She Despised Charlie Kirk. He Resolved to Make People Like Her Pay.

“Watch this! We’re at war,” a friend wrote last month, and Arnold, 55, clicked on the link. He saw Charlie Kirk, a fellow Christian conservative, speaking to a crowd of students in Utah. He heard the echo of a rifle. He watched Kirk go down. Arnold had hunted enough deer to recognize a kill shot, so he began to pray not for Kirk’s survival but for the country he was leaving behind.

As mayor, Arnold had often warned his constituents about the decline of Christian values, the spread of indecency and the fragile “veneer of civility” holding America together. Now he believed it was fracturing. Retreat no longer seemed like an option. He went on Facebook, changed his profile picture to one of Kirk and joined the fight online.

“Time to take the gloves off,” he wrote. “Enough is enough.”

In the weeks since Kirk’s murder, millions of Americans have engaged in an internet war, flooding one another’s feeds with accusations and attacks that begin onscreen and spill into the real world in places like Blanco, a town of 2,100 in Texas Hill Country. Hundreds of people have been doxxed, fired or threatened for social media posts that were perceived as callous or celebratory in the wake of Kirk’s death. A historic act of political violence has unleashed a wave of new threats, deepening the cycle of division in a nation splitting into two hostile sides.

Arnold had always conceived of himself as a peacemaker, a bridge-building conservative who was opposed to Donald J. Trump in 2016 because of the way he stoked anger and hatred in campaign speeches that “crossed the line in terms of decency,” Arnold said. He wore a necklace made up of foreign coins from his mission trips to Nigeria, where he’d helped raise money to build a school for hundreds of children living in a camp for displaced people. He’d spent his professional career in ministry, sinking into personal debt to start a nonprofit that took thousands of children on their first hunting and fishing trips. Each summer, he taught teenagers how to use a rifle and then baptized them in rivers or horse troughs.

“I know I might sound corny,” he told donors. “But I believe the best way to change the world is by loving and mentoring one person at a time.”

But now Arnold scanned through Facebook and saw little of that love in evidence. Some people on the far left were laughing about Kirk’s murder in gleeful videos; others on the right were plotting vengeance. President Trump was saying he “hated” his opponents — that “we just have to beat the hell out of them” — and the longer Arnold scrolled, the more he came to identify with the president’s anger. If a group of Americans was willing to celebrate a coldblooded murder, then there was no line left to step over.

He wondered if there was another way he could help change the world one person at a time — not with kindness, but with exposure.

“Do not miss the weight of this moment,” he wrote to his 1,700 followers, in the first days after Kirk’s death. “We need men and women of faith, courage, and action who will take the fight to the enemy — lawfully, openly, fearlessly.

“We can’t bring out the stocks. We can’t tar and feather them. But we can do the next best thing. Expose them. Call their bosses. Make them famous. Get them fired. And make sure to take screenshots.

“This is war. And this is how we fight back.”

Forty miles up the highway, Danielle Meyers was standing over a dead body when she heard that Charlie Kirk had been shot. Meyers, 36, worked as a paramedic and a firefighter in rural Comal County, and she was leading a training for a half-dozen colleagues on ways to detect internal trauma. She worked on the cadaver with an ultrasound machine, scanning the abdomen until she noticed that a few of her students had become distracted by a video on their phones.

Meyers paused her lesson to watch along with them, a paramedic evaluating another case: a single gunshot, an instant spray of blood, an abnormal stiffening of the arms that she believed was decerebrate posturing, a sign of a severe brain injury. “Brutal,” she said. She returned her attention to the cadaver, but the other paramedics remained in a fog, rewatching the video, cursing, praying for Kirk and consoling one another as Meyers stood by herself.

She was used to being isolated. She was one of only a few women in a fire department of about 100 employees, and even though she tried to fit in by sleeping at the firehouse two nights each week — even though she had won E.M.T. of the Year, passed all the fitness tests, registered as a Republican, collected guns and voted for Trump in 2016 — she was always defined by the ways she stood apart. A vegetarian. A bisexual. A single woman with dyed pink hair and facial piercings among a sea of mostly white, Christian, conservative men.

Once, in 2022, she had decided to join a nationwide protest for abortion rights by adorning her uniform with a small red bandanna. After an hour of hazing and harassment, she ended up outside the firehouse in tears.

“This culture is the exact opposite of tolerance,” she’d texted to a friend.

Kirk had sometimes reminded her of some of those same colleagues: “a bully,” she said, whose language felt like a personal affront to her identity. Kirk encouraged women to have lots of children at a young age and to “submit to a godly man,” but she was single and childless. Kirk believed a certain number of gun deaths were a necessary cost of the Second Amendment, but some of those victims died while Meyers and her co-workers were performing CPR. Kirk criticized “diversity hires” and once joked about feeling nervous when he saw a Black pilot in the cockpit, and Meyers had heard those same dismissive jokes about female paramedics. Kirk said transgender people were an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger at God,” but some of them were Meyers’s close friends.

She finished the training and got into her car to drive to the firehouse. Cars backed up on the freeway while she sat in traffic and flipped through Facebook on her phone. It seemed to her as if the entire internet had transformed into a shrine. Kirk was a martyr, a hero, a genius, an angel, a saint. She hadn’t posted on her private Facebook page in weeks, but she was tired of censoring herself for the benefit of others.

Meyers started a new post for her 400 followers. Her job required her to witness death every week: the chiseled 43-year-old who jumped into a lake to save a stranger, even though he didn’t know how to swim. The grandmother who swung her truck to avoid a drunk motorcyclist and hit a tree. The alcoholic who apologized for the mess of his trailer and insisted on walking himself to the ambulance, where he lay down on the stretcher and died. None were celebrated. The world moved on. Nobody else seemed to care.

“Good riddance,” she wrote on Facebook, a few hours after Kirk’s death. “Thoughts and prayers to the other guy.”

She posted it without a second thought and navigated toward the firehouse as her phone began to vibrate with replies. “You are a truly disgusting person,” someone wrote. She deleted that message and then saw a text from one of her friends.

“Please tell me we’re not actually at a point where we celebrate or laugh at someone being shot because of their political views??”

“You mean the guy who very loudly tells people that I’m an abomination and says my friends shouldn’t exist?” Meyers wrote back.

“This thinking and action leads our country to a very dark place.”

“I will not be guilted into feeling sorry,” Meyers wrote back, but by then her post was beginning to generate a steady number of replies, and even if she didn’t regret her message, she didn’t want to deal with any more blowback or harassment. Forty-seven minutes after posting, she went back onto Facebook and cleared it off her page.

“Fine. I deleted it,” she told a friend. “It’s done.”

Arnold woke before dawn to scroll through Facebook, searching for evidence of cruelty, gathering ammunition and directing his followers to do the same. “Get on the social media pages of people you know locally to be left-wingers,” he wrote. “Screenshot what you find. Make them famous, get them fired, put them out of business. It’s our turn.”

For years, he’d watched newcomers from Austin and San Antonio move into Hill Country for cheaper land and a quieter life, and Arnold thought they imposed some of their liberal politics onto his rural community. They stopped saying the traditional prayer before Blanco’s city meetings, tried to raise taxes and started enforcing minor code infractions against farmers for overgrown grass or free-range chickens. Anything that didn’t fit into their agenda was mocked as small-minded. Anyone who didn’t comply was dismissed as ignorant.

As mayor, Arnold had started an annual Founders Day to celebrate Blanco’s 170-year history with music and dancing on the town square, and a few residents had ridiculed the event as backward, saying it glorified the white settlement of Apache and Comanche territories. Now, he went onto some of their Facebook pages and found something more vicious spreading across the internet.

“Charlie Kirk was a straight up Nazi. There. I said it.”

“He deserves an unnamed ditch in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’m happy he’s rotting in hell.”

“Leave him to the vultures.”

“His wife deserves to go, too. Get rid of the whole family.”

Arnold believed he had witnessed a similar escalation before, during his frequent trips to Nigeria. When he first traveled to the capital city of Abuja in 2010, it was a peaceful place, where the national mosque and the Christian center stood directly opposite each other on Independence Avenue. But over the next years, Arnold saw in Nigeria the pattern he feared was beginning in the United States: an increasing number of solitary terrorist attacks, which then spread into widening conflict zones and displacement camps, which turned into AK-47s routinely being shoved into his face at checkpoints. On some of his most recent trips, in 2024, he’d visited the site of a Christmas massacre, where churches were bombed and hundreds of innocent people were attacked with machetes in what Arnold believed was an ongoing Christian genocide.

“There must be economic consequences for this cancerous vitriol,” Arnold wrote to his followers on Facebook, a few days after Kirk’s death. “Share, share, share.”

“All of the sudden I am really enjoying cancel culture.”

“Shame is not revenge. Shunning is not cruelty. These are the thorns God places on the path to drive men back to the way of truth.”

Arnold searched through posts and then called out a local printmaker, a psychic, a hobbyist farmer. Thousands of conservatives across the state were following the same methods, creating an online echo chamber that targeted perceived offenders. Together they filed more than 280 complaints against teachers with the Texas Education Agency. They flagged a city employee in Marble County, and then turned their ire on Meyers and her fire department as Arnold circulated the accusations about her and encouraged others to join in.

“Doctors. Teachers. Executives. Even a firefighter in Comal County,” he wrote. “These aren’t anonymous trolls. These are people in positions of trust. They are everywhere. Let’s root them out and shame them into oblivion.”

But by the time Meyers got back to the firehouse, friends were sending her screenshots of her post as it spread all over the internet. It had been shared by a local hunting guide, reposted by an old Tea Party group and amplified by a right-wing comedian with hundreds of thousands of followers. When Meyers sat down for her lunch break, she searched for her name online and saw thousands of posts totaling millions of views.

“I know where she works,” one poster wrote, sharing a photo of Meyers and a link to the Canyon Lake Fire Department.

“Revoke her license,” another person responded. “She cannot be trusted to have life in her hands.”

“Getting ‘fired’ won’t even be enough punishment.”

“Hopefully God takes away someone she adores. Hopefully he makes her choke.”

“Find out what she drives and her home address.”

“Cash $$$ offer for a Verified Home Address!”

Hundreds of phone calls came into her fire department — and to three other departments in the area, each of which released statements to clarify that Meyers was not an employee. Soon the Canyon Lake emergency lines were backing up with callers demanding Meyers’s firing. The department put its firehouses on lockdown and sent a police officer to watch over Meyers. She tried to joke with her colleagues about which ambulance crew might respond to her shooting, but late at night in the firehouse, she scrolled through her phone and saw new photos of her face, her car, her house, her mother’s house.

The demand for consequences went all the way up to the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who was using his own platform to target an elementary school teacher and two college students who had posted about Kirk. Meyers wondered if she might be next.

She left the firehouse to drive home, but one of her colleagues said she could stay at his house. He was a conservative who thought Meyers’s post was horrific, but he hid her car behind his house and offered her a bedroom for the next few days. He insisted on following her everywhere for protection, including back to the chief’s office for another disciplinary meeting, where she was fired for “unacceptable conduct.”

She packed her belongings at the firehouse and noticed a message on her phone. It was from a number in New York, and a voice she didn’t recognize. “What a shitty little green house and a red Jeep,” the caller said, and she wondered if he was watching her.

As a paramedic, she’d responded to hundreds of 911 calls for anxiety, and now she recognized some of those same symptoms in herself. Shortness of breath. Accelerated pulse. Panicked thoughts. The world seemed to be closing inward, squeezing her like a fist.

She packed a suitcase of clothes, loaded her dog into the car and stopped at her mother’s house. Her mother mistook her distress for regret, but Meyers said she wasn’t sorry for what she’d written. If anything, she was angrier, but she also needed to find someplace that felt safe in a country increasingly on edge. She didn’t know where she was going yet — just that she needed to leave.

“Everything is collapsing,” she said.

Arnold scrolled through his feed, tallying wins. Ever since he was president of the young conservatives at the University of Texas — once speaking at the same spot on the campus in Austin where Charlie Kirk later held events — he had been telling people that the best way to expose liberals was to let them talk. Now, they were talking, and Arnold believed some of their words were so callous and ugly that they demanded consequences. He said it pained him as a Christian to think of people losing their jobs or suffering from mass rejection, but in this case he considered it necessary.

“Over 1,000 fired,” he wrote. “Let’s make it 10x tomorrow.”

He saw a story online about the firefighter in Comal County who’d just been terminated and shared it on his page. “I am thinking all of these people that have rendered themselves unemployable like this should probably go ahead and self deport,” he wrote. “We don’t want them here anyway.”

By then, some of the other people Arnold had targeted in rural Texas were circling back and beginning to organize campaigns against him, demanding their own consequences. They shared his profile picture on liberal pages and called him a “MAGA bully.” They searched for his home address and threatened to boycott his construction business.

One of Arnold’s friends wrote to say he was worried: “Pay attention to anything other than this for a while. It’s only my opinion, but I feel it’s not healthy for you.”

“Thank you for your concern,” Arnold responded, but in the days that followed he continued to scroll as the thin veneer of civility unraveled on his screen. From his time as mayor, he knew he could thrive in conflict. He could endure being disliked, even despised, when he believed in the cause. He thought the country he loved was collapsing into moral and civic decay, and his responsibility to God and his family was to fight for his principles. The attacks were intensifying, but so was his resolve.

“Now is not the time to retreat,” he posted. “This isn’t a game. This is, in every meaning of the word, a civil war.”

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.

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