For years, Kirk had cast himself as a roving tribune of free expression, touring college campuses to provoke arguments with liberal students and faculty, and warning that political correctness was strangling the first amendment. To civil liberties lawyers, the wave of firings and suspensions following his death became an opportunity to test those principles. Many believed they could help some of the fired get their jobs back.
The Philadelphia-based lawyer Greg Greubel was one of those people who felt Charlie Kirk was upholding the principle of free speech. As a senior attorney working with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), Greubel had helped Turning Point USA, the conservative, Christian non-profit co-founded by Kirk, set up some of their college chapters. When he heard about Kirk’s shooting, he was devastated. Kirk, to his mind, was an advocate of free expression who had been violently gunned down while exercising his first amendment rights.
But it didn’t take long for Greubel to spot retribution for those that didn’t share his view. “The fallout from this was easy to predict, unfortunately,” Greubel recalls, speaking from Fire’s Philadelphia office. “Within 24 hours we started seeing calls for terminations.”
Greubel and other Fire members immediately sprang into action. Greubel’s expertise is the free speech of public employees. He set out to find a clear, obvious example that would demonstrate how many of these employees were unfairly targeted for expressing themselves. He and his colleagues pored over cases of people who had been targeted, and even fired, for social media reactions to Kirk’s death, scanning social media and following tips submitted to Fire’s website. Before long, they had reviewed more than 200 cases. “And that number just kept going up,” Greubel says.
He thought Monica Meeks of Clarksville, Tennessee, might prove a compelling test case. She was fired from the Tennessee department of commerce and insurance on 12 September for calling Kirk a “White Supremacist” in a comment responding to a friend’s Facebook post. In a statement published online, her employer claimed that Meeks “revealed bias and disregard toward the very people she was tasked with serving”.
A disabled 20-year veteran who served honorably in the United States army and longtime public employee, Meeks struck Greubel as especially sympathetic. “She has an impeccable record,” he says. “She is really dedicated to public service. And for someone to get fired that quickly, it was such a disgrace.”
In December, Greubel filed a lawsuit for wrongful termination on behalf of Meeks, seeking reinstatement and damages. (Kevin Walters, communications director at the Tennessee department of commerce and insurance, told the Guardian that the office does not comment about ongoing litigation.) Greubel is optimistic. He points to a settlement from January, when
Tennessee’s Austin Peay State University reinstated a professor, Darren Michael, who was fired for a social media post, and paid him a $500,000 settlement.
“I was heartened to see the outcome of that case,” says Jack Cohoon, a South Carolina attorney defending another client fired in the post-Kirk purge. “It demonstrates that there is a price to be paid for depriving someone of their first amendment rights.”
Cohoon is representing Lauren Vaughn, a South Carolina teachers’ aide at an elementary school who was sacked for social media posts about Kirk’s death. Vaughn’s case is unusual in that she offered precious little actual critical commentary about Kirk, instead repeating Kirk’s own words about gun violence on her personal Facebook account. According to the lawsuit, her post read, in part:
“I think it’s worth to [sic] have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second amendment to protect our other God-given Rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.” – Charlie Kirk. Thoughts and prayers.
In her termination letter, River Ridge elementary school claimed that Vaughan had violated an internal social media policy, which held that all employees “must be respectful and professional in all communications”. Her legal team disagrees. They are suing on the basis that the termination and the social media guidelines are unconstitutional.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) request from Vaughan’s lawyers, asking the district to produce “All complaints, received from any source, regarding Lauren Vaughn from September 10, 2025 to the present”, the school district revealed that it did not actually possess “any written complaints that would be responsive to this request”.
“They were anticipating harassment in advance,” says Cohoon of his client’s school district. “It’s a sacrifice to the wolves.” The district did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
