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Well, in a sense the First Amendment is just words. But the liberal system and norms that we enjoy in the US, which the First Amendment is part of, is why you largely don't have to worry about sitting in jail for your political opinions. Getting fired or canceled for your political opinions is bad, but sitting in jail or getting killed by government agents for them is much worse.
The reason I don't have to worry about being jailed for my opinions is because I live among people who share them, and are willing to coordinate meanness to provide protection against those who disagree. Where the protections of a values-aligned community are absent, my next-best protection is OPSEC, pseudanonymity. Third place is guns and a willingness to use them. The "Liberal System" does not place, as it is a intellectually-masterbatory fiction.
Is Charlie Kirk less dead because it wasn't a government agent who shot him? Government exists to coordinate action. There are other ways to coordinate action as well. I care about the actions being coordinated, not the method used to coordinate them.
By coordinating meanness against Blues through the government, I compromise their ability to coordinate meanness against me. Since I am advocating doing so in exactly the way they have been coordinating meanness against me for decades, I see no reason why moderates such as yourself should see my coordination as more objectionable than theirs. Moderate arguments failed to moderate them; why should they moderate me?
Punishing people for celebrating and endorsing political murders makes us all marginally safer. Refraining to do so makes us all worse off, and does not even protect free speech in any principled way in the bargain.
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Getting fired for opinions while your enemies operate with impunity is worst of all. Your rules fairly, and all that. As has been said many times here, liberal norms only work when a shared moral fabric is smuggled in as the bedrock of civic life, when certain fundamental questions about human existence are not up for debate. Once there arise factions who can no longer agree on these fundamental questions, it's only a matter of time until one faction purges the others and enforces a new consensus, after which liberalism can be restored in this new moral context.
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Eugene Debs would've disagreed.
To what extent are people allowed to leverage their political opinions to evoke meaningful political change in their country? Even China doesn't go around commonly jailing people for their privately held convictions and beliefs, even when they express said views openly, absent those opinions forming a real call to action among other people. The US is largely a place where you're free to act out your privately held beliefs whether personal or political to yourself or behind closed doors so long as you aren't effectuating real change. If most political protests had the impact of something like the January 6th riots, protesting would be significantly curbed or outright banned overnight.
This liberal system in all it's glory also leads the world with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Even within the most progressive pockets of the country.
Or blacks are just really violent
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