To the editor,

US Rep. Derrick Van Orden has succeeded in pressuring the Ellsworth schools to fire high school math teacher Krista Lesiecki for exercising her First Amendment rights as a citizen.  

The offense? Ms. Lesiecki commented outside of her professional setting on a public figure, a freedom Mr. Van Orden seems unable to tolerate. And so Mr. Van Orden threatened the entire city of Ellsworth with the loss of federal funding if Ms. Lesiecki was not removed from her position.

Mr. Van Orden has similarly threatened the city of Eau Claire for emailed remarks made by city council members. To my knowledge, Eau Claire has not yet bowed to Mr. Van Orden’s demands.  

The targets of Mr. Van Orden’s wrath, Ms. Lesiecki and the Eau Claire council members, essentially restated the old adage that, “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”  The subject of these comments, the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, has said on record that the inevitable gun deaths in a society with unrestricted access to firearms are “worth it.”  Would Mr. Kirk have called his own gun death “worth it?” Apparently, we are no longer allowed to speculate on such matters.

Mr. Van Orden’s tactics of scapegoating and intimidation are anti-democratic and a betrayal of the Constitution. Apparently, he values Second Amendment rights to carry guns over First Amendment rights to free speech.  

With his threats and intimidation Mr. Van Orden reminds me of those old gangster movies where a man walks into a shop and tells the proprietor, “Nice little place you have here. I’d hate to see anything happen to it.”  

Voters, the bedrock “proprietors” of our democracy, need to show him the door.

Thomas R. Smith

River Falls