We the People

What Jill Lepore Misses

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Before diving into today’s topic, I want to address my last post on Charlie Kirk. This portion will be free in place of my typical free preview of paid posts.

Two weeks have elapsed since I wrote my post responding to the assassination. Even 48 hours after Charlie’s death, plenty of terrible people were celebrating the tragedy. At the time, I hoped that disgusting display would die down, but it instead increased and spread to ridiculing Erika Kirk, a widow and now single mother of two whose only transgression was grieving for her husband. Influential figures with reputations at stake nevertheless made such public comments. In a case I covered for The College Fix, a law professor posted “I will 1000% wish death on people like him. He is the epitome of evil, and I have no compassion, not even a minute ounce of it for people like him who go around spewing hate the way he does.”

In a fascinating development, employees voicing this disgusting rhetoric have lost their jobs, even those at public institutions subject to the First Amendment. However, judges have blocked those firings as likely unconstitutional. Approaching this as an issue of constitutional law, as this blog demands, I am shocked by how easily people have missed the point of this moment. Instead of blaming “both sides” for shunning free speech, we should perhaps take a moment to understand both how and why they have done so. Specifically, the right pushed back on calls for political violence and slander against their role model and idol, who not days before, had died from an assassin’s bullet. The left? Well, they cheered that assassin’s bullet. Those who did not made absolutely sure to justify Charlie’s death by listing off a (largely fabricated) set of views they found unacceptable, thereby suggesting his speech invited violence.

“Both sides” does not work here. Charlie died a believer in free speech, and died at the hands of a movement that hates free speech. I do not need to cite the surveys everyone has already seen. We all understand the gravity of the problem. Although the young right does not uphold free speech principles, the young left has completely abandoned them and treats them with absolute disdain. If we take any lesson from Charlie’s murder, let it be a warning. We the People are facing a generation of leftists who disavow free speech, and trying to lure them back to those principles may results in a bullet to your neck.

Now, on that note, let us discuss We the People.