The Guardian reports:

Julie Strebe, a 55-year-old sheriff’s deputy in the small Bible belt town of Salem, Missouri, was on a date with her husband at a Buffalo Wild Wings when her husband slid his phone across the table. On Facebook, people were demanding Strebe’s immediate termination, calling her a “wacko” with “extreme mental health issues”.

It was the afternoon of 13 September 2025, just a few days after Charlie Kirk had been killed by a sniper’s bullet on a college campus. Shortly after his assassination, Strebe had posted on her personal Facebook page: “Empathy is not owed to oppressors.” In comments underneath, she did not mince words. She called Kirk a racist, a sexist, an antisemite and the kind of person who wants to see gay people, like her own son, stoned to death. “I don’t feel bad,” she says, months later, speaking from her home. “I refuse to feel bad for this man, and the hateful things he stood for.”

When she heard people were calling for her to be fired, Strebe told her superiors that she would take her offending posts down. But it was too late. Her posts had escaped containment. On Facebook, and in phone calls to her workplace, she was called a lunatic with a badge and gun or a “corrupt cop”, who couldn’t be trusted to execute her duties as law enforcement. Some locals apparently worried that if Strebe pulled them over for a routine traffic stop, she might fire her weapon at them if they were wearing a Maga hat.

People from her home county of Dent, which voted overwhelmingly to re-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 election, used homophobic slurs against her son online. Her husband’s woodworking business was targeted too, as was the Facebook page for his charitable side gig, where he dresses up as the Grinch and visits children’s hospitals over the holidays.

“I’ve been a cop for 19 years,” Strebe says. “I believe that everybody should be treated fairly. And that’s what I’ve done my entire career. And this one statement was completely just twisted. It’s very frustrating.”

Strebe is one of a group of Americans who endured similar ordeals after Kirk’s death. Some were called out for their unkind, even giddy, social media reactions to news of the far-right activist’s assassination. Others were harangued for merely quoting Kirk’s own words – particularly his comments about how a certain number of gun deaths are an acceptable cost to maintain the gun rights vouchsafed by the second amendment. A website, titled Charlie Kirk’s Murderers, collated the names and personal information of such alleged offenders. The site has since been decommissioned – but it aided Kirk acolytes in mounting complaints to employers against those they deemed to be not sufficiently reverential.

By November of 2025, a Reuters investigation estimated that 600 people had been terminated, disciplined, investigated, suspended or otherwise admonished for their Kirk posts, likening the reaction to an ideological purge.

That’s how the Strebes felt when they started to notice people lurking outside their house. They set up security cameras on the perimeter. A large truck parked on their block with a dinky, Sharpie-on-cardboard taped to its side that read: “Julie Strebe Supports the Assassination of Charles Kirk.” “He could have done a much better sign,” laughs Strebe, as she prepares to pack up and move out of the town where she has made a life for 20 years. “It looks like a third-grader wrote it.”

Strebe was suspended, then fired. According to Strebe, superiors claimed that because she made her posts on the clock and did not disclaim they were her personal opinions, there were grounds for termination. She also says that her bosses argued she had a history of making controversial social media posts while serving the public, but the only previous example they were able to cite was a 10-year-old post about shoddy local roadwork causing flat tires. When approached for comment, the Dent county sheriff’s office told the Guardian that “we are prohibited by law from disclosing any information regarding that former deputy”.

“Basically they screwed me because of the mob mentality,” Strebe says. “This is everything I’ve ever done in my adult life. And they took it from me … I could have retired in six and a half years. Full pension. Can’t do that now.”

Demands for the termination and professional castigation of Kirk’s critics, people like Strebe, were amplified by some of the biggest megaphones in the United States. When JD Vance guest-hosted an episode of Kirk’s podcast in the week after his death, the vice-president told listeners: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance said. “And, hell, call their employer … Get involved! It’s the best way to honor Charlie’s legacy.”

For years, Kirk had cast himself as a roving tribune of free expression, touring college campuses to provoke arguments with liberal students and faculty, and warning that political correctness was strangling the first amendment. To civil liberties lawyers, the wave of firings and suspensions following his death became an opportunity to test those principles. Many believed they could help some of the fired get their jobs back.

The Philadelphia-based lawyer Greg Greubel was one of those people who felt Charlie Kirk was upholding the principle of free speech. As a senior attorney working with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), Greubel had helped Turning Point USA, the conservative, Christian non-profit co-founded by Kirk, set up some of their college chapters. When he heard about Kirk’s shooting, he was devastated. Kirk, to his mind, was an advocate of free expression who had been violently gunned down while exercising his first amendment rights.

But it didn’t take long for Greubel to spot retribution for those that didn’t share his view. “The fallout from this was easy to predict, unfortunately,” Greubel recalls, speaking from Fire’s Philadelphia office. “Within 24 hours we started seeing calls for terminations.”

Greubel and other Fire members immediately sprang into action. Greubel’s expertise is the free speech of public employees. He set out to find a clear, obvious example that would demonstrate how many of these employees were unfairly targeted for expressing themselves. He and his colleagues pored over cases of people who had been targeted, and even fired, for social media reactions to Kirk’s death, scanning social media and following tips submitted to Fire’s website. Before long, they had reviewed more than 200 cases. “And that number just kept going up,” Greubel says.

He thought Monica Meeks of Clarksville, Tennessee, might prove a compelling test case. She was fired from the Tennessee department of commerce and insurance on 12 September for calling Kirk a “White Supremacist” in a comment responding to a friend’s Facebook post. In a statement published online, her employer claimed that Meeks “revealed bias and disregard toward the very people she was tasked with serving”.

A disabled 20-year veteran who served honorably in the United States army and longtime public employee, Meeks struck Greubel as especially sympathetic. “She has an impeccable record,” he says. “She is really dedicated to public service. And for someone to get fired that quickly, it was such a disgrace.”

In December, Greubel filed a lawsuit for wrongful termination on behalf of Meeks, seeking reinstatement and damages. (Kevin Walters, communications director at the Tennessee department of commerce and insurance, told the Guardian that the office does not comment about ongoing litigation.) Greubel is optimistic. He points to a settlement from January, when Tennessee’s Austin Peay State University reinstated a professor, Darren Michael, who was fired for a social media post, and paid him a $500,000 settlement. [Continue reading…]