TikToker Hannah Brown Is Losing Followers Over Charlie Kirk’s Memorial
On Sunday, over 90,000 people showed up for Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Glendale, Arizona, where President Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance spoke while Elon Musk sat in the State Farm Stadium’s VIP section. Also spotted in the crowd: popular TikToker Hannah Brown, who’s known for her viral videos in which she poses as a restaurant server having frustrating customer interactions. After being seen at the memorial, Brown has seemingly lost over 150,000 followers and counting — but in a new video posted on Tuesday, she said the backlash doesn’t bother her. Here’s what’s happened.
Who is Hannah Brown?
Whether you recognize her name or not, you’ve probably seen Brown’s videos, which are mostly sketches about working in the service industry. Brown — not to be confused with the former Bachelorette of the same name — is a prolific poster. Many of her TikToks, in which she acts out annoying encounters between restaurant workers and their customers (think: people sending back food they’ve already finished; large parties that show up sans reservation), have gone massively viral. Before last week, she had nearly a million followers.
Why are people unfollowing Hannah Brown?
On Sunday, Brown attended Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Glendale, Arizona. Though she didn’t announce on social media that she would be there, eagle-eyed followers spotted her in the audience on a broadcast of the service and posted screenshots on TikTok. “I always thought she did the Karen thing a little too well,” read one TikTok comment, which got over 17,000 likes.
Before her appearance at the memorial, no one had really bothered to look into Brown’s life beyond her TikTok persona. But after the screenshot went public, fans began scrutinizing her content more closely. That’s when followers noticed she appears to have reposted several TikToks mourning Kirk, including one that seemingly compared Kirk to Jesus.
In the days that followed, Brown’s follower count began plummeting. Prior to the controversy, she had over 950,000 followers, according to screenshots that have circulated on TikTok. But after word started spreading of what she was up to on Sunday, that number began dropping. As of Thursday morning, the reposts still show up on her profile, and her follower count has dropped below 800,000.
What has she said about the controversy?
On Tuesday, Brown posted a video emphasizing that she was “not MAGA” and defending her decision to go to Kirk’s memorial. “I was not at a MAGA rally — I went to a memorial for Charlie Kirk, a man who was brutally assassinated in front of thousands of people, a man who has a wife and children who will never get to see him again,” she said. Brown said she’d been “disturbed” by the video of Kirk’s death, “and even more disturbed” by comments she saw on TikTok “celebrating and rejoicing his death.”
Brown was vague about her own views in the video, saying she and Kirk had “differing beliefs” and that she doesn’t “agree with a lot of what Charlie believed.” “I did not go to the memorial to align myself with any political views or to make a political statement. I went to pay my respects to a human that died,” she said. She castigated her followers for “attacking” her for going to the memorial, calling the backlash “insane.” “Whether or not you agree with his political beliefs is irrelevant, because truly, if you are against gun violence, which why would you not be, you cannot celebrate when someone you don’t like gets shot,” she said.
Brown said she was “completely fine” if people unfollowed her, explaining that she would “rather have zero followers than hundreds of thousands of people that would celebrate the death of a man who just wanted to speak.” Wrapping up the video, she thanked “everyone that is still supporting me and defending me,” and said “Jesus is King.” She captioned the video “John 15:18,” a Bible verse in which Jesus tells his disciples, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.”
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