Teachers Receive Death Threats After MAGA Claims Their Halloween Costumes Mocked Charlie Kirk

Staff at a high school in Arizona have been deceived and inundated with online attacks, and received multiple death threats, after a spokesperson for Turning Point USA inaccurately accused a group of teachers of wearing Halloween costumes that were supposedly mocking the murder of TPUSA co-founder Charlie Kirk.

On Friday, members of the Cienega High School math department wore matching bloody white T-shirts with the words “Problem Solved” written in black letters on the front. A photo of the group was posted on the Vail School District Facebook page. District Superintendent John Carruth said in a statement that no students or parents complained about the costumes during the school day.

Then on Saturday, Andrew Kolvet, who was the executive producer of the Charlie Kirk show, posted the photo on “They deserve to be famous and fired.”

The white T-shirts, Kolvet implied, resembled the “Freedom” T-shirts Kirk was wearing when he was killed while speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on September 10.

Kolvet’s post went viral and was viewed nearly 10 million times before being removed Tuesday after WIRED contacted him.

Immediately following the publication of Kolvet’s post, Cienega High School was bombarded with social media posts, comments, direct messages, emails, and at least one voicemail containing racial slurs, calls for teachers to be fired, personal information of school staff, and explicit threats of violence. The school shared these messages with WIRED.

The school district immediately responded to the allegations, clarifying on Facebook that the costumes were not a reference to Kirk’s murder and that, in fact, the math department had used the same costumes a year earlier.

“We want to clarify that these shirts were part of a math-themed Halloween costume intended to represent solving difficult math problems,” wrote Carruth, the superintendent. “The T-shirts were never intended to target any person, event or political issue.” The Vail School District provided WIRED with a copy of an email from Oct. 31, 2024, which features an image of the same costumes.

While Kolvet acknowledged Carruth’s statement and admitted in a post on X later Saturday that the costumes had been used the previous year, he did not delete his original post.

“It’s a very strange costume for teachers in general, but after what happened to Charlie, I’m absolutely floored that they used it again,” Kolvet wrote. “I don’t believe for a second that all of them are innocent.”