My title is a play on the familiar phrase "Power without restraint is tyranny." A quick search attributes the phrase to Samuel Adams, but I'm thinking of a need for similar restraint with respect to the American power of free speech, which this week was propelled into public attention once more by comedian Dave Chappelle. I won't repeat Chappelle's denigration of Kirk here, because the remarks have
"gone viral," though they're neither good comedy nor political analysis. But I will note that when quizzed about his take-no-prisoners comedy, Chappelle has framed his priority as a devotion to free speech.
Now, there is no national legislation requiring restraint of free speech under well-defined circumstances. At most there is a cultural consensus usually framed as a misquote of Oliver Wendell Holmes, along the lines of "don't shout fire in a crowded theater," and that's resulted in many local laws against disorderly conduct. Specific laws allow the charging of persons who encourage violence in what seems a non-rhetorical manner. But what about people who simply say, sans irony as Chappelle did, that they are glad that X, a victim of violence, is dead?
Probably there will never be either federal or state statures against this form of unrestrained, and arguably pointless, speech. However, businesses in this country are free to terminate "at will" employees who utter such remarks. From this site:
“The First Amendment does not apply in private workplaces to protect employees’ speech,” said Andrew Kragie, an attorney who specializes in employment and labor law at Maynard Nexsen. “It actually does protect employers’ right to make decisions about employees, based on employees’ speech.”
When Charlie Kirk was murdered in September 2025, many US workers found that their employers did not react well to posts on social media celebrating the death of the alleged "racist." This site names a number of incidents of employee termination for the celebration of Kirk's murder, enforced by such companies as Microsoft, Delta Airlines, Nasdaq, Office Depot, MSNBC, and the Washington Post. It's entirely possible that the persons carrying out these discharges might have cared nothing about anything but covering their own asses, in case some dipstick making such a comment turned violent in the workplace, which incident would then rebound on management.
Despite social media's aggravating the long history of the human need for scapegoating, the responses of these companies may the closest American society comes to a cultural consensus, to the effect that endorsing the results of violence constitutes a threat to public safety, even if it's not a crime in and of itself.
Now, no one believes that Dave Chappelle is going to turn out to be the creepy guy who plays First Person Shooter with his fellow workers. I've long considered Chappelle a "hate comic," who frequently encourages race hatred-- sometimes with the screen of humor, sometimes (as with these Kirk remarks) without any such screen. But that's not illegal, and Chappelle, currently one of the country's most successful standup comics, is not going to pay any price like the ignoramuses who lost their jobs for the sake of doing a superiority dance. As I write this, an unconfirmed rumor asserts that Sony may have cut Chappelle from the cast of the impending GROWNUPS 3, a role which was basically an extended cameo. I'm sure many consumers will cease patronizing the comedian, but many will continue to attend his performances, curious about what he'll say next. I'm sure that Chappelle's pretense of reluctance to dis Kirk-- made, of course, in numerous separate performances-- was easily overcome as he contemplated a new level of notoriety.
Shifting to the personal, I don't know that I've ever felt better because someone whose politics I disliked had died, whether from violence or from natural causes. Neither type of death counts as "one less for their side," though that seems to be the faux logic involved. I showed how, in my essay-series KEEPING VS SHARING, the political stances we call "liberalism" and "conservatism" are intrinsic to the human species and have always been so. I'll confess that I've fantasized about seeing actual murderers, ranging from Osama bin Ladin to Tyler Robinson, being killed outright, and I can laugh, albeit bitterly, at the picture of (say) Osama being shot to death as he goes to get Slim Jims from his fridge. But I don't have any delusions that the deaths of crazies will keep other crazies in line.
One might think, in conclusion, that the fact that we all die someday might discourage so much simplistic scapegoating, Someday Dave Chappelle will die, and even if he's not called on the carpet in the afterlife, what has he accomplished in this world by disrespecting a murdered man whose politics he disagreed with?
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