Endorsing Violence Is Not Protected Speech and Employers Know It

By Jordan Boyd | Commentary, The Federalist

Celebrating the brutal murder of a civilian lacks morals and requires far more accountability than mere ‘cancel culture’ can afford.

As if Americans’ trust in corporate media weren’t eroded enough, Axios set out to further destroy what’s left of it by suggesting that firing the people who cheered on Charlie Kirk’s assassination is of the same magnitude as school shootings and other acts of violence.

The egregious comparison, which made its debut in Mike Allen’s AM newsletter, suggests that the tens of thousands of people who were caught cheering and mocking Kirk’s murder didn’t deserve the “unprecedented online hunt … to name, shame and contact” their employers that ensued.

Axios is not alone in pretending that statements such as “1 down. Now get the rest of these fools” don’t deserve attention and accountability. NBC News also lamented any punishment by whitewashing comments celebrating Kirk’s death and calling for more violence against Christian conservatives as “sharing opinions.” The Atlantic even went so far as to claim that “for conservatives, cancel culture is in.”

Except that it’s not, because firing someone for dancing on the grave of a 31-year-old man who had his life with his wife and two kids stripped away from him because he was a Christian and a conservative is not cancel culture.

Anyone who claims companies’ decision to fire employees for celebrating murder is cancel culture is either stupid or superbly dishonest. Your cousin who spent all weekend firing off his mouth on Facebook might fall into that first category, but corporate media outlets such as Axios and The Atlantic (which are undoubtedly staffed by leftists who have benefited from the left’s vice grip on cancellation) certainly belong to the second.

We know this because the smear campaigns against conservatives like Kirk are fueled and often led by corporate media.

How many times have these publications printed lies simply to see someone they don’t care for suffer? Time and time again, they have proven that they want Christians and conservatives blackballed by Big Tech, blacklisted by advertisers, behind bars, and pushed out of politics and the public square for good.

Cancel culture is, by nature, a political weapon wielded mostly by the left. The very design of it hinges on the fact that, for a long time, the blue party, their allies in the corporate media, and the institutions that partner with them have controlled the culture war armory that even makes cancel culture possible.

Accountability might appear to yield the same end results as cancel culture, but the means for those ends require a moral, principled foundation that cancel culture lacks. Celebrating the brutal murder of a civilian is, by all definitions, lacking in both morality and principles.

The decision by so many to dance on Kirk’s grave was not an inherently political choice; it was a moral one, and the deserved consequences are not cancel culture. The reason the immorality on display from so many teachers, doctors, and others especially hit home was because their vitriol was aimed at a man known for his moral courage.

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