"If some people didn’t like Kirk or denounced him in harsh terms, this must have inspired someone to kill him. If everyone had simply agreed with Kirk or at least politely disagreed, nobody would try to shoot him.
The problem with this argument is that it is fundamentally authoritarian. Millions of Americans engage in caustic political debates every day. Yet the number of actual political murderers is tiny — you can count them on one hand in any given year. The millions of people hurling insults at eachother are not responsible for the minuscular number of people on their “side” who actually pick up arms and try to harm someone over a disagreement. If we were to believe that speech alone was triggering violence, it would require fundamentally disabling the First Amendment. And that’s just not reasonable in a free country.
In fact, it’s not clear that politics is a big factor in political murder to begin with.
What? Did Zaid just write that? How can politics not be a big factor in political violence?
Well, in almost all recent cases of political violence, we have lonely disturbed individuals gravitating towards a political cause that also leads to the end of their own life or freedom. That’s not the path a happy person chooses."
https://www.theamericansaga.com/p/political-murderers-have-no-party
#FreedomOfSpeech #Politics #USA #PoliticalViolence
Miguel Afonso Caetano
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2025-09-11 23:38:04 UTC
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