Free Speech, Assassination Attempts and the Future of America

We need to distinguish between what is legal and what is acceptable

Last night, a man named Cole Allen walked up to a security checkpoint outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. He told investigators he wanted to shoot Trump administration officials. A Secret Service agent was struck by a round; his vest saved his life. President Trump was rushed off the stage. It was the third attempt on a sitting or former president in two years.

Within minutes of the news breaking, Hasan Piker — whose initial reaction to the shooting was to joke about a conspiracy, implying press secretary Karoline Leavitt had foreknowledge because she had earlier said Trump would “bring the heat” and “shots will be fired” at the dinner — was doing what he does: performing for the crowd that has made him one of the most influential political voices in America.

Piker himself last year had endorsed the meme of “somebody needs to do it” as a widely understood dog whistle to assassinate Trump.

Keep in mind that Piker is now considered mainstream. He campaigns at rallies for Democratic candidates including Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, Summer Lee, and Abdul El-Sayed. The Harris campaign invited him to livestream from the 2024 Democratic National Convention. The New York Times has given him a flattering profile, a podcast appearance, and an op-ed. Ezra Klein’s column originally ran under the headline “Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy,” changed after ridicule made the title untenable, though the defense of Piker within it was not changed.

So what exactly has the Times been platforming? Piker called for Sen. Rick Scott to be killed during a live stream: “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott.” He is famous for arguing that America “deserved 9/11.” When the New York Times podcast asked him about the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, he never once suggested it was wrong to assassinate people or acknowledged the immorality of extrajudicial murder — instead immediately invoking Friedrich Engels’s concept of “social murder” to justify the killing. He has told followers to “kill” and “murder” people “in the streets” and “let the streets soak in their red-capitalist blood.” Piker insists Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel and has described Hezbollah’s banner as his favorite flag. On October 7, he said: “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”

This is the person the New York Times treats as a legitimate political voice worth treating with respect.

The Times's editorial complicity runs deeper than a softball interview. When it published its podcast conversation with Piker, it chose to headline it "The Rich Don't Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?" — a question the Times apparently could not bring itself to answer. The answer is: because the alternative is anarchy. The logic that lawbreaking by some licenses lawbreaking by all is not a critique of inequality; it is the dissolution of the social contract itself. By identical reasoning: criminals don't play by the rules, so why should I? Terrorists don't play by the rules, so why should I? The Times would recoil from those formulations and it should recoil from its own headline. Yet a significant part of the podcast justified theft - from avocados to cars. A media outlet that condones vigilante logic is not a neutral observer of American civic decay. It is a participant in it.

Now: is publishing or promoting any of this illegal? Perhaps some of it — the First Amendment does not protect true threats or direct incitement to imminent lawless action, and there is a reasonable legal argument that some of Piker’s statements approach that line. The Supreme Court’s Brandenburg test requires that speech be directed to inciting imminent lawless action and likely to produce it. “You would kill Rick Scott” is closer to that line than most of Piker’s defenders admit, and “let the streets soak in their red-capitalist blood” is closer still. But the legal question is genuinely uncertain, and legal scholars will argue about it.

The moral question is not uncertain at all.

There is a category error so common in contemporary American life that it has become invisible: the conflation of legality with morality. If something is legal, the argument goes, then objecting to it on moral grounds is at best squeamishness and at worst an assault on free speech. But legality and morality operate at entirely different levels. The law is a floor — the minimum standard of behavior a society can compel with the threat of force. Morality is the ceiling, or rather the open sky above it: the vast domain of behavior that the law was never designed to reach and cannot reach without becoming something far worse than what it is trying to prevent.

The First Amendment is a legal floor. It means the government cannot imprison Hasan Piker for his statements. It says nothing whatsoever about whether those statements are acceptable, whether platforms should carry them without consequence, whether media institutions should legitimize them with the imprimatur of prestigious bylines, whether sponsors should finance the audiences they cultivate, or whether political candidates should campaign alongside someone who has openly cheered political violence and the rape of Israeli women. The First Amendment protects Piker’s right to speak. The rest of us retain our right — and bear our obligation — to respond.

The mechanism for that response is what the critics of political violence have always had available: social pressure, institutional accountability, and the withdrawal of legitimacy. Boycott sponsors. Refuse to appear alongside him on panels and stages. Decline to grant him the credibility that comes from being treated as a normal participant in civic debate.

When The New York Times platforms him, it is engaged in immorality. When Democratic candidates campaign with him, they are making a conscious choice to promote immorality. When companies advertise on his show they are directly condoning his immorality. To push back on all of these actions, both socially and financially, would not be acts of censorship but of moral seriousness.

The book I am completing on America at 250 makes this point at length in a different context. America gives us rights but it also gives us obligations to be good citizens. We owe things to our families, our communities, and our nation. It is patriotic to oppose restrictions on free speech but it is also patriotic to oppose speech that erodes the quality of American life. And that is exactly what calls for violence, whether it is a coded message to assassinate the President or cheering the murder of a health care executive or threatening to use “any means possible” including violence to silence the speech of others, do.

This is part of the covenant between the people of the United States. A nation where political violence is normalized cannot stand. This cannot be done by law; it can only be done by citizens, institutions, and cultural gatekeepers who understand that the legal floor is the beginning of the moral conversation, not the end of it.

The America that produced the First Amendment also produced the expectation that it would be used responsibly — that the freedom to speak carried with it the social obligation to speak in ways that did not incite neighbors against each other. That expectation was enforced not by courts but by culture: by editors who declined to publish certain things, by audiences who withdrew patronage from those who cheered violence, by communities that applied social consequences to people whose speech fell beneath a moral threshold that the law did not reach.

That culture has not disappeared, but it has been systematically weakened by a generation that learned to treat the legal floor as the only relevant standard — and by platforms that outsourced the judgment entirely to algorithms optimized for engagement rather than decency. An algorithm does not ask whether content normalizes political violence; it asks whether content drives clicks. When we allow algorithmic reach to substitute for editorial judgment, we have not protected free speech — we have abdicated the human responsibility to distinguish between speech worth amplifying and speech worth marginalizing.

What happened last night at the Washington Hilton did not occur in a vacuum. Cole Allen did not emerge from nowhere. He emerged from an information environment in which a man with millions of followers can spend years normalizing violence against political targets, calling for senators to be killed, excusing the murder of executives, laughing at the rape of Israeli women, and then be invited to the Democratic National Convention, given a podcast slot by the New York Times, and welcomed as a surrogate by candidates running for the United States Senate. Maybe people like Piker manage to stay just barely on the side of legality, but how the rest of us respond to someone like that is the real test of what it means to be an American.

The First Amendment will survive Hasan Piker just fine. The question is whether American civic culture will — and the answer depends not on judges but on whether the rest of us remember that the floor is where behavior is compelled and the ceiling is where character, including the character of America itself, is revealed.