In September 2025, Gerald Bourguet stood on the cusp of the life he had long dreamed of. A full-time professional basketball journalist, he had just closed on a new home with a swimming pool alongside his wife, and the couple had welcomed their newborn son months earlier. That perfect picture collapsed in mere hours, after conservative icon Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on the campus of Utah Valley University, and Bourguet published a series of unflinching critical posts about the activist online.
In his public comments, Bourguet labeled Kirk an “evil man” who had spent his career advancing hateful ideological causes, and called out Kirk’s supporters for their longstanding silence on the crisis of school shootings. Speaking to the BBC a year after the incident, Bourguet explained his reaction was driven by the flood of glowing tributes that flooded social media immediately after Kirk’s death. “I had seen the way that people were talking about this person – kind of eulogising him and lionising him and it bothered me based on a lot of the things that he had said,” he said.
Kirk, the founder of the influential Christian youth conservative group Turning Point USA, was one of the most polarizing figures in modern American politics. To conservatives, he was a charismatic trailblazer who made right-wing ideology accessible and appealing to young generations. To his critics, his inflammatory rhetoric on issues ranging from racial justice and immigration to gun control and gender identity inflicted widespread harm on marginalized communities.
Within days of Bourguet’s posts, screenshots of his comments went viral across polarized social media platforms. He was fired from his position at PHNX Sports, his home address was doxxed, and he began receiving a steady stream of violent threats against his family. Fearing for the safety of their four-month-old son, Bourguet and his wife fled their home state, only returning months later to sell their house and relocate permanently. Today, PHNX Sports has not responded to the BBC’s repeated requests for comment on Bourguet’s termination.
Bourguet is far from alone. A year after Kirk’s assassination, a Reuters tally from November 2025 confirms more than 600 people across the United States have been fired or formally disciplined over critical comments they made about Kirk in the wake of his death, a number experts widely believe is an undercount, as many cases never attract local or national media attention. While some terminated workers have won large financial settlements or reinstatement through legal action, many others like Bourguet have been forced to rebuild their lives from scratch, with little legal recourse.
In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s killing, most Americans chose to keep their private opinions about the activist confined to close circles. But on social media, the reaction split sharply along partisan lines: right-wing users demanded harsh consequences for anyone who spoke critically of Kirk, arguing that comments posted hours after his death were callous, disrespectful, and risked inciting further political violence. Prominent right-wing commentator Laura Loomer, who boasts nearly 2 million followers on X, issued a public warning to Kirk’s critics: “prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined.”
That pressure to punish critics extended all the way to the highest levels of the U.S. government. Days after the assassination, Vice President JD Vance publicly urged the public: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer.” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the BBC that “Anyone who engages in or endorses political violence or assassination culture must be condemned in the harshest terms possible.”
Left-wing critics and free speech advocates push back on this framing, drawing a clear line between celebrating Kirk’s assassination and voicing criticism of his long career of activism. Many also point out that the same conservative leaders now calling for mass terminations have spent years decrying “cancel culture” — the phenomenon where people face professional and social ruin for voicing unpopular opinions.
South Carolina state Representative Jordan Pace, a Republican, pushed back on that charge of hypocrisy in an interview with the BBC, arguing that context matters when it comes to consequences for unpopular speech. “Cancel culture can be good, it’s bad when it’s applied in the wrong ways,” he said. “If you are someone who celebrates political assassinations and the murder of an innocent man with two young children in a way that many people did, then yeah, that’s an appropriate way for society to function, to shame those people.” Pace previously called for cutting public funding to South Carolina universities that refused to discipline employees who made critical comments about Kirk, a post that was later shared by President Donald Trump.
The actions that triggered disciplinary action varied wildly across cases. In Tennessee, anthropology professor Tamar Shirinian was suspended and ultimately fired after a public Facebook comment that read “the world is better off” without Kirk. A Delta Air Lines flight attendant was terminated after posting “good riddance” in response to news of Kirk’s death, and an Office Depot employee was fired after refusing to print vigil flyers honoring Kirk. Neither company responded to requests for comment from the BBC.
Some workers faced consequences even without making any direct critical comments about Kirk or his assassination. Darren Michael, a theater professor in Tennessee, was fired after sharing a 2023 news article that quoted Kirk arguing that protecting broad gun rights was worth the cost of annual gun deaths. Florida wildlife biologist Brittney Brown was fired by the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission after reposting a satirical meme mocking Kirk’s stance on gun violence following his killing. “I was absolutely gutted,” Brown told the BBC. “It was like the entire world just completely flipped on its head in a moment.”
Over the past year, dozens of wrongfully terminated workers have filed lawsuits across the U.S., arguing that their terminations violated their constitutional right to free speech. A number of these cases have resulted in substantial financial settlements for the workers, even as many say the payouts do not make up for the damage done to their careers and personal lives.
Brown accepted a $485,000 settlement — roughly 12 times her annual salary — after her termination. Michael won reinstatement to his position at Austin Peay State University, and the school agreed to pay him $500,000 to resolve his legal claims. The largest settlement confirmed by the BBC was a $1.9 million payout from the University of Tennessee to Tamar Shirinian, though as part of the agreement, Shirinian will not be reinstated and agreed not to apply for future roles at the institution. Just recently, an arbitrator ordered *The Washington Post* to rehire opinion journalist Karen Attiah, who was fired after posting that she would not participate in “performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence.” Dozens of other lawsuits remain pending in courts across the country.
Most successful lawsuits have been brought by public sector employees or unionized workers, who retain formal free speech protections that do not apply to most private sector workers. The majority of private sector employees in the U.S. work under at-will employment agreements, which allow employers to terminate workers for any reason, with no legal requirement for just cause.
For that reason, Bourguet, a private sector at-will employee, has little chance of winning a legal challenge to his firing. A year after his termination, he told the BBC he has struggled to secure full-time work as a journalist. Even though his new home state has a professional basketball team, he believes the viral controversy has made him unemployable in the tight-knit world of professional basketball journalism. He has launched his own independent podcast, but admits he doubts it will generate enough income to cover his family’s living expenses, and leaving the United States is now an option he is actively considering. “I have accepted that that life is over and that I need to start a new one,” he said.
Despite the profound personal and professional costs they have endured, almost all of the workers who spoke to the BBC said they do not regret the comments that cost them their jobs. “I have a right to say what I want to say,” Brown said. “They are the ones who should have the regrets, not me.”
Shirinian apologized for the tone of her comment shortly after her suspension, acknowledging it was an emotional outburst that was never intended to be widely public. But she stands by the core sentiment behind her words. “I don’t regret the sentiment, however,” she said. “the sentiment was that I am not sad. And I refuse to be made to feel like I have to be sad that someone who was so hateful was killed.” She took the settlement rather than waiting for a full trial to move forward with her life, saying “I took a settlement because this allows me to move on with my life. The one small regret that I have is that I will not see my day in court and justice will not be served in that way. But I think that the number of the settlement actually speaks to that anyway.”
Bourguet similarly stands by his comments, even as he grieves the impact the controversy has had on his family. “I don’t regret that line of thinking because I think it’s important to push back on things that are steeped in hatred,” he said. “I don’t regret what I said. I don’t regret the way that I said it. I do regret the ripple effects that came from it and the way that they impacted me, my career, my family, and my son.” At 35, he says, he is forced to start over: “My life will never be the same after this… I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”
