September 10, 2025 — 5:42 p.m.
Of course, at this point in the day my Facebook feed is filled with posts about Charlie Kirk’s murder.
I’ve even written a piece about it. The one thing I know with absolute, 100% certainty is this: Charlie Kirk would not want our freedom of speech — our First Amendment right — to be trampled because of his death. Not so much because of the death itself, but because of the way government might try to “prevent senseless tragedies” like this one today.
One of the first things I saw online was someone suggesting that maybe it’s time we shut down social media. Not permanently, but “just for a while.”
Wow. Talk about an infringement on our rights.
This isn’t Communist China. It isn’t North Korea. It isn’t Russia. This is the United States of America — where we have a guaranteed constitutional right to express our opinions.
With the advent of smartphones — and let’s be honest, they’ve been around so long now that we’ve got two whole generations who don’t know life without them — we’ve become constantly connected to the internet, to social media, and to each other. Sometimes I wonder: how did we ever get along before?
I was born and raised in a time when the only phone in the house was hardwired to the wall in the kitchen. A rotary or bell telephone with the curly cord. If you don’t remember those because you’re too young, you’ve probably seen pictures, heard stories, or caught a glimpse of one on TV. Before cell phones. Before the 24-hour news cycle. Before the constant internet feed. Communication was the newspaper, the radio, the nightly news, and that one phone on the wall.
I’ll be the first to admit — I’m attached to my smartphone and my internet connection more than I ever thought I would be. But I also know how to communicate effectively with people I don’t agree with — politically, ideologically, or religiously. The old adage still holds: we can agree to disagree, without being disagreeable.
You’ve got your opinion. I’ve got mine. We’re both free to speak our minds.
But here’s the deal: we don’t need any more limitations on free speech than already exist. I can’t scream “fire” in a crowded building because of the chaos it would cause. I also can’t shoot you in the face because you say something I don’t like. Those boundaries exist for good reason. But does that mean we should shut down social media or the internet? No. Because that would make our free country no better than those regimes we despise — the ones that silence their citizens.
From the very beginning, when this nation was nothing but wild prairie and a place to escape tyranny, America was founded on principles of free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press. The ability to think freely, speak freely, and express one’s opinion.
So how do we move forward to prevent — if that’s even possible — the kind of evil that happened today? The instantaneous fame, the fifteen-minute spotlight that drives deranged people to acts of violence? I don’t have the answers. Nobody does. But I know this much: Charlie Kirk would never want our freedom of speech restricted by shutting off social media.
End of story.
