What the Blazes?

When Clark Kerr, the head of the University of California, Berkeley, was dismissed in 1967, he said, “I left the presidency just as I had entered it — fired with enthusiasm.” Donald Trump made his television reputation by barking, “You’re fired!” (a phrase that Elon Musk has appropriated with gleeful promiscuity). In 1919, the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. set the limits on freedom of speech when, in a Supreme Court opinion that is mangled in many retellings, he wrote, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” Near the eternal flame at John F. Kennedy’s grave is a marble slab with an excerpt from his stirring 1961 inaugural address, where he spoke of defending freedom during the chill of the Cold War: “The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can...