Cancel Culture in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination

The troubling new rise of state censorship in the USA should have everyone concerned about the future of free speech

The recently cancelled Jimmy Kimmel

As I’ve argued before, cancel culture is a ubiquitous phenomenon across the political spectrum, and has existed in one form or another for a long time. My own view is that cancel culture is a paradoxical effect of free speech itself. When a diverse society ridden with deep moral and political conflicts has a right to free speech, there’s an increasing likelihood that speakers say stuff that deeply offends some community or another. In such a diverse society, its inevitable that members of every community will be offended by at least some of the speech uttered. Moreover, speech will often threaten the material status of members of other communities. This instigates the offended community to use their own speech to try to shout down those who offend them. After all, if free speech protects the right of people to offend us, it also protects our right to tell them to shut the fuck up. It also protects our right to shun them, threaten to boycott anyone who hires them, or even deny them access to platforms we own or manage.

We can see this phenomenon across US history. Slave-owners were offended by the speech of abolitionists, and sometimes their wealth and status as slave-owners were undermined when abolitionists used their speech to defend the underground railroad or the freedoms of escaped slaves in the north. Abolitionists in turn were offended by the blatant hypocrisy and racism of the slave-owners. Christians were offended by the religious proclamations of Joseph Smith (who was ultimately “cancelled” in the most absolute sense, whatever we think of the self-proclaimed Mormon prophet … although the violence that took his life was about much more than just his words). Indigenous religion, particularly the Ghost Dance, terrified white Americans. Anarchism and communism offended America’s wealthy from the first Red Scare onwards. Segregationists were offended by the civil rights movement. Patriots have long been offended by flag burning and other forms of “unpatriotic” speech like kneeling during the anthem. Alan Dershowitz famously cancelled pro-Palestine academic Norman Finkelstein after Finklestein accused him of plagiarism. Bill Maher was fired from his show Politically Incorrect because he uttered the politically incorrect truth that suicide bombers weren’t cowards, however evil they might be, in the days after September 11, 2001. Lately, conservatives have become increasingly offended by drag queens doing anything with children, treating it as a form of “grooming”.

Often times, this offense is very much sympathetic. The practice of the Westboro Baptist Church of protesting against gay rights at the funerals of soldiers has offended people across the political spectrum, even otherwise homophobic politicians. Racial and religious minorities have always been offended by the speech of bigoted organizations like the Klan or the various neo-nazi sects, and this offense has increasingly spread to white people who tire of their bigoted fellows. Those who defend abominable groups like NAMBLA have also been widely shunned. We might still be sufficiently bound by the principle of free speech to not want these people arrested, but we certainly want them gone and are happy to shun such assholes.

My point isn’t to draw any moral equivalence between any of these. I am far more sympathetic to some than others. Nor am I opposed to any and all forms of cancellation. To cancel someone might mean different things. It might mean a form of shunning. It might mean denying someone a specific desired platform. It might mean a sustained harassment campaign against a person. It might mean pressuring a person’s employer to fire them. It might mean pressuring the state to take some form of legal action against the speaker. Notably, none of these except the last lead to a violation of someone’s first amendment right to free speech. The others are often bad, but I think there are cases of the others which most people would support. If a Kindergarten teacher calls her black students racial slurs, I doubt many people would leap to her defense if her employment contract was “cancelled”. On the other hand, if a teacher was fired for saying a racial slur once a decade ago, or for not standing during the pledge of allegiance, there would probably be many more defending the teacher. If a standard conservative or liberal thinker was denied a platform at a university, few would support it, but if David Duke or Louis Farrakhan was denied such a platform, I imagine few would strongly oppose it.

Of course, we didn’t call any of this “cancel culture” until quite recently. It wasn’t until our modern social media age that we even needed the concept. Social media has made cancellation far more frequent, as social media preserves people’s offensive speech and spreads it far and wide. Whereas Becky saying the n-word to her white friend in 1990 would have gone unheard by the rest of the world, when Becky puts it in her tweet in 2010 the message is preserved and spread far and wide.

It has also facilitated social groups who want to cancel someone for their speech, as members of a community will be able to spread their anger on a national platform. People across the nation can find Becky’s tweet and share it on this international platform to direct anger towards her. We saw this play out in real time when a random businesswoman tweeted an edgy joke about South Africa when boarding an airplane to the country. By the time she landed, she was already a social media pariah and promptly lost her job. By all evidence, she wasn’t actually racist, she just thought her comment would be read ironically. It wasn’t.

Alongside the phenomenon of “cancel culture”, social media has also created conditions where the state is increasingly concerned about how quickly “unwanted” ideas can spread on social media. This might be so-called “misinformation” or “disinformation”, or simply ideas which are inconvenient. As ideas are spread far and wide, political leaders increasingly struggle to use their power to control the direction of public discourse. We saw during the war on terror and the pandemic how the state was increasingly concerned about minimizing the spread of ideas that made it harder to realize their public policy goals. This has led the state to become increasingly interested in directly or indirectly influencing internet platforms to curate the messages that the public receives.

Often times, this has to do with politically inconvenient speech. Whether we’re talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop or news stories that offend Donald Trump, we’ve seen the executive branch using its authority to curtain certain ideas on the internet. Other times, it has to do with government leaks of information that embarrasses institutions like the Snowden and Manning leaks. In some cases, we might even sympathize with the concerns of the state, as the internet has also given nefarious groups like ISIS to recruit across the world. What matters is that free speech in the 21st century has vastly different social consequences than it did in the late 18th century and can be far more destabilizing from the point of view of politicians. Even if we object to the blatant attempts to curtail free speech, we need to understand the structural reasons that have led governments on the left, center, and right to meddle in social media. They might be unjust constraints on our freedoms, but they are anything but irrational.

The killing of Charlie Kirk has led to a deeply troubling combination of these two phenomena. As with the death of any public figure, there are many who celebrated it on their public platforms. Others made salty jokes or just showed insufficient levels of mourning. This naturally offended a bunch of conservatives who respected Kirk (and others who didn’t respect Kirk but want to weaponize his death against their ideological enemies), and it shouldn’t be surprising that a kind of cancel culture emerged from it. What’s much more troubling is that the executive branch has leapt on this outrage to justify a wave of anti-free speech measures. Marco Rubio is threatening to deport any immigrant who is deemed to say things unkind about Kirk. JD Vance is using his Vice-Presidential bully pulpit to pressure employers to fire anyone who spoke out. Trump is threatening to go after any liberal or left group which he thinks “demonized” Kirk in one way or another, and is threatening to crack down on “antifa” for “terrorism” (yet again). Conservative politicians got comedian Jimmy Kimmel fired from his nightly comedy show, not because the show wasn’t that funny but because he said the wrong things about Charlie Kirk.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this from the current administration. It also leapt on pro-Palestine speech at universities to crack down on academic freedom and arrest or try to deport foreign students or academics who are critical of Israel or Zionism. It seems to be something of a bad habit from a cabal of rightwing goons who also ironically made defending “free speech” one of the central planks of their platform (it turns out, they only meant free speech for anyone on the political right).

It’s also not the first time that the federal government has conveniently forgotten its own first amendment. The McCarthy Era, of course, was marked by the state cracking down on anyone perceived to be a communist. The first Red Scare before it also saw the federal government going after anarchists like Emma Goldman for their speech. During the War on Terror, the Bush administration also had a pretty dubious relationship to free speech.

Yet we should be deeply concerned by this development. The state was limited in the earlier waves by the lack of national platforms upon which most of their ideological enemies were putting out their messages. Where the state could not effectively crack down on every American with anarchist and communist sympathies in the 1950s or 1920s, it is very easy for them to do so now. With the fuel of a rightwing cancel culture burning white-hot in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death, they are able to weaponize this anger against their ideological foes in a way we haven’t seen before.

Moreover, Trump has gotten entirely brazen with his use of state power to control media content. Right before Kimmel was canned, the head of the FCC went onto a rightwing podcast to threaten ABC with suspending licenses and preventing mergers if they do not remove his show. Who knows what will happen to other left-of-center comedians like John Oliver, Jon Stewart, or Jimmy Fallon.

All in all, we should be deeply concerned by this development. Leftists and liberals should be united in defending their own free speech, of course. So should libertarians and those conservatives not turned irrational by their anger at people making jokes about Charlie Kirk, or even just quoting him verbatim. Yet with courts and media outlets increasingly cowed by the administration, it will be hard to actually use our institutions to defend our rights. Once lost, these rights can take generations to claw back. When the Federal Government violated the religious of Native Americans to engage in the Sun Dance and other indigenous practices, it took generations to win their rights back. Hopefully it will not take us so long.