Deep Freeze

Within hours of Kirk’s death, a website called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” was launched to collect and publicize information about anyone caught reacting boorishly to his assassination. (The site appears, at least for the moment, to have been taken down.) “The site includes a tip line for submissions and includes photos of the people who disparaged him or cheered his death, along with personal information like their email addresses, place of residence and employer,” the New York Times reported. The owner posted that nearly 20,000 tips had already been received by Friday afternoon, one day after the shooting.

Meanwhile, on social media, populists eagerly promoted posts by leftist randos celebrating the murder or expressing contempt for the victim. News of firings and suspensions soon began trickling in—cable news commentators, newspaper editors, federal employees, university workers, and garden-variety private-sector wage slaves. One Twitter user kept a running list of the terminations, which he cheerfully dubbed “The Trophy Case.”

There’s a name for this phenomenon, I believe.

The story of Trump’s second term is a story of the right abandoning all pretense that it objects to left-wing politics in principle. Republicans are fine with running gigantic deficits, fine with socializing private industry, fine with rule by executive order (despite controlling both houses of Congress), fine with weakness toward America’s foreign adversaries, and, as we’re seeing right now, fine with imposing professional sanctions for thought crimes.

As a wise man noted just a few weeks ago, “The postliberal right has always seemed more jealous than resentful of the postliberal left’s cultural bullying. They’ve never wanted an America where people don’t get canceled; they want an America where they get to do the canceling.” The aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s horrendous murder reminds us that they now have that America.

Would it shock you if I said I feel some sympathy for them?

My sympathy derives from the fact that I’ve never been an absolutist about cancel culture.

I can’t imagine how anyone could be. “No one deserves to lose their job for their political opinions” is a fine liberal principle—but one that none of us actually holds. Imagine a person who agitates for legalizing pedophilia or orchestrating a second Holocaust. A moral consensus around those issues has formed in America, and no one makes much of a fuss when that person is fired. We tend not to think of such cases as “cancel culture.”

Cancel culture, properly understood, is an attempt to bully institutions like businesses into enforcing one faction’s cultural preferences in the absence of moral consensus around those preferences. It doesn’t involve subjects about which we’re all in broad moral agreement, like whether pedophilia should be a crime. It involves subjects about which we disagree, like whether trans women are women. As Thomas Chatterton Williams put it in The Atlantic, “Cancel culture is more fundamentally about solidifying norms that haven’t yet been established.”

Cancellation is an assertion of cultural hegemony. It presumes to declare a live public debate over and to threaten penalties for those who don’t adopt the hegemon’s position.

So when a right-winger resorts to naming and shaming someone who celebrated the act of murdering Charlie Kirk, that doesn’t sound like cancel culture to me. Americans overwhelmingly agree that political violence is unacceptable; that’s a virtuous near-consensus, and it’s understandable that decent people would want to ruthlessly enforce norms around that consensus given the dire consequences to the country if it were to soften. If you wish for an America where we’re shooting at each other in the streets, as the conflict entrepreneurs of the right do, I’m unbothered by the “chilling effect” that the prospect of unemployment might have on you.

The problem is that it isn’t just the assassination enthusiasts on the left whom the right is trying to cancel.

Various Kirk critics were singled out this weekend not for celebrating his death, but for criticizing him or his beliefs. In several cases, those targeted for cancellation condemned the murder explicitly in the course of arguing that Kirk was a bad influence on American politics, a debatable but defensible proposition. The right isn’t enforcing a moral consensus when it cancels people for believing that Charlie Kirk did more harm than good in politics because no such consensus on that question exists—and almost certainly never will.

What it’s doing is asserting its newfound cultural hegemony by trying to brute-force a consensus about the deceased into being through professional intimidation, which is textbook cancel culture. If you can’t convince most Americans that trans women are women or that Charlie Kirk is a secular saint, you might resort to scaring them into biting their tongues if they happen to hold an opinion to the contrary. Kirk can’t be a potent political martyr for the right if his critics remain free to make the case that he was a “racist homophobe misogynist,” so the cancel contingent is doing what it can to restrict that freedom.

Which is ironic, as Kirk himself was gung-ho to puncture the “myth” of sainthood around certain political martyrs.

To grasp the importance of hegemony in cancel culture, consider that Fox News host Brian Kilmeade wasn’t canceled last week despite saying one of the foulest things ever uttered on an American news program. During chitchat on Wednesday, a co-host argued that homeless people who refuse help from the state should be sent to jail, to which Kilmeade replied without missing a beat, “Or involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill ‘em.”

If you’re reading that and thinking there must be context that I left out, see for yourself.

That’s a superb case for cancellation since there does exist a moral consensus in this country, thankfully, that exterminating undesirables is wrong. And because there is such a consensus, and because the outcry online over Kilmeade’s remark was ferocious, he was forced into the rare-for-Fox humiliation of having to apologize—despite the fact that there’s no good explanation for what he said except that he honestly believes it.

But Fox News didn’t fire him because letting him go at this particular political moment would have caused it more trouble than keeping him on would, I think. As it ascends culturally, the postliberal right is eager to guard the power it’s attained by punishing even the smallest perceived concessions to the left disproportionately. Firing Kilmeade under those circumstances would have betrayed that sense of new right-wing cultural hegemony, handing “wokesters” a scalp when they no longer have the political muscle to take one. Viewers would have been furious—even though most, I’m sure, would agree with liberals that we shouldn’t euthanize the homeless.

One way to respond to all of this is to say that turnabout is fair play. The left spent years rationalizing the professional ruin of people who disagreed with their shibboleths, and now the right gets a turn. The president’s favorite Bible verse doubles as the logic of postliberalism (and the antithesis of Christianity), not coincidentally.

But right-wing cancel culture and left-wing cancel culture aren’t the same, and we’ll need to bear that in mind as we endure months or years of Republicans justifying abuses of power in the name of Charlie Kirk by screeching that the left started it.

The paradigm case of left-wing cancel culture is a virtual mob forming on pre-Elon Twitter to hound some rando for saying something outre and getting them fired. If that’s as far as right-wing cancel culture goes in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the analogy will be on point.

But it’s going to go much further. Witness the unhinged ruminations below of one Stephen Miller, possibly the second-most influential person in the executive branch. There’s no precedent in my lifetime for a demagogue this vicious and lowbrow wielding real power in a presidential administration, Democratic or Republican:

He posted that on Thursday—before he knew anything about Kirk’s killer. The next day he promised on Fox News “to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. … The power of law enforcement, under President Trump’s leadership, will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

As our friend Andrew Egger pointed out, Miller’s own words confirm that the government won’t limit itself to punishing lawbreakers. This will be a state harassment campaign, organized by violent coup enthusiasts, to reduce the influence of even law-abiding left-wing organizations on the pretense that they’re “fomenting violence.” It will work, I assume, the same way all of Trump’s harassment campaigns have worked so far: The administration will identify some federal benefit that these organizations rely on—for example, their tax exemption—and threaten to cancel it unless the organization does whatever the White House wants.

That’s what cancel culture under a postliberal regime looks like. It’s not progressive chuds on Twitter doxxing people while the most influential guy in the party grumbles at them to knock it off. It’s top-down. It’s the president threatening lawful activists while making excuses for his own side’s radicals. It’s the vice president urging Americans to snitch on each other to their employers. It’s lawmakers like Sen. Katie Britt warning Americans that they’ll be held “accountable” for “hate speech” and flushing decades of conservative beliefs about free expression down the toilet in the process. It’s high government officials like Miller penning indictments of his opponents that sound like they were lifted from an especially grumpy edition of Der Sturmer.

Right-wing cancel culture under Trump will be state-enforced to a degree that left-wing cancel culture never was, with the alphabet soup of federal agencies tasked with protecting postliberalism’s new cultural hegemony. All authoritarianism really is, a Dispatch colleague smartly observed this morning, is “cancellation” backed by state power. The Justice Department, for instance, has purged employees who worked on the January 6 prosecutions not because those employees were incompetent but because they’ve offended the right’s moral conviction that Trump’s coup plot was justified.

Those employees weren’t fired, they were canceled. They affronted Republicans’ sense of cultural hegemony.

Very soon, we’re going to start separating the men from the boys on the American right in terms of who’s still meaningfully liberal and who’s gone all the way to the dark side. Protecting lawful political actors from persecution by the federal government is the absolute essence of the First Amendment; delegitimizing political opponents by demagoging them as radicals and threats to public safety is the absolute essence of Trumpism. Trump and Miller will demand that Republicans choose. It’s one or the other.

We’re left with two ironies.

One is that, to some Americans, electing Trump was supposed to bring about the end of political correctness. “Woke is dead,” as the saying goes. Not so. The definition of woke may have flipped from “transgenderism is good” to “Charlie Kirk was good,” but political incorrectness will be punished even more ruthlessly by the postliberal right than it was by the postliberal left.

Electing the GOP in its current form hasn’t spared America from suffering under most of leftism’s worst pathologies, you may have noticed. All we’ve done is trade government by a movement that’s still somewhat restrained by liberalism for one that’s unrestrained.

The other irony is that what Trump and Miller are planning is antithetical to Charlie Kirk’s model of politics. The common note of praise for Kirk in his many obituaries is that, in an era when most activists are siloed off behind screens and fulminating about the inhuman enemy, Charlie met his opponents face to face. He liked debate. To all appearances, he was an old-school liberal to the extent that he believed more speech is better than less speech.

What’s about to be done in his name contradicts that. “In a free society, we must not be afraid to express our views, no matter how strongly some might oppose them. That’s the point of free speech,” Adam Goldstein wrote this weekend of Kirk’s murder. “But it is precisely for that reason why we must not respond to mockery of Kirk’s assassination by canceling everyone who offends us: because that too creates a society where people are afraid to express themselves.”

Indeed, but that’s the kind of society that the president and his henchmen want. If they have a chance to exploit the death of cheerful debater Charlie Kirk to build a country where everyone’s afraid to debate the subject of Charlie Kirk—and Donald Trump by extension—they’ll take it every time. A deep freeze on dissenting speech is the goal of every fascist regime.

In a democratic country, state-run cancellation campaigns should be a contradiction in terms: By definition, a government that’s accountable to the majority will be reluctant to aggressively pursue cultural vendettas that haven’t inspired a moral consensus. And there is no moral consensus in America that lawful political entities should be harassed simply because Stephen Miller is convinced they “hate everything that is good, righteous and beautiful.”

The fact that the White House seems poised to move forward anyway suggests it either no longer understands what the majority wants or it doesn’t care. Decide for yourself which is more alarming.