The right is calling for revenge in the form of firing every leftist who talked out of turn over Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week. This mentality does threaten to tear the country apart.

Already, there are firefighters, publicists, teachers, and a whole host of others who have lost, or are in the process of losing, their primary occupations. Three teachers right here in my home state of Massachusetts alone are in danger of losing their jobs over comments they made on social media. Elon Musk has gone on record as saying, “The left is the party of murder, and celebrating murder,” even though all the prominent Democrats in Washington explicitly condemned the assassination.

And the reality is that most of the people being fired didn’t even celebrate Kirk’s death. A Florida Panthers publicist was suspended for a comment about gun control: “Why are yall sad? Your man said it was worth it.” The comment was insensitive, yes, but it was a comment about a past statement by Kirk on gun control (a statement I agree with in part). It was not a “celebration” of the murder by any stretch of the imagination.

Even those who actually cheered the death of Charlie Kirk engaged in what was, by definition, a truly victimless sin (and it certainly wasn’t a crime). Nobody got hurt after someone said, as a firefighter from New Orleans did, that the bullet which killed Kirk was “a gift from god.” Again, it’s a horrible sentiment. But nobody was hurt by this kind of speech. Kirk is already dead, and he can’t be hurt any more. 

People say and write things online to troll or vent all the time, sometimes implying or saying things outright they don’t believe. Everybody knows that most people are not the same in person as the personality they create online.

Yet there’s a highly judgmental sentiment on both sides of the political duopoly that the livelihoods of absolutely powerless people need to be destroyed for this kind of verbal faux-pas, even though they’ve never met them and know next-to-nothing about them. And the targets are by definition powerless people, not just because they are only employees, but typically because they are mostly on the lowest end of the supervisory scale.

“I don’t want to work with someone who has such a moral lapse in judgement that they would praise murder,” the chorus of Republicans who cheer on Trump’s drone strikes reply. In the end, this social phenomenon is a form of punch-down online bullying. What’s a proportionate punishment for the sin of praising Kirk’s murder that caused no tangible harm? Jesus called for forgiving a brother “seventy times seven times,” and the Old Testament calls for “eye for eye.” 

Is it really proportional to say that these people who objectively harmed no one should lose their livelihoods, that they should lose their homes, that their children should go hungry because of some speech that in a better age would have been not recorded and dismissed as blowing off steam? 

The question is rhetorical. We all know it’s not proportional. We all know deep down that this “fire them” sentiment comes from a mean spot of vengeance in the soul that shouldn’t be nourished. The reaction on my social media to a comment by me calling for cooler heads was as unhinged as the comments by the people losing their jobs right now, and perhaps worse. I got one comment that, “Our enemies are evil and need to be destroyed. That is it.” A different person wrote, “These people should be destroyed in whatever way we can make that happen.” I hope my social media friends don’t lose their jobs for calling for people to be “destroyed” and in “whatever way we can.” But if the same standard is applied to their comments as they seek to apply to those whose jobs they are trying to destroy, they would find themselves unemployed.

While the praise for Kirk’s murder online was mostly reactionary and thoughtless, the calls for firing the (mostly powerless) people who said or posted about Kirk is different in one sense: Their kind of punch-down bullying is thought-out, thoroughly deliberate. 

Therefore, in that one sense, the right-wing dimwits calling for their pound of leftist flesh are worse than the leftist dimwits who posted that crap online in the first place.

Of course, in the Old Testament, the “eye for eye” proscription was meant to replace the disproportionate “head for an eye” of vengeance, the same vengeance now called for among all the moralizing hypocrites on the political right.

There needs to be social guard rails installed against this kind of social media mob vengeance. We saw it with the left on COVID, and now we see the right doing the same thing. I’d argue that nobody should lose their job over social media comments (except direct threats), though anyone is free to vote against a politician who expresses such an opinion at the next election.

The impact of these firings cannot be positive. What do you think will happen to the people thus made unemployed? Do you think they will learn their lesson and suddenly become sinless, perfect people? Or will they harden their views and bear ever-greater grudges? Will they next seek to get people on the right fired as revenge with social media creating even more economic chaos, as the powers-that-be tighten the noose around rational political discourse? 

This is a generational bug that will probably resolve itself with reason and a thicker skin on speech. America will either consume itself in a perpetual Hatfields and McCoys feud where the opposing teams bite each other to death and free expression is gobbled up in the frenzy, or, more likely, look back on this time with one of those “how could those primitive people think the way they did?” vibes.

Some free marketeers are falling back on the cop-out that “it’s a private company, they can fire anyone they want,” even as all the government officials from the president on down call out for the speech offenders to be purged from the ability to provide for their families.

This is not the free market in action. None of this is organic. None of it. All of it is socially engineered, every bit as much as the social media companies are giant government contractors. Anyone seeking liberty should see this for what it is: A screen test of the two-minutes of Orwellian hate that will be used against people seeking liberty at the first opportunity. 

If you would call for the firing of someone who spoke out of turn on the Charlie Kirk assassination, you’re not calling for using the enemy’s weapon against them, you’re calling for taking our main weapon―free speech―away from the liberty movement.

Think at least one step ahead, people.

Even if you can pretend you’re immune because you’re as pure as the driven snow, and can’t see the plank in your own eye, no doubt you can see the speck in the eyes of your loved ones.

The enemies of freedom own the NSA, CIA, and the surveillance state and have full access to every keystroke we’ve ever made. Do you really want to make it so your loved ones can lose their means of self-support, their homes, and have their children go hungry when the worst moment of judgment on their worst day is brought out into the public? 

If you do, good luck with that strategy. Because that strategy will never win.

I’m sticking with forgiveness, and Jesus’ instruction. That instruction, at least, has a long history of success.