Cancel culture: Now coming from the Right

Attendees hold up signs during the memorial service for Charlie Kirk — The Left “started a cultural revolution” aiming to make it “socially unacceptable to disagree with them.” Now “the Right is doing precisely the same thing.”

(Image credit: Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

“MAGA’s doxxing war” has begun, said Edith Olmsted in The New Republic. Hundreds of Americans have been fired, suspended, or investigated over social media posts expressing negative opinions about Charlie Kirk after the prominent Trump ally’s assassination last week. Vice President JD Vance encouraged the purge, saying, “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer.” But many of those being canceled didn’t “celebrate” Kirk’s death; instead, they called out his “history of making racist, misogynist, and homophobic remarks.” One Oklahoma teacher was investigated for writing, “Charlie Kirk died the same way he lived: bringing out the worst in people.” Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah was fired for posts lamenting the country’s gun culture and reminding her audience that Kirk said Black women like Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson don’t “have the brain processing power” to succeed without affirmative action. A website called Expose Charlie’s Murderers received over 63,000 tips about people deemed to be celebrating Kirk’s death.

I’ve long opposed cancel culture, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review, but there’s a chasm “between cheering someone’s death and offering a political opinion.” Some people did express happiness that Kirk had been assassinated, which is a rejection of “the classically liberal order atop which the United States has been painstakingly built.” Those individuals should suffer the consequences of endorsing murder. If you’re pleased “a man died because you disliked his words, you’re a useless citizen of the republic.”

Conservatives spent years rightly complaining “about the excesses of leftist cancel culture,” said River Page in The Free Press. In recent years, the Left “started a cultural revolution” aiming to make it “socially unacceptable to disagree with them.” Now “the Right is doing precisely the same thing.” Seemingly innocent people are getting swept up, like the manager of a Texas Roadhouse in Florida who was fired because his wife allegedly called Kirk a “Nazi.” Cancel culture is the attempt to bully everyone into accepting “one faction’s cultural preferences,” said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. The MAGA right is now canceling people for arguing “Kirk was a bad influence on American politics,” not “a secular saint,” which offends MAGA’s “right-wing cultural hegemony.” These so-called conservatives “never wanted an America where people don’t get canceled; they want an America where they get to do the canceling.” Now they’ve got it.