Texas State University has ended the enrollment of a student who appeared to mock the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk during a campus memorial event earlier this week.
A video posted to social media on Tuesday morning shows the student in the crowd slapping his neck multiple times, calling himself “Charlie Kirk”, and imitating Kirk when he was fatally shot in the neck on 10 September at Utah Valley University.
“Charlie Kirk got hit in the neck, b---h,” the person says in the video.
At one point in the video, the person can be seen walking through the crowd and up on to a statue, where he mimics Kirk getting shot and pretends to fall down.
The video quickly gained attention, prompting Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican, to share the video and call for the student to be expelled.
“Hey Texas State. This conduct is not accepted at our schools,” Abbott wrote . “Expel this student immediately. Mocking assassination must have consequences.”
The Texas State University president, Kelly Damphousse, issued a statement on Tuesday afternoon, calling the video “disturbing” and confirmed that the video was taken at the school’s San Marcos campus.
“I have directed university officials to take immediate steps to identify the individual in the video,” Damphousse said. “Behavior that trivializes or promotes violence is reprehensible and violates the values of TXST. It will not be tolerated. Let me be clear: expressions that glorify violence or murder have no place on our campuses.”
Several hours later, Damphousse announced that the individual in the video had been identified and was “no longer a student” at Texas State.
The university did not release the name of the student and said that “federal law prevents the university from commenting further on individual student conduct matters.”
In a separate message to Texas State students and community members, obtained by the San Antonio Express News, Damphousse reportedly said the incident “has shaken the Texas State community”.
“The video understandably evoked strong emotions here and across the country,” he wrote. In the message, he also urged members of the Texas State community to “consider the impact that our words and actions can have on those around us.”
The expulsion follows a similar incident at Texas Tech University, where an 18-year-old student was reportedly expelled this week after a video surfaced showing her disrupting a vigil for Kirk on campus.
In the video, she is seen shouting “F--k y’all homie dead, he got shot in the head.”
On Monday, Texas Tech confirmed to multiple local media outlets that the student was no longer enrolled at the university.
“Any behavior that denigrates victims of violence is reprehensible, has no place on our campus, and does not align with our values,” the university said in a public statement on Monday. “Federal law prevents Texas Tech University from commenting on individual student conduct matters. We take all reported violations seriously and address them under university policy and the law.”
Governor Abbott also weighed in on that incident, reposting the video and writing: “Definitely picked the wrong school to taunt the death of Charlie Kirk”.
The expulsions are part of a growing wave of disciplinary actions, ranging from firings to suspensions, against individuals who have made public remarks about Kirk or Kirk’s death since the fatal shooting that some political, business and university leaders have deemed “inappropriate”.
Since Kirk’s killing, a Secret Service employee, journalists, a junior strategist at Nasdaq, firefighters and school employees have reportedly lost their jobs over comments related to Kirk’s politics or death.
The Texas Education Agency is investigating about 180 complaints against teachers accused of posting inappropriate remarks online about Kirk’s death, according to the Texas Tribune.
The Texas American Federation of Teachers has condemned the investigations, calling them a “political witch hunt against Texas educators”.
“These ‘investigations’ into teachers exercising their First Amendment rights outside their official duties silence dissent and encourage the purging of civil servants,” the statement says.
Zeph Capo, the president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers said that “what started with lawmakers weaponizing their platforms against civil servants has morphed into a statewide directive to hunt down and fire educators for opinions shared on their personal social media accounts”.
