Efforts to avenge Charlie Kirk’s death have fallen apart everywhere — except where it counts

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.

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. Tt’s not the only organization ostensibly created to help right-wingers punish their critics that has flopped in the past month.

The Charlie Kirk Data Foundation, in its last update on September 14, claimed to have collected 63,648 entries of people who were “happy about an innocent man’s death,” as they put it. It collected the details of alleged critics of Kirk’s alongside numerous other conservative activists in the wake of Kirk’s death, aimed at getting those who failed to honor Kirk fired from their jobs.

The group, however, quickly evolved into just another right-wing X account, attacking people for taking a knee in honor of George Floyd’s death, reposting clips of President Donald Trump and shadowboxing imagined enemies like the so-called “trans terror cell network.” The catch is that this account claimed to have a database with information about tens of thousands of Americans.

The site, however, seems to have gone down permanently in late September, with the domain hosting company Epik telling Salon that they disabled and removed the site because the people who registered the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation website did so using false information.

They added that the site had generated “verifiable DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) threats that were directly connected to the website’s activities” and that Epik focused on instead “serving legitimate business owners and providing a safe, secure platform for all users.”

Cancel the Hate, an organization that cropped up around the same time, has also shuttered. The website and app were made to allow users to report individuals who criticized Kirk, but it collapsed shortly after its launch, owing to a vulnerability exposed by hackers that made the personal information of the site’s users public. As first reported by Straight Arrow News, users’ emails and personal details were compromised.

The app and website were taken down shortly after SAN contacted them for comment, and now the organization’s website just shows an image of Kirk at his final rally and a still from security footage of the killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, alongside the text “coming soon.”

Conservative influencer Jason Shepherd, who created the organization, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Salon.

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.

The only place where the effort to punish Kirk’s critics lives is in the one place it matters most: the federal government.

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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, a free speech advocate and the founder of The Future of Free Speech, told Salon in an interview that these efforts have left the administration’s targets in a position where they either need to comply or fall back on legal protection, which “requires courage” and resources that most don’t have.

“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,” Mchangama said.

Mchangama also said that the current administration has exposed many conservatives as fair-weather advocates for free speech.

“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,” Mchangama said.