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More 120 Minutes on WRFL in just a moment, but first, it’s 12:30 and it’s time to check the news.

The Kentucky Kernel reported earlier on Friday, September 12th that UK has placed one of its employees on administrative leave from his job after he made a comment using his own personal social media account outside of work about Wednesday’s assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk.

Brad Van Hook, who is the key shop manager in UK’s administrative services, posted a comment on a WKYT Facebook post about the assassination. In it, he quoted the historic American lawyer and civil rights advocate Clarence Darrow, writing, “I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great satisfaction.”

The X account @libsoftiktok, which has over 4 million followers, first brought widespread attention to Van Hook’s comment in a post on Wednesday night. The Lexington Herald-Leader further reported that Libs of TikTok, weaponizing its platform against ordinary people in its typical fashion, spent much of the day Thursday targeting people who made social media comments about Kirk’s death, often tagging their employers.

UK responded Thursday to this targeting of its employee by Libs of TikTok by placing Van Hook on paid administrative leave from his staff position, with a UK spokesperson issuing a statement on behalf of the university condemning his remarks, offering their own opinion that the comment was “insensitive, cruel and wrong”, “does not reflect who we are as a community” and that “talking about it more gives it the space it doesn’t deserve”. And despite Van Hook making his comment on an external channel unrelated to the university, the spokesperson also said that UK was conducting an investigation into him for his speech, referring him to “the appropriate officials”.

This action taken by UK has caused a firestorm online, with the Kernel’s posts about the incident currently standing this late Friday night at a total of over 2,000 reactions and 500 comments, with many of them accusing UK as a public university of violating Van Hook’s First Amendment rights, asserting that he was merely exercising his Free Speech in a personal capacity, much like Charlie Kirk himself did throughout his career prior to his death on Wednesday, speaking on college campuses defending his own right to make insensitive and controversial statements, including when he spoke most recently here on UK’s own campus in 2023.

More details about this story and those reactions to it can be found on the Kentucky Kernel Instagram.

And that’s… the news.