In the days since Charlie Kirk’s killing, conservatives have embraced a phenomenon they previously called toxic: cancel culture.
The impulse to cancel some voices this past week is understandable: Celebrating murder is cruel. It’s gross. It’s wrong. But the irony is impossible to miss: Conservatives, who long treated cancel culture as an affront to the 1st Amendment spirit of open discourse, are now calling for people to lose their jobs and their livelihoods, all because of something stupid they said on the internet.
This is the same issue that drove numerous stand-up comedians, young men, podcasters and Silicon Valley tech bros into the arms of Donald Trump in 2024. But now, in an amazing turn of events, conservatives are now aping the progressive scolds and speech cops, only with red hats.
Actually, their version is worse. The left’s “accountability culture” mob might have been overbearing, but their agenda was (with a few notable exceptions) largely driven by hall monitors. Today’s “woke right” is executing things in a more overt, efficient and official manner — which for the record means it can violate not just the spirit of the 1st Amendment but the actual, you know … 1st Amendment.
As a case in point, JD Vance, the vice president of the United States of America, recently told Kirk’s radio audience: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer.”
Which raises the question, what if their employer is the government? That would be awkward. But no problem! Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly telling staff to track down soldiers guilty of wrongspeak. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) is trying to get teachers terminated, tweeting: “We don’t fund hate. We fire it” — which feels like the sort of slogan Mao might have had printed on a T-shirt.
And speaking of printers, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi has warned that the government can “prosecute” any professional printer who refuses to “print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil.” She also pledged to “absolutely target” anyone who targets anyone with “hate speech.”
Not long ago, progressives insisted bakers must bake cakes for gay weddings, and now a U.S. attorney general from a Republican administration is insisting that printers must print images for vigils. Funny how the tables turn.
Then, there’s the so-called Charlie Kirk Data Foundation, which claims to have a searchable list of tens of thousands of people who posted mean tweets after Kirk’s death. Collectively, this purge campaign seems to be working. A lot of scalps have already been claimed, including those of prominent pundits and late night host Jimmy Kimmel (who was suspended after making remarks about the motives of Kirk’s killer).
But — let’s be clear — opposition to cancel culture is merely the latest principle that Trump-era Republicans have conveniently abandoned. Indeed, almost every tenet that conservatives held dear a decade ago has been reversed.
And people are starting to notice. Oregon state Rep. Cyrus Javadi recently switched parties, citing the GOP’s abandonment of principles like “limited government, fiscal responsibility, free speech, free trade, and, above all, the rule of law.”
He has a point. Trump’s America now owns a chunk of U.S. chipmaker Intel (so much for small government), spends like a drunken sailor, slaps tariffs on everything that moves (bye-bye, free trade) and ignores laws he doesn’t like — most recently, the TikTok sell-off mandate that was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court, which Trump decided to treat like a menu item he didn’t order — until he found a suitable buyer.
But it’s not just normie Republicans who are worried about Trump diverting from the Reagan-Bush playbook.
Comedian and podcaster Tim Dillon recently observed that the Trump agenda looks suspiciously like the dystopia that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones used to warn us about between colloidal silver ads: “Military in the street, the FEMA camp, the tech company that monitors everything, the surveillance. This is all of that.”
So why is this happening? Why the contortions? I’m reminded of an old story Rush Limbaugh used to tell about the late actor Ron Silver.
As the story goes, Silver went to Bill Clinton’s first inauguration as a bleeding-heart liberal and was horrified by the military flyover. And then he realized, “Those are our planes now.”
That’s where conservatives are when it comes to cancel culture. They’ve finally realized that this is their cancel culture now.
And maybe that’s the grubby little secret about politics in the Trump era. Almost nobody cares about values or morals — or “principles” — anymore. Free speech, limited government, fiscal restraint — these are all rules for thee, but not for me.
Cancel culture wasn’t rejected, it was just co-opted. So go ahead. Drop a dime. See something, say something. Big Brother is watching.
Irony, meet guillotine.
Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”