Charlie Kirk's death has Trump administration looking for online critics

In an email, a State Department spokesperson said the Trump administration did not believe that visas should be granted to people whose presence in the country “does not align” with American national security interests. (The spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions about how this would work in practice.) 

In the hours after Landau’s post asking for reports about foreigners making light of Kirk’s death, he received almost 4,000 responses, including from users who posted screenshots from the personal social media accounts, including photos, of people that users claimed had “sided with America’s enemies,” as one widely-shared response put it. 

The call to publicly identify those who were felt to have celebrated Kirk’s death was picked up by right-wing commenters, including Trump ally Laura Loomer, who claimed on X that she’d gotten a government employee fired after publicly posting screenshots of his social media accounts, one of which included a post of him calling Kirk a “literal racist.” The “Libs of TikTok” X account has posted photos of several dozen people, including teachers, government employees and even a reality TV show contestant, it claims have celebrated Kirk’s death. Self-described political strategist Joey Mannarino posted on X that he’d been “reporting people to their jobs all day.” 

Calling for action against those who express controversial opinions is “striking and dangerous,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, an associate professor who studies conspiracy theories and online communities at Queen’s University, in an email. While the U.S. Constitution’s first amendment protects American citizens’ freedom of speech from their government, there’s no such protection for foreigners seeking visas, entry or residence, he points out. 

Landau “is basically crowdsourcing surveillance and turning social media users into informants for state power,” he wrote. “This opens the door for abuse, with people mass-reporting foreigners whose politics they dislike, knowing it might jeopardize their visas.”

The second Trump administration has cracked down on immigration and those expressing views contrary to government policy, and the fatal shooting of Kirk, a close Trump ally, has further inflamed tensions. Kirk, a co-founder of the youth-focused conservative organization Turning Point USA, was speaking at a university in Utah when he was fatally shot Wednesday.

The response to his death worldwide has been unusually large for a non-elected person and, in many ways, has reflected the ideological divide that has roiled the United States in recent months. While many people have denounced political violence in general — Prime Minister Mark Carney said he was “appalled” by the assassination — much of the outpouring has split along partisan lines and opened up a new front in the fight about political decorum and free speech.

Trump blamed the “radical left” in a video posted on social media, saying Kirk had been unfairly compared to criminals and mass murderers. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today and it must stop right now,” he said. To his fans, Kirk was one of the most persuasive advocates for a more youthful brand of conservatism that he proselytized via no-holds-barred debate and visits to campuses much like the one during which he was killed.

But his critics have drawn attention to some of Kirk’s more controversial takes, including calling the Civil Rights Act “a huge mistake,” and Martin Luther King Jr. “not a good person,” blaming a Texas flood on diversity hiring and promoting the false narrative that the 2020 U.S. election was rigged against Trump.

His comments about gun control in particular were widely shared on social media following the shooting. “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the (U.S. Constitution’s) second amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” he said in 2023.

In the moments before he was shot, Kirk was engaged in a back and forth with an event attendee about the number of mass shooters who were transgender. “Too many,” was Kirk’s response. (A recent school shooting in Minneapolis committed by someone who may have been transgender has prompted some in conservative circles to claim they’re more prone to violence, though experts say there is no data to suggest it’s a widespread phenomenon.) 

As of Thursday afternoon, Kirk’s shooter remained at large. The FBI has released photos of a person of interest and offered an $100,000 reward.