The Charlie Kirk cancellations

In a grimly ironic twist, the horrific assassination of conservative activist and free-speech campaigner Charlie Kirk has unleashed a new wave of cancel culture. Republicans, right-wingers and Trump loyalists, from the White House downwards, have dusted off the woke playbook and are gleefully wielding it to have their political enemies silenced and punished.

‘There’s free speech and there’s hate speech’, intoned Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, earlier this week. ‘We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech’, she warned. Bondi’s horror at those celebrating Kirk’s death may be understandable, but her flagrant disregard for Americans’ free-speech rights is not. As Kirk himself wrote last year on X: ‘Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.’ The ghouls lapping up Kirk’s death enjoy that protection, too.

While it has been heartening to see many on the right push back against Bondi’s free-speech illiteracy, this hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from using its power to punish wrongthinkers in other ways. The Pentagon has promised to ‘track’ and ‘address’ federal employees who mock or celebrate Kirk’s death online. The State Department is revoking visas for foreigners whose social-media posts ‘celebrate’ the assassination. And the administration is placing enormous pressure on private companies to adopt the same stance, too. Vice-president JD Vance, who hosted the first post-assassination edition of Kirk’s podcast, encouraged listeners to call the employers of anyone ‘celebrating Charlie’s murder’. This is textbook cancel culture.

The highest-profile scalp among the Kirk cancellations has been late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who was pulled from the air after falsely claiming that suspected killer Tyler Robinson was part of the ‘MAGA gang’. His ABC show has now been placed on indefinite hiatus.

Reprimanding Kimmel in some way would not, in itself, be an unreasonable reaction to a host broadcasting outright misinformation. Or to a show whose ratings have been tanking for some time, no doubt owing to Kimmel’s hectoring monologues. But his suspension clearly has less to do with the network’s desire to uphold standards than with a fear of regulatory reprisals. Before Kimmel was taken off air, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr made a thinly veiled threat that companies like ABC ‘can find ways to change conduct to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead’. This is precisely the kind of thing Republicans rightly decried when the Biden administration leant on social-media firms to censor so-called mis- and disinformation – that is, views that challenged the then US government.

Most alarming of all, ordinary people are being dragged down by the tide of right-wing cancel culture. Employees at Delta Airlines, Microsoft and the Nasdaq, along with teachers and firefighters, have been sacked, investigated or placed on leave for distasteful social-media posts about Kirk’s killing. An Office Depot worker in Michigan who refused to print a poster for a Kirk vigil was not only fired – Pam Bondi’s Justice Department has also threatened her with prosecution. The same conservatives who defend the right of Christian bakers to refuse to make cakes with pro-gay messages want to arrest printers who refuse to print posters about Charlie Kirk, it seems.

‘I’m going to use congressional authority and every influence with Big Tech platforms to mandate [an] immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk’, fumed Republican congressman Clay Higgins. ‘I will be spending my night making everyone I find online who celebrates his death famous. So prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death’, tweeted Trump sycophant Laura Loomer. Censorious right-wingers are displaying a relish for reprisals similar to that which has long animated the woke’s cancellation crusades. This is about exacting revenge, not ensuring accountability.

Of course, the Charlie Kirk cancellations are on nothing like the scale of the woke left’s. Comparisons with the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder fail to appreciate the hysteria of that moment. In the summer of 2020, anyone who showed insufficient deference to the Black Lives Matter juggernaut faced cancellation, sacking and social ostracisation. TV shows were pulled wholesale from streaming services. News stories that challenged BLM were censored on social media. Entire institutions were forcibly reoriented to promote the false narrative that the West is ‘systemically racist’. It’s also worth noting that people were being cancelled in 2020 for even tepid criticism of BLM, not openly celebrating the murder of someone because of what they believed.

Yet it seems some on the right are determined to learn the wrong lessons. They want to fight fire with fire. They want tit-for-tat cancellations. They want to meet the left’s censoriousness with their own. This is a scorched-earth approach to free speech and debate. It would leave very few of us left uncancelled should it carry on unchecked.

Free speech is not a partisan tool. It is a bedrock democratic principle. It applies to friends and enemies alike, to speech we agree with and speech we hate. It is a terrible and tragic irony that Charlie Kirk’s death has been used to trample on one of the very values he fought hardest to preserve.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.