Cancel culture comes out of the barrel of a gun

On balance, all things considered, are you for or against the cold-blooded murder of a young father-of-two, for saying the ‘wrong’ thing?

It is a sign of the degraded state of our public debate that, in 2025, that question became a live issue. Many on the left sought to justify, and even celebrated, the assassination of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September, shot dead while defending free speech at Utah Valley University.

Kirk’s murder, and the reaction to it, confirmed that the Western left has abandoned any belief not only in free speech and democracy, but also in basic humanity. He was not a president or the sort of powerful individual targeted in past political assassinations in America. He was murdered simply for holding right-wing opinions – and having the nerve to express them in public.

The world should now know that cancel culture is not about protecting the vulnerable from hateful words or any of that guff. It does not stop at censorship, but can end with ‘No Platforming’ the speaker permanently. To paraphrase Chairman Mao’s views on political power, in 2025, cancel culture came out of the barrel of a gun. That some celebrated his death is a sign of how desperate and dangerous the woke culture warriors have become as the political world turns against them.

This has been a long time coming. Intolerant leftists began by insisting that the right to free speech cannot include ‘hate speech’ – aka words which they hate. The traditional playground rhyme taught us that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones / but words will never hurt me’. Instead, the infantile woke left screamed that words are weapons and speech is the same as violence, so that offensive words become as bad as physical assault. Indeed, they insisted, the scars caused by words can be worse.

The woke left then moved on to insisting that ‘silence is violence’ during the outburst of Black Lives Matter protests. The message here is that you don’t even have to say the wrong thing. You are guilty if you fail to follow the BLM script loudly enough. Keeping quiet is effectively deemed the same thing as kneeling on a black man’s neck.

If you seriously believe all this irrational dogma about how speech is more harmful than assault and silence is violence, then it might not seem too much of a stretch to think that violence is a justified response to offensive words. What begins as an ‘ethical’ argument for censorship can end up as an incitement to and justification for murder.

In the eyes of his enemies, Charlie Kirk’s ‘crime’ was not simply to give a youthful voice to national conservatism, whether hammering trans ideology or defending Israel. Worse, he stood up for free speech and insisted on open debate, going into the leftist lions’ dens and unapologetically defying woke student activists on their own campuses.

This made him guilty of blasphemy, and a death sentence followed, just as it might in an Islamic state. As it would there, the death of the blasphemer became a cause of celebration for the bigoted faithful. Social media became a pulpit for execrable wokeists to declare that, in being assassinated for what he said, Charlie Kirk had got what he deserved.

Much attention has focussed on the differences over gay or trans issues within the Islamo-left alliance, between the woke set and socially conservative Muslims. However, in 2025 the left and the Islamists remained united by their shared hatred of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, and their belief that blasphemers deserve to be punished.

January 2025 marked the 10th anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, when Islamist gunmen slaughtered 12 cartoonists, journalists, police and others at the offices of the satirical magazine. The ‘crime’ for which Charlie staff were executed was blaspheming against the Prophet Muhammad. And the reaction of much of the left was to agree that Charlie Hebdo was too racist and Islamophobic to be tolerated. The gunmen acted as Islamists, but also as the armed wing of the modern Western movement against hate speech.

Ten years later, in August 2025, Islamist knifeman Hadi Matar was sentenced to 25 years in jail for the attempted murder of British author Salman Rushdie. Matar attacked Rushdie on stage in 2022, while the writer was speaking about free speech.

Matar intended to carry out the death sentence imposed on Rushdie 40 years earlier by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, after the author wrote The Satanic Verses, a novel about the Prophet Muhammad. Even back then, many in the West failed to come to Rushdie’s defence, instead wagging their fingers at him for offending Islam. (As the editor of Living Marxism magazine, I wrote an editorial in 1989 entitled, ‘Defend the right to be offensive’.)

This year, the crossover appeared even starker. In his pre-sentencing statement, Matar declared that he believed in free speech, but that Rushdie deserved to die because there was a ‘difference between attacking things that are sacred, and freedom and speech’ (sic). Which sounds like the left’s two-faced attempt to defend free speech for ideas they agree with, ‘but’ not for other people’s ideas, aka ‘hate speech’.

As the culture war gets hotter, it becomes more important than ever to stand and fight for free speech.

Mick Hume is a spiked columnist.