Millions of Dollars Have Now Been Awarded to People Fired over Charlie Kirk Comments
Hundreds of Americans lost their jobs thanks to a right-wing outrage campaign. Many of them have been awarded large monetary settlements.
Photo via Unsplash, Vitaly Gariev Splinter charlie kirk
In the days following the shocking assassination of right-wing provocateur/debate charlatan/Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September of 2025, MAGA America spied a rare opportunity to lash out at perceived cultural foes and profiteer all at once. Before they’d gotten around to turning the death into a cheap fundraising plug, and presumably before Vice President JD Vance managed to use the death as a rationale for impregnating his wife for the fourth time, the first days immediately following the assassination were marked by a different endeavor: a coordinated campaign to use any online commentary about the shooting as a social cudgel against any “liberal” identifying Americans who dared to share an opinion, no matter how tepid.
Through mass campaigns of online harassment, complaint submissions and calls and emails to employers, MAGA America subsequently embarked on the biggest cancel culture campaign the nation had ever seen, despite previously decrying any effort to do these exact things as traitorous behavior or styling themselves as “free speech absolutists.” All told, at least 600 Americans were fired, suspended, or investigated by their employers (many in academia or public service) in the days following the death of Charlie Kirk, with companies frequently kowtowing to Libs of TikTok-style online pressure campaigns to avoid negative attention, even when their offending employee had posted something truly innocuous. In many cases, people lost their jobs for simply posting quotes from the likes of Donald Trump or Kirk himself. But checking back in now, some 10 months later, many of those people not only succeeded in getting their jobs back–they’ve also received hefty settlements following the world’s most obvious wrongful termination lawsuits. Millions of dollars have cumulatively been awarded to people fired or even jailed over Charlie Kirk-related comments.
List of people who were fired over a #CharlieKirk comment and got #settlements for their 1st Amendment violation rights:
Brittney Brown: $485,000
Maria Ruhtenberg: $125,000
Larry Bushart: $835,000
Darren Michael: $500,000
Suzanne Swierc: $225,000Keep it coming you diseased minded #MAGA filths. 🤣
— Taloop (@taloop.bsky.social) 4:13 PM · May 26, 2026
One of those stories is captured in an NPR deep dive that opens with the account of Maria Ruhtenberg, an attorney who had spent 15 years in the thankless task of a public defender for the state of Iowa. When Kirk died, Ruhtenberg fired off a few mildly taunting sentiments in Facebook posts that were only visible to friends, with quips like “live by the sword, die by the sword” and “you reap what you sow,” while acknowledging that she believed Kirk’s killer should also be imprisoned. An unknown Facebook acquaintance subsequently reported the posting to a right-wing news outlet, which contacted her employer, and Ruhtenberg was fired within five days of her original post, despite a decade and a half on the job. The attorney would appeal her termination with the state and had her job reinstated by November after it was revealed that a single complaint had “raised concerns about her conduct.” She would go on to sue the state in federal court on First Amendment grounds, and ultimately settled for $125,000 in damages.
Ruhtenberg’s comments, however, register as positively incendiary compared to what some of the people fired in the post-Charlie Kirk moral panic actually wrote or posted. For instance, Darren Michael, a tenured professor at Tennessee’s Austin Peay State University, did nothing more than repost a news story from 2023 with the following headline: “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment.” He added no commentary of his own, but conservative activists still called for his firing–messaging that was then amplified by Marsha Blackburn, one of the state’s two Republican U.S. Senators. The university folded like a cheap suit, saying that Darren Michael daring to repost a news story “caused significant reputational damage to the university,” and that Michael’s post was “interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death.” In January, after three months of court arguments, Prof. Michael’s job was reinstated, with Austin Peay University agreeing to pay a $500,000 settlement and reimburse him for therapy sessions as a result of the tumultuous experience.
Still, even that is better than the case of Larry Bushart, the Tennessee man who was not simply fired by an employer but instead locked up in a local jail for 37 days by an overzealous small town sheriff who decided to interpret a single meme with a Trump quote following Kirk’s death as a supposed threat Bushart was making against the local high school, refusing to release the man even long after cooler heads should have prevailed. Bushart, a retired police officer, lost his current job and missed the birth of a grandchild while imprisoned, and would later settle for a frankly smaller than expected $835,000 payment in May, considering that he was locked up for more than a month under entirely false and invented pretenses.
NEW REPUBLIC: “Employers and institutions have paid out $2 million in settlements to people fired or penalized over reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death… one of the largest was retired Tennessee cop Larry Bushart, jailed for more than a month…” newrepublic.com/post/211049/…
— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) 7:07 PM · May 29, 2026
It should be noted, of course, that the cases we publicly know about in this vein are just a drop in a larger bucket, and more are likely coming. As NPR observes, not all of the resolved cases involved publicly available settlements or monetary damages, and some confidential settlements do not allow the recipients to discuss them. Still other workers were quietly reinstated into their jobs after the wave of Kirk hysteria and ascendent right-wing cancelations passed by, and some semblance of basic sanity returned. One wonders, in the end, if the efforts of Libs of TikTok and others to punish this segment of society ultimately resulted in more in lost wages, or more gained in gaudy wrongful termination settlements.
Still, there are ripple effects that continue on the social level, which should not be overlooked. Maria Ruhtenberg, the Iowa public defender, gave a quote that sounded a hell of a lot like someone chastened by the experience of being made into a pariah, even though she ultimately got both her job back and a payout. As she told NPR: “I thought my career was over. It was traumatic. I felt targeted. I felt hated. I don’t want to go through that again.”
Tell me that doesn’t sound like someone tacitly acknowledging that they’ll check themselves in apprehension before ever expressing the mildest possible political comment in the future … which is of course exactly the outcome that operatives like Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik are striving for in the first place. The goal of a mass cancelation campaign is not just to cause the petty loss of a few hundred jobs by way of punishing people for their speech; it’s to intimidate everyone else around them into not daring to speak in the future, in order to create the appearance of a culture with no dissent against right-wing domination. You can’t blame someone like Ruhtenberg for subtly acknowledging the effectiveness of such a smear and intimidation campaign, because it was surely a hellish experience to go through. But at the same time, MAGA America might consider the court settlements money well spent, if it stops people from the opposite side of the political spectrum from feeling safe in expressing themselves in the future.
Thankfully, there are some people here who simply refuse to be intimidated. Brittney Brown, a former biologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, won a $485,000 settlement for her wrongful termination but ultimately left the agency, even though she freely admits all she ever wanted to do was continue on with her original job before political influencers saw to it that the entire situation became toxic. She has since found other work in biology, and despite never learning how her original post about Charlie Kirk somehow ended up calling down a Libs of TikTok horde on her head, she wants the likes of Chaya Raichik to know that she can’t be silenced. Or as Brown put it: “I want them to know that they lost. I won. I can speak out now. And you didn’t shut me up forever.”
A profile of Brittney Brown, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist who was fired for her Charlie Kirk social media post and was awarded $485,000 by the court.
She now lives in Mississippi.
— SFDB (@sfdb.bsky.social) 10:39 AM · Jun 13, 2026
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