For some creators, Kirk’s killing has only crystalized the risks they’ve long associated with this career. “Most of us knew that we were in danger or had some level of threat just by being public,” the person behind Organizermemes, an anonymous, left-leaning X account, tells WIRED.
But even small amounts of hesitation could affect a creator’s bottom line. “You have to be somewhat open to meeting people,” this person says. “Everything is a choice between comfort and safety. Does that one thing you don’t do a major event for mean that you don’t get that sponsorship? This stuff is so freelance-heavy.”
Rather than pulling back, some creators are leaning even further into producing political content following Kirk’s killing, despite facing attacks and doxing attempts. Kimberly Hunt, a progressive creator with more than 170,000 followers on TikTok, was publicly doxed and says she was fired from her full-time job as an HR official after posting a video last week criticizing Kirk and his history of targeting marginalized groups of people. (Her employer did not respond to a request for comment.) Instead of retreating, Hunt says, she now plans to focus on producing political content full-time and has created a GoFundMe for followers to help fund her transition into independent work.
“You didn’t shut me up. You just cleared my schedule,” Hunt said in an Instagram post linking out to the GoFundMe on Tuesday.
As of publication, Hunt has raised nearly $70,000 to support her channel.
Conservative creator Cam Higby and a handful of his friends have organized a spur-of-the-moment campus tour, which started this week in Georgia, to debate people in Kirk’s honor. Shortly after Kirk’s killing, Higby says, he and four of his friends quickly drafted a plan to travel the state until they “run out of money.”
“We really want to show conservatives who are very heartbroken, devastated, and scared about Charlie’s death, that somebody is going to continue and that we’re not going to back down, we’re not scared, and that we’re going to fearlessly defend our ideas,” Higby says.
Asked if the group is taking additional security precautions, Higby says, “I don’t want to say exactly what we’re doing, because I think it’s kind of a security breach in and of itself.”
David Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor and gun-control activist, has been the subject of conspiracies for nearly a decade and has seen an uptick in threatening messages over the past week. Soon after law enforcement officials released a CCTV image of the suspected shooter last week, Elon Musk’s chatbot, Grok, responded to several posts falsely suggesting that the shooter resembled Hogg.
“There will always be, whether it’s real people or bots or anonymous accounts or whatever, who are going to make these threats. But to have this agent of X spitting out incorrectly, alleging that David is the shooter, is just unbelievable,” a spokesperson for Hogg’s political organization Leaders We Deserve says.
Kirk’s killing has highlighted a truth most creators already knew: Their visibility puts them at risk, but their livelihoods depend on them staying visible.
“Part of my rate is the ‘someone might kill me tax,’ which is crazy,” says Organizermemes.
