Cancel Culture turns, bites the hand that fed it

"The party of tolerance is suddenly allergic to consequences."

From the outset, it should be acknowledged that Cancel Culture represents one of the most pernicious legacies of the digital era—a phenomenon that, in its essence, revives the specter of public tribunals akin to French Revolution executions, where judgment is swift, collective, and often irrevocable.

Far from mere social ostracism, it inflicts wounds that extend beyond reputation, dismantling careers, livelihoods, and psyches in ways that echo a perpetual exile, irrespective of the offense's gravity or context.

---

Article continues below

---

In partnership with Freespoke

Fight for the Truth and Take Back Control with Freespoke

The internet isn’t a discussion anymore, it’s a shouting match between clickbait, spin, and headlines that sound like bad comedy. One minute you’re checking the weather, the next you’re wondering if “Ambassador Arrested in His Underwear” is news, or just Tuesday.

That’s why we built Freespoke.

Freespoke puts you back in control. One tap shows you the consensus, the divide, and expert insights from podcasts, so you see the truth, not the propaganda. It’s private, clean, and uncensored. No tracking. No porn. No data harvesting. Just clarity.

Whether you’re fact-checking a meme, decoding a viral TikTok, or cutting through the “official version” of events, Freespoke is your chaos-killer.

And as an exclusive for The Capitalist readers: Get 35% off Freespoke Premium with code cap35.

Premium unlocks enhanced privacy by blocking all ads while using the app which means no more creepy data-stalking ads. Plus, you get unlimited AI summaries that simplify complex stories in seconds, and fully searchable podcast transcripts that pull truth straight from the source.

Don't lose the truth in the chaos of the internet. Download the free app today and take back control.

---

Article continues

---

Those of us immersed in the media landscape on the right are intimately acquainted with this force. At the Capitalist we are no strangers to Cancel Culture. Over years of navigating newsrooms and digital platforms, our staff have witnessed its toll first hand: the ever present self-censorship to avoid its Sauron like gaze, friends and colleagues ensnared in its web, institutions where we once contributed eroded, and the subtle, pervasive creep of its “logic” into the algorithms that govern our daily discourse.

We have observed and worked for thriving enterprises, bolstered by robust financials, reduced to ruins in mere weeks—victims not of overt censorship but of opaque "adjustments" to “algorithmic visibility”, fragmenting their reach and viability in the name of “fact checking” and “trust scores”. In starker instances, the mechanisms were laid bare: shadow bans and outright expulsions from platforms, executed without transparency or recourse, leaving the afflicted to ponder the unspoken rationales from their couch, jobless.

Yet, in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination—a seismic event that has reshaped the political terrain—this amorphous entity, unbound by ideology, has pivoted toward fresh prey.

Cancel Culture has come for the liberals and the conservative view largely is, we are fine with it.

The initial repercussions were immediate and visceral: "Stealth woke" individuals, long used to consequence free radical political expression online vented their schadenfreude online over Kirk's demise, only to face swift professional reprisals as their posts were circulated to employers, culminating in terminations within hours or days, their employers citing violations of conduct policies amid public outcry.

“It turns out that the right is more than adept at Cancel Culture” -Anon

We are now entering a subsequent phase of this unfolding drama, where the targets have escalated from anonymous users ensnared by a fleeting TikTok clip or an ill-advised Facebook rant to figures of prominence: celebrities, influencers, and cultural arbiters, hauled before the unforgiving court of public scrutiny.

Then came the big scalp: Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who knowingly went on-air and repeated false information about the Kirk’s assassin which drew ire from conservatives and advertisers, then doubled down according to The Hollywood Reporter:

”THR reported on Wednesday that Kimmel did not plan to apologize for his comments, but did plan to address the situation on-air.”

Consequently he was pulled off the air indefinitely by ABC.

The episode crystallizes a profound irony in America's cultural wars: Cancel Culture, once wielded predominantly by progressives to enforce their “social justice norms”, is now turning inward, ensnaring its erstwhile champions. Jimmy Kimmel once thrived as a sharp-tongued satirist, skewering the absurdities of power from his perch on ABC but that perch like so many other careers over the years has been atomized by Cancel Culture.

The hydra of the social media era, has long thrived on outrage's asymmetry. Born in the crucible of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, it weaponized platforms like Twitter. Liberals championed it as a tool for “social justice” to enforce “accountability”—or, critics argued, vengeance.

Historically, Cancel Culture has disproportionately targeted conservatives. Take actress Gina Carano, fired from Disney's "The Mandalorian" in 2021 after social media posts where she compared COVID policies to Nazi actions in WW2. Liberals largely applauded, viewing it as “a stand against hate speech.” Similarly, Roseanne Barr's ABC sitcom was axed in 2018 over a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, with progressives hailing the move as “necessary accountability.”

Tucker Carlson's abrupt departure from Fox News in 2023, amid lawsuits and controversies, elicited cheers from the left, who saw it as “curbing misinformation.” And Donald Trump's ban from Twitter following the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot was defended by many Democrats as “protecting democracy” from incitement.

Liberals, quick to embraced de-platforming as a tool for “social progress,” dismissed conservative complaints as overreactions as they went about their work as moral arbiters.

Now however they feel very differently.

“The average time between a liberal switching sides on an argument is two years” -Anon

The situation is not so funny when the wolf is at your door and their cries of “silencing” and “infringements on their first amendment rights” to conservatives sound like selective amnesia.

Hollywood, naturally, has erupted in protest over the Kimmel situation, decrying it as an “assault on free speech.” Yet for many on the right, this was the most ironic poetic justice—a taste of the medicine liberals had long prescribed for everyone else being dispensed to them. To see it administered gave immense satisfaction, to take part in dispensing it, cathartic.

"The party of tolerance is suddenly allergic to consequences." -Anon

The chickens for the Left in America are very much coming home to roost and they are not enjoying it very much. The problem for them is that a vast amount of their political strategy for most of the last decade has has been inextricably intertwined with Cancel Culture. They did it to conservatives, they did it to members of their own tribe who they did not think conformed to their view of “social moral purity”, and for a while it worked, Cancel Culture was their pet, but now they have lost control of the leash and those are on the right are in no hurry to save them from a monster they themselves created.

Conservatives are grieving for the loss of Kirk, but from that grief is emerging a resolve not seen before. Conservatives learned the rules of Cancel Culture long ago, as anyone who had questions about climate change, covid’s origins, the efficacy of the covid vaccines and lockdowns, or dare we say it, the 2020 election, discovered to their cost. So now they seek to take the fight to the left, to subject them to the same scrutiny they have endured and it is very evident that it is something the left is totally and utterly unprepared for.

For more than half a decade the weapon of choice for the Left was Cancel Culture. They championed it like there would never be a reckoning to face. Self assured that it would never turn on them. The evidence is everywhere, littered on their social feeds. Bold posts dripping with patronizing moral condescension about the need to censor view points and silence people they did not like, and cheering when their mob justice felled another career. Kimmel was no exception.

They spoke in a way that all moral zealots do, that the world will regard them as the pinnacle of lawful good for eternity. But just as they banished Christmas songs from the forties (“Baby it’s cold outside”) because they deemed it contained “problematic language” they are discovering that the passage of time has changed perceptions on their zealous moralism too.

Now it is the turn of the left to feel the chill of Cancel Culture as it wafts past them, to have old tweets dragged out into the light and harshly examined under a new paradigm of thought.

To recycle the arguments conservatives made when you mercilessly unleashed this force on them is a fools errand, they will fall on deaf ears because for many on the right, we are fine with it.

---

---

---

---