Speech doesn't have to be likeable to be free

The First Amendment is the cornerstone of the Constitution, yet in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk it appeared to be made more of modelling clay than solid rock.

An act of sickening political violence became a license for some to reshape the speech right into an-only-if-we-agree-with-you freedom.

Health care workers, professors, airline employees, police officers, lawyers, journalists and restaurant workers were fired or suspended for making comments that did not tow the line of adulation for Kirk.

Kirk, charismatic and persuasive in the evident sincerity of his messages combining Christian values with conservative ideology, inspired passionate admiration from his devoted followers, so it is not surprising that some would take offense at comments criticizing his political views after his shocking death.

Acting to silence those critics by denying them their livelihoods, however, is not the way political discourse is supposed to work in America. Of all people, Kirk’s adherents should know that. It was one of his messages.

“You should be allowed to say outrageous things,” he wrote on the social media platform X last year. “There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And all of it’s protected by the First Amendment.”

The First Amendment was written explicitly to restrict government from denying citizens the right to speak freely, but the Trump administration has treated that as an irrelevant constitutional nuance. 

It was the federal government, in the person of the Federal Communications chairman, that coerced the ABC network to take comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air after he made remarks that condemned the assassination but suggested MAGA operators were trying to exploit the tragedy for political gain.

Vice President JD Vance weighed in by urging people to report disparaging comments made about Kirk, saying, “Call them out, and hell, call their employer.” 

The preferred instrument to carry out the veep’s instructions is, of course, social media, a feature of 21st century life that is inseparable from freedom of speech. The First Amendment protects its unregulated existence as well as its abuses.

Companies that fired employees in the Kirk purge bent to pressure organized by social media campaigns. Southeastern Wisconsin has the unfortunate distinction of being the setting for one of the worst examples.

A right wing influencer called on his followers on Facebook, Instagram and X to harass the Elkhorn Area School District into firing an associate elementary school principal who he said had posted that Kirk “deserves everything he got.”

The district office was overwhelmed with hundreds of telephone calls, voice mail messages and Facebook posts demanding the firing of the principal, many accompanied by various threats.

It turned out that the influencer, Ryan Fournier, who is the national chairman of Students for Trump, had given his followers a false target for their vitriol. The principal had not posted the inflaming words.

The consequences of Fournier’s reckless accusation went beyond harassment of the school district. He introduced his call to action against the principal by writing, “Meet Cynthia Rehberg,” naming the principal, then providing his audience with her phone number and email address, along with her school’s contact information. He attached a photo of Rehberg.

As was obviously the intent, Rehberg became the instant target of abusive calls and emails, some filled with obscene expletives, others with that standard tactic of anonymous harassers—death threats. Rehberg told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel some of the callers said she should be shot or dragged behind a truck. 

This appalling behavior, certainly anathema to most Americans, is a perverted extension of the efforts to suppress commentary deemed unacceptable following the killing of an icon of political activism.

Charlie Kirk gained the affection of his audience, especially the college-age voters who joined his Turning Point chapters, with his articulate justifications for controversial conservative causes. He made his views on race, gender identity, gun violence, antisemitism and the separation of church and state crystal clear. 

Many Americans disagree with those views, and the assassination does not take away their right to say so.

The killing of Charlie Kirk is a tragic sign of something going very wrong in the way this country deals with political division. Political violence is threatening to become an American way of life—and death.

That has to change. Bending the First Amendment to exclude unauthorized speech is not the way to do it.