Salon: Efforts to Avenge Charlie Kirk’s Death Have Fallen Apart Everywhere — Except Where It Counts

By Russell Payne

Organized right-wing doxxing efforts have evaporated in the month since the killing of Charlie Kirk, the former head of Turning Point USA, leaving questions about where all the data went.

In the six weeks since Kirk’s death, most of the right-wing efforts to avenge his death — except the ones in the federal government — have closed up shop. The biggest of these would-be organizations is the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation, an anonymously operated social media account and website that claims to have collected tens of thousands of entries on supposed critics of Kirk.

Today, however, the site is down, and it has been for weeks. It’s not the only organization ostensibly created to help right-wingers punish their critics that has flopped in the past month.

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Jacob Mchangama, a free speech advocate and the founder of The Future of Free Speech, told Salon in an interview that these efforts have left the administration’s targets in a position where they either need to comply or fall back on legal protection, which “requires courage” and resources that most don’t have.

“If you are able to intimidate people, you can get away with pressuring people into self-censoring, even if the people who are the targets have the First Amendment on their side,” Mchangama said.

Mchangama also said that the current administration has exposed many conservatives as fair-weather advocates for free speech.
“It’s also true that a lot of conservative voices who were riled up about the Biden administration and about censorious cancel culture, coming from the left, are now gleefully adopting the same tactics and are in favor of supercharging them against people on the left. And more broadly, being in favor of using state power and also purging cultural institutions of ideas they don’t like,” Mchangama said.

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