Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk at the 2025 Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida on July 11, 2025

After Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk was fatally shot in Utah on September 10, a long list of Democrats wasted no time forcefully condemning his murder — from former President Joe Biden to ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). AOC made it abundantly clear that while she had major disagreements with Kirk politically, that type of violence has no place in U.S. politics.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), an independent who caucuses with Democrats, spoke out as well — not unlike his quick response to the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) in 2017. The Vermont senator was quick to condemn the attack and wish Scalise a full recovery.

Regardless, MAGA Republicans ranging from Vice President JD Vance to Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisconsin) to Fox News' Jesse Watters blamed Democrats for Kirk's assassination. And MAGA websites, including the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation and Cancel The Hate, called for retaliation against anyone who criticized Kirk.

But according to Salon's Russell Payne, sites promising vengeance against Kirk's critics have either been discontinued or shifted their focus.

"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," Payne explains in an article published on October 23. "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."

Payne notes that the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation's "last update" was "on September 14," while Cancel the Hate has "shuttered."

"As these sites collapsed, other high-profile conservatives who had spent time reporting Kirk's critics returned to their normal activities, like attacking the LGBTQ+ community online and pushing to ban certain types of religious garb in the United States," Payne reports. "The only place where the effort to punish Kirk's critics lives is in the one place it matters most: the federal government. The Trump Administration has launched a widespread effort to attack its perceived political opponents while downplaying violence from right-wing groups and Trump's own supporters. These efforts have spanned multiple agencies, including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS, and have included the revocation of visas for those who criticized the far-right commentator, the firing of military personnel who criticized Kirk and attacks from the president himself."

Jacob Mchangama, founder of The Future of Free Speech, called out the campaign to silence or bully those who disagreed with Kirk politically as anti-First Amendment.

Mchangama told Salon, "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…. 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."

Russell Payne's full article for Salon is available at this link.