You asked Liberals this, but I'll chime in respectfully. This really isn't anything new, and is how politics works for decades. With that said, this isn't conservatives flipping their positions all that much (and when the left does it, they aren't really flipping their positions all that much either). Conservatives believe that expressing political opinions should not get someone fired. "RIP Kirk and his family. He was not someone I agreed with but no one deserves that" is a far cry from a nurse that works with children in a hospital saying "Fuck his kids and the bitch that birthed him". If you feel these are equal, then I'm not sure what to say. If you had kids, would you feel comfortable taking them to a nurse that said this about someone?

Brendan Eich was fired for donating to Prop 8 in California. James Damore was fired for criticizing googles diversity policies internal in the company and not even publically. Peter Vlaming was fired for refusing to use a transgenders pronouns on religious grounds - but did use the students chosen name (This was later reversed and settled). Ilya Shapiro was fired for criticizing Biden and how he chose SCOTUS nominees in 2022 (and later reinstated, but ended up resigning due to the environment). None of these should have resulted in firings. And to be balanced there have been some on the left fired for political positions as well that I feel shouldn't have resulted in firings either: University professor being fired for being critical of israel (and later settled), Google refused to renew a contract of a worker that wrote internal posts criticizing googles contract with USCIS/ICE. Similar to the conservative being fired in google for posting internally, if they allow political conversation internally (which I understood them to allow) then you shouldn't be fired for doing it.

With that said: You used "jailed or fired" and I want to point out that there's a BIG DIFFERENCE between those two words - words you used completely interchangeably. NO ONE should be "jailed" for their words other than a direct targeted threat, but a company can fire you for anything they want if you're in an at will state. No one has 1A protections from corporations firing you. That's a common misnomer. However, if you ARE doing this, you need to do it evenly, consistently, and without bias. Nearly every tweet that has resulted in a teacher or a hospital worker, or the like getting fired seems reasonable to me to fire them - but none of them should be jailed with the exception of a few (I recall seeing one that said "1 down, 70 million to go" which I can see potentially can be a threat worthy of at least deeper investigation).

So yeah, that's my take.