At their convention five years ago, President Donald Trump and his Republican Party rallied their supporters fervently against an idea they characterized as a rot on society: cancel culture.
Too many people, they argued one by one in prime-time speeches, were being publicly ostracized — in some cases losing their jobs — for exercising their constitutional right to free speech.
But the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was among the speakers at that 2020 convention, seems to have rapidly shifted how Trump and other Republicans see the boundaries of free speech and the rules of engagement for a once-loathed cancel culture.
Previously a voice for the canceled, they are now the ones canceling.
There are no “cancel culture wars”. The right wing just pretended it was a thing so they could go after policies that were protecting people from bigotry, because it kept affecting them, because they are bigots. And the government punishing people for political speech is a quite different matter, and what the First Amendment was actually supposed to prevent. When MAGA claimed their First Amendment rights were being violated because they got fired by a private employer for violating anti-discrimination policies, or criticized online for expressing bigoted views, their rights were not being violated. When the government shamelessly and explicitly does everything it can to ruin private citizens’ lives because they expressed an unduly nonfascist opinion, people’s rights are absolutely being violated. Let’s not allow the media to frame this as a “both sides” thing.
I’m like, “Who the hell on the right got canceled?” About the only person I can think of is Tucker Carlson and that was done by Fox without any real campaign for his dismissal. It was totally out of the blue.
That, and I still hear from Tucker all the time, even though he was supposedly “cancelled”.
I ask the same question - where the fuck was all this supposed “cancelling” of the right wing? They think they should have special privileges no one else has to disseminate just whatever the hell they want, including hate speech and conspiracy theories and blatant disinformation campaigns all over private platforms in violation of the supposed Terms of Service everyone else has to abide by, AND have the algorithms boost that content.
But that is not the same thing as getting “cancelled”.