Shortly after President Joe Biden spoke of uniting the country last week, Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center think tank quipped on Twitter, "If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence.” The joke — in case it doesn’t sound funny to you — being that Pence is now hated on both the left and the right.
Wilkinson quickly lost his job. And the reaction was predictable: Fox News reported the tweet at face value. Reason magazine condemned "cancel culture.” And other public intellectuals on Twitter fretted that if it can happen to Wilkinson, "it can happen to any of us.”
That’s right. It can happen to anyone ... who jokes on Twitter about lynching the vice president.