Whacking their knees with a crowbar wouldn't stop them from speaking either, but we don't do that when someone expresses a wrong view, nor should we try to get them fired. Free speech as a cultural value requires that people actually be free to speak. If one fears losing one's livelihood, one is not free to speak. That's obvious.
For a long time, it was the left who championed this. Noam Chomsky, an archetype of the left, has always been one of the biggest free-speech advocates in the US, and takes a far more expansive view than "free speech only means the government can't put you in prison". He advocated for Walt Rostow, a technocrat whom he had condemned in print as a war criminal, to be allowed to teach at MIT. But he's a libertarian socialist, and the left has taken an authoritarian turn.
The social-media driven ideological lust for driving wrong-speakers out of their jobs (and inflicting anything else the mob can muster) is clearly a recent development in America, and you have to go back at least to McCarthyism to find anything comparable.
For a long time, it was the left who championed this. Noam Chomsky, an archetype of the left, has always been one of the biggest free-speech advocates in the US, and takes a far more expansive view than "free speech only means the government can't put you in prison". He advocated for Walt Rostow, a technocrat whom he had condemned in print as a war criminal, to be allowed to teach at MIT. But he's a libertarian socialist, and the left has taken an authoritarian turn.
The social-media driven ideological lust for driving wrong-speakers out of their jobs (and inflicting anything else the mob can muster) is clearly a recent development in America, and you have to go back at least to McCarthyism to find anything comparable.