“Every leftist you get fired for celebrating someone being murdered, is another business who has a chance to hire a quality human being to replace them,” wrote one right-wing influencer.
The blacklist sites are also protected speech, and nobody can stop advocates for any cause from compiling them. They highlight comments that are sometimes, indeed, crude or offensive, though there are also a lot of shades of gray they tend to gloss over; for someone to say they will not mourn Kirk’s passing, for instance, is not the same as “celebrating” his death. And there’s an ever bigger difference between either statement and actually inciting further violence.
Still, the blacklists seem to be accomplishing their goal. A teacher from Holden was suspended last week from her job at Wachusett Regional High School for a post related to the assassination. So was a staffer at the school. An employee of the Broad Institute was fired. School employees in Framingham and Sharon were also reportedly under investigation.
That’s just in Massachusetts. Many other workers across the country have been fired or suspended from their jobs, including some from public employers, which unlike private entities are bound by the First Amendment.
We won’t defend any of the comments those people allegedly made. It’s yet more evidence of how much social media has coarsened society that so many people apparently felt it was totally normal to praise or make excuses for an assassination.
Still, these are for the most part everyday people, not politicians. As righteous as it might feel to punish them, swooping into the lives of private citizens — who may have just made a mistake or failed to think through a social media post in the heat of the moment — and pillorying them in front of a national audience is a bad idea.
First, it’s likely to backfire, because it makes Kirk’s supporters look like bullies and may cost them public sympathy. It’s also hypocritical, since Kirk held himself out as a defender of free speech. These accusations also often lack crucial context — such as if a person quickly took a post down once they thought better of it.
The biggest problem, though, is that they perpetuate the cycle of denunciation and outrage that is helping to fuel political violence in the first place. A better response is the one the Republican governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, recommended last week in a noteworthy speech urging Americans to turn down the temperature on political rhetoric.
“History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country,” he said, “but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.”
Quoting Kirk, Cox said: “Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much.”
Many conservatives don’t seem to be in the mood to listen to those calls, perhaps because they feel that sort of forgiveness hasn’t been extended to them.
But payback for cancel culture is a terrible justification. Ruining the life of some random teacher in Holden is not going to undo the wrongs conservatives feel they’ve suffered. It’s just going to feed the desire on the left for revenge the next time people on the right say something offensive on the internet, which they no doubt will soon. A little bit of judge not, lest ye be judged, would go a long way right now.
Kirk’s killing, at 31, has been a searing event. We can respect that his supporters feel angry and raw. It can’t be stated enough that in a democracy there is no excuse whatsoever for political violence against anyone.
But as Cox said, we all have an “off ramp” from political strife, and we should take it. Part of that means forgoing revenge. The employers facing calls to fire employees for ill-advised posts should at least give them a chance to make amends instead. And the internet sleuths combing social media for offensive posts should back off: We’d all be better off if we spent less time scouring the internet for people to be mad at.