panthers’ communications director was let go, and you think their bosses saw their tweet,” Natalie says. “But no, there were people trying to ruin their lives.”
Social media incentivizes regular people to surveil each other. Those same motives — weaponizing the virality of X and TikTok — are what make the right’s large, anonymous troll army willing to dox and abuse ordinary people. And, as with Gamergate, some influencers stand to gain clout by encouraging the harassment campaigns. But both the troll army and the influencers need one more group: snitches. When people post a video of a CEO canoodling at a Coldplay concert, they are using the means of resisting government abuse against each other; when people post a video of a woman arguing about Kirk’s death in the “free speech” area of campus in order to get her kicked out of college, they have become the surveillance tools of a repressive state.
“You can get plucked out of the echo chamber and zeroed in on and you’ll feel like your life is over.”
Because it was a private Facebook post, Natalie’s fateful remark was screenshotted by someone she knows; she even has a guess about who it was. If she’s right, the bombardment of hate was caused by someone she’d known for almost 20 years and who she’d once considered a close friend.
“The fact that it was someone I know — it’s like people just don’t care anymore,” she says. “Just today another one of my friends is being doxxed, and all she did was share posts that already existed.”
Natalie describes the result of the harassment as a days-long panic attack. She felt paranoid. She has an upcoming flight and found herself worrying that the plane might go down just because she was aboard. She’s scared the president will say something about her, triggering another wave of harassment. “The only thing keeping me sane is remembering I’m not special,” she says. “But I am unwell.”
The experience has changed how Natalie thinks about social media and what she’s willing to post. She travels for work, but now she’ll never post what city she’s in while she’s in it. She’s asked friends to hide photos that show the interior of her house, so that trolls won’t know its layout. And she never wants to talk about politics online again. “I am done with liking a political post — or sharing it,” she says. “No one is worth me ever feeling like this again. You can get plucked out of the echo chamber and zeroed in on and you’ll feel like your life is over. It’s not worth it.”
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