It’s Time to Rethink “Cancel Culture”
Ostracizing antisemites like Nick Fuentes is necessary and just. The “cancel culture” concept only obscures what’s wrong with today’s political culture
What’s the difference between “cancel culture” and shaming toxic people who infect one’s political movement?
This question recently embroiled the American conservative movement after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts refused to denounce Tucker Carlson for his interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes.1 Roberts said that Heritage rejects the policy of “cancelling our own people,” and specifically objected to “cancelling” both Carlson and Fuentes.
Vice President JD Vance revived the issue in December at a Turning Point USA conference where other speakers condemned antisemitism from other conservatives.2 In spite of that, Vance proclaimed that he didn’t bring a list of conservatives to “denounce or deplatform.”3
Roberts was widely rebuked by other conservatives for his statement and for defending his association with Carlson in the name of opposing “cancel culture.” There’s a world of difference, say his critics, between the behavior of “woke” activists in 2020 after the George Floyd protests and sensible work to critique bad actors who’ve gained too much influence inside conservatism.
There is a difference. But is simply criticizing vile characters like Fuentes enough for a movement to maintain its dignity? And if Fuentes is disinvited from podcasts, is that “cancel culture”? What even is “cancel culture,” and does treating it as an uncontested political sin help us understand what’s happening in our political culture? Or does doing so play into the hands of attention-hungry trolls like Fuentes, who profit from the platform conservatives now reflexively give to victims of “cancellation”?
We need a better way of understanding the full extent of the distressing, real social phenomenon that the concept of “cancel culture” only brushes up against.
“It’s not cancel culture to criticize”
Why don’t critics of Roberts think they’re engaging in “cancel culture”?
Writing in The Free Press — a regular forum for critics of “cancel culture”— Eli Lake attempts an answer.4 It was “cancellation,” he says, when the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer resigned over writing the headline “Buildings Matter, Too,” during the George Floyd protests in 2020, and it was “cancellation” when a high school student was denied admission to college because of old tasteless internet posts. By contrast, criticizing Carlson for his amicable conversation with a rabid antisemite is only “doing the hard work of policing one’s coalition.”
But why should we criticize Carlson? Not, apparently, for inviting Fuentes on the podcast in the first place, but simply because he didn’t grill him hard enough. Lake recommends William F. Buckley’s approach in a 1968 interview with the rapist-turned-Black Panther advocate of terrorist violence, Eldridge Cleaver.5 Buckley gets Cleaver to admit he endorses the assassination of Richard Nixon and other odious positions. But it’s noteworthy that Buckley does not actually criticize, let alone condemn, any of these positions in the interview. He at most asks tongue-in-cheek questions that relay others’ criticism to elicit Cleaver’s response. He actually grills him little better than Carlson did Fuentes.
Lake’s idea is that since Buckley is only using speech to try to discredit Cleaver, it can’t be “cancel culture” and so can’t be bad. But Buckley’s tactic is no model here. Even if he had been more vocally critical it would not have erased the dramatic effect of treating an agitator for crude mob violence as worthy of civilized conversation. To be sure Buckley had the free speech right to platform a spokesman for thuggish Marxist viewpoints. But not every exercise of free speech is wise.
By the same token, it was Carlson’s right to host Fuentes, but in exercising his rights he also elevated and dignified an obscene antisemitic troll. In the weeks since Carlson’s interview, Fuentes has now done a grand tour of the podcast circuit and has even made it onto TV interview programs like Piers Morgan’s, where the host tried to be critical but is widely seen even by critics of Fuentes as having been bested by him.6 You can’t shame a shameless troll, you can only embolden him.
So there’s a good case for refusing to provide the Cleavers and Fuentes of the world with a platform. But it’s thought that campaigns to deplatform are evil “cancel culture.” Why?
The confused definition of “cancel culture”
It’s now widely thought that “cancel culture” is an offense against free speech. We see this in the closest thing to a textbook definition of “cancel culture” we can find, in Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s 2023 book The Cancelling of the American Mind. They define “cancel culture” as “the uptick beginning around 2014, and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or would be — protected by First Amendment standards and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.”7
Read carefully, this definition is ambiguous. Does it mean that “cancel culture” is itself legally forbidden by the First Amendment (because it punishes people for speech that should be free), or just that it’s a personal moral offense perpetrated against those who are legally exercising their free speech rights?
If it means the first, then the definition does not cover all of the outrageous “cancellations” by “woke” activists. Some “deplatformings” really did violate someone’s free speech rights, as when a student mob shut down Judge Kyle Duncan’s speech before the Federalist Society at Stanford in 2023. But not all did. When Philadelphia Inquirer editor Stan Wichnowksi resigned in 2020 because of outrage over his decision to publish an article bemoaning the impact of Black Lives Matters protests on urban areas, he was well within his First Amendment rights to resign, and the paper would have been within its rights to fire him. Even if the editor’s article made a valid point and we think the paper’s ideological agenda is misguided, the editor does not have a right to his job and the First Amendment protects a paper’s right not to have to fund a dissenting employee’s speech.
But if we take the definition of “cancel culture” to mean some personal moral offense against those who exercise legally protected speech, then many of Carlson’s critics are engaging in it in spite of themselves. However abhorrent Fuentes’s racist views may be, they’re also protected by the First Amendment. So unless we assume “hate speech” is actually violence (as “social justice” activists insist), his critics are trying to punish him for his protected free speech, if only through social shaming. That’s certainly true for any who say Fuentes should not be on conservative podcasts: they want to deplatform him, and other antisemites may now fear they will suffer the same consequences. But even those who just want to criticize him more harshly, on or off a podcast, are still “otherwise punishing” him.
So even the textbook definition of “cancel culture” is hopelessly confused. Either it doesn’t explain what was wrong with core examples of the most objectionable “cancel” campaigns, or it actually classifies totally reasonable efforts to ostracize unreasonable people — itself the exercise of the rights of free speech and free association — as some kind of moral offense.
We need another framework for understanding what was wrong with cases like the 2020 Philadelphia Inquirer firing.
An alternative conceptualization
Not every exercise of First Amendment rights is rational or wise. Buckley unwisely platformed Cleaver as many today are unwisely platforming Fuentes. Some free speech is even overtly irrational. What made the Inquirer firing so bad was simply that it was driven by a kind of religious fervor to ferret out heretics who offend against a cherished but irrational orthodoxy.
But this kind of fervor is what defines a concept that is older and better-tested than “cancel culture.” A religiously driven social campaign to root out and punish heretics is what defines a “witch hunt.”
“Cancel culture” is a not very descriptive name for simply the latest chapter in humanity’s long history of irrational, inquisitor-driven persecution campaigns, from the literal medieval witch hunts targeting heretical devil-worshipers to Stalin’s party purges of traitors to the Communist party. The ideologies driving these campaigns have varied, but they all mobilized mobs who cared little about evidence to root out some unorthodox “other.”
And while witch-hunting campaigns often involve resorting to state force to suppress dissent or silence speech, they do not always. The Satanic panic in the 1980s included (futile) campaigns to censor rock and roll music and even prosecutions (which were eventually overturned) of child care workers alleged to be Satanic abusers.8 More than 12,000 cases of abuse were reported in this period, but none were ever substantiated as being Satanic.9 But the campaign, which originated in Evangelical churches and drew on now-discredited psychological theories of recovered memories, also involved voluntary boycott and smear campaigns that simply worked to impugn reputations without violating anyone’s rights. Everyone from Procter and Gamble (because it had a logo confused with Satanic symbols) to the makers of Dungeons and Dragons and the Smurfs to (of course) heavy metal musicians like Ozzy Osbourne was a target.10 ,11 ,12 Some of these alleged witches were tried in real courts, many were simply tried (or mistried) in the court of public opinion.
To chalk this up to “cancel culture” is to dramatically understate what makes the underlying “culture” outrageous. The term alludes to the cancellation of TV programs by networks, and was first used after notable celebrities had opportunities cancelled because of various scandals. But it was of course no outrage that Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby were “cancelled” after dozens of credible accusations of sexual assault. It is outrageous when others had opportunities revoked because of unfounded accusations of wrongdoing — or credible accusations of manufactured wrongs — spread by online cancel mobs.
The problem isn’t cancellation per se, it’s the cancelling, smearing, persecutions, and sometimes prosecution of scapegoats because of the delusions and madness of crowds.
As Stalin’s party purges demonstrate, witch hunts don’t need to be justified in the name of explicit, overt religiosity to be pursued with religious fervor. Nominally atheistic movements like communism can draw inspiration from religious models. (A relevant symbol here is that Stalin himself spent five years in seminary training to become an Orthodox priest before he became enamored of communism.13 )
Fast forward to the 21st century. As John McWhorter has argued persuasively in Woke Racism, the “social justice” egalitarianism of the last few decades bears all the hallmarks (in the words of his subtitle) of a “new religion.” The movement has its own articles of faith (that any inequality represents injustice), its own sacred texts (DeAngelo and Kendi), its own conception of original sin (the concept of “white privilege”), and its overwhelming demand for repentance and submission, in the name of which so many “cancel” campaigns have been launched.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, that demand for submission is what empowers all the rest of the religious fervor of the “woke” movement.14 And the moral code behind the demand is something that woke egalitarianism actually inherits from old-fashioned Judeo-Christian religion.
But if the real problem with woke inquisitions and heretic hunting is its religious fervor, will religious conservative critics of “cancel culture” be willing to admit this?
The blind spot for MAGA witch hunting
Surely many religious people are willing to condemn the inquisitorial witch hunts of religion’s past. But are they willing to condemn them because of their religious fervor? And will they be willing to confront baseless persecution when it arises again?
This question is pressing because anyone critical of woke witch hunting has to confront the fact that the “MAGA” movement is prone to it as well. They need to confront this even if MAGA doesn’t hunt for its heretics in the same way or to the same degree.
To their credit, in The Canceling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Schlott do offer three whole chapters detailing very recent campaigns against free speech launched by politicians on what they characterize as the “right.” As I’ve argued, actual free speech violations (e.g., when student mobs pushed speakers off stage) were only among the worst offenses of the woke witch hunters. If there’s not even respect for free speech among the activists and politicians more broadly on the “right,” then surely MAGA activists are capable of engaging in witch-hunting campaigns whether or not they target free speech. As just an early indication of this, Lukianoff and Schlott note that in 2017 there were more attempts to fire university professors launched by the “right” than were by the “left.”15
Even though there really were communists working in positions of power in the 1950s, McCarthy’s often baseless accusations of communist infiltration resulted in unjust persecution of many non-communists. In the same way today, even though there surely are pedophiles who’ve abused children, much of MAGA’s hunt for pedophiles is similarly baseless.
And even though Jeffrey Epstein was clearly guilty of serious sexual abuse against underaged girls, the latest push to “release the Epstein files” is being pushed by conspiracists who believe without evidence that Epstein was at the center of a vast network of perpetrators of similar abusers in business and politics.16
QAnon conspiracists are the ring leaders of the religiously inspired MAGA pedophile witch-hunting campaign. On sheer faith they accept their anonymous prophet’s predictions about the coming “Storm” that will oust Satanic pedophiles from positions of power. Their religious fervor led one of their faithful to launch an armed attack on the pizzeria in Washington where children were allegedly being held in a (non-existent) basement. (Don’t forget that the “QAnon Shaman” also participated in the January 6th riots.) In a dramatic reversion to form, these witch hunters literally go hunting.
Even as the QAnon faithful hunt for pedophile witches in government, they’ve been singularly uninterested in speaking up about the proven and ongoing international conspiracy that protected pedophile abusers for decades: the Catholic church.17 It seems the faithful have a blind spot for the crime when its committed by the faithful.
Faith-driven MAGA conspiracism is widely recognized.18 And when people believe baselessly in dangerous conspiracies or seek scapegoats for real afflictions, they’ll go to extraordinary lengths to combat their fears. This is why religious faith produces witch hunters.
The MAGA “George Floyd Moment”
We would be remiss not to mention one last example. If the killing of George Floyd and his portrayal as a fallen martyr inflamed the woke hunt for heretics, shouldn’t we be willing to talk about how the killing of Charlie Kirk did something very similar among the MAGA faithful?
Make no mistake, as conservatives have eagerly insisted, Kirk’s mourners did not riot in the streets over Charlie Kirk’s death, and there were many differences between Kirk and Floyd and in the circumstances of their deaths.19 What’s more, many of those who openly celebrated Kirk’s assassination or political violence against people who share a similar viewpoint, or who claimed that Kirk “had it coming,” certainly did deserve to lose their jobs or otherwise face public shaming. Just as we rightly deplatform Nazis we also rightly ostracize advocates of violence.
At the same time, some of those punished in connection with statements made about the assassination surely did not deserve it, and the only way to explain why they were punished is to point to a kind of witch-hunting mentality in the MAGA crowd.
Consider the case of Darren Michael, a theater professor at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, who was fired for posting a headline to Facebook saying “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth It to Keep 2nd Amendment.”20 Michael was expressing disagreement with Kirk’s position on gun control, citing the tragedy of his death as a reason. Or consider Marjean Corkran, who was fired by Enterprise State Community College in Alabama for posting, “Let us not forget some other children were shot in another (expletive) school today.”21 Or Suzanne Swierc, another university employee who was fired by Ball State University in Indiana, for posting, “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.”22
Joshua Bregy of Clemson University in South Carolina shared a post privately with friends on Facebook.23 It opened with an explicit denunciation of political violence and closed by noting that he grieved the tragic loss of Kirk. But it also took issue with Kirk’s views on guns and with the idea of treating him as a martyr. Someone from the Clemson College Republicans on his friend list shared a screen shot of the post.24 This was then reshared by influencers and politicians until President Trump himself called for defunding Clemson.25 At this point Bregy (along with others who made more inflammatory statements) was dismissed.
More recently Greg Lukianoff himself has written about how his organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has counted eighty attempts to discipline academic employees about statements on Kirk’s death since September 10, compared to ninety-eight comparable attempts in all of 2020 to do the same after Floyd’s death.26 The Chronicle of Higher Education has also kept a record of academic employees fired for comments on Kirk’s death.27
Sorting through the data reveals many academic employees who said things that betrayed a severe lack of judgment, fully warranting their dismissal. (Could some dismissed after George Floyd’s death have deserved it as well?) But Michael, Corkran, Swierc, and Bregy seem to have done nothing more than commit the faux pas of “speaking ill of the dead” by disagreeing with Kirk’s worldview. They may have lacked tact, but they did not call for or celebrate violence.
No one has a right to a job. So advocates of violence certainly shouldn’t expect to keep their jobs in spite of their gross display of bad judgment. And perhaps we can understand why some fans of Kirk, in their grief and anger, were erroneously swept up in an online movement to ferret out genuine offenders. But the effect of the campaign’s lack of concern for evidence — like other witch-hunting campaigns — was the targeting of many innocent victims.
The campaign had its inquisitors, influencers like LibsofTikTok’s Chaya Raichik, who became a clearing house for indiscriminate allegations of heresy against Kirk. In just the first two days after she declared, “This is war,” I count on her feed at least three very public accusations directed against individuals who did little more than express perhaps tactless disagreement with Kirk.28 ,29 ,30 ,31
Charlie Kirk’s death should of course have been condemned. But he has also been sanctified into a conservative martyr. Speakers at his heavily scripted and deeply religious memorial service compared him not only to St. Stephen but to Jesus Christ himself.32 ,33 In a movement that already revels in its religious faith, in its acceptance of dogmas strictly on the basis of traditional authorities, it should come as no shock that in their grief and anger over their martyr, emotion and not evidence would push some to hunt the latest new category of witch, those who refuse to recognize their martyr.
Conservatives did not riot in the streets after Kirk’s assassination. But they also didn’t need to: they held political power. And notably, as Lukianoff and Schlott argue in their book, when they lost power on January 6, 2021, some faith-driven conspiracist MAGA activists did riot in the streets. And even for those conservatives who would never do such a thing, there’s an uncanny reluctance to recognize that the fundamental psychology behind these activist movements in their midst have many of the same signs of witch hunting by the woke.
It’s fundamentally a religious culture that underpins the recent uptick in witch hunting. And it’s virulent, to one degree or another, in key sectors of both political camps.
Breaking the witch-hunters’ spell of “cancel culture”
For those of us who don’t have tribal political loyalty to any political camp, it should only be liberating to abandon the “cancel culture” concept in favor of a clearer conceptualization.
If we understand what’s been called “cancel culture” as just another witch hunt motivated by the latest religious reawakening, we can understand the difference between tribal campaigns to smear, deplatform, and persecute heretics and rational efforts to ostracize bad actors. The campaign to canonize George Floyd and sniff out any objections to this orthodoxy were driven by irrational fervor that often targeted innocent victims. But campaigning to deprive Nick Fuentes of undeserved publicity can be a principled exercise of justice itself.
Such an effort to ostracize the likes of Fuentes is not just fundamentally different from a witch hunt. It actually represents the conscious opposition to the whole phenomenon of witch hunting — because it’s working to expel an active witch hunter from polite circles.
Antisemitism itself has always been an essentially religious call for witch hunting, where the Jew plays the role of the witch. Motivated by Christianity, neo-pagan Nazism, or Islam, antisemites blame all the problems of the world on powerful Jews. Medieval inquisitions hunted witches and Jews alike. Ostracizing the witch hunters means expressly rejecting the religious fervor of the incitement to launch pogroms. Don’t let witch hunters like Fuentes use their “cancel culture” spell to make it seem like they’re on the side of reason, freedom, and justice.
Ben Shapiro, “TPUSA Speech: Truth Over Cowardice and Grifting,” Ben Shapiro YouTube channel, December 19, 2025.
“FULL REMARKS: VP Vance Speaks to Supporters at Turning Point AmFest,” LiveNow from FOX YouTube channel, December 21, 2025.
Eli Lake, “The Buckley Test: Can the Right Still Police Its Own?” The Free Press, December 18, 2025.
“Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Black Panthers,” Hoover Institution Library & Archives YouTube channel, January 26, 2017.
Mary Harrington, “Does Nick Fuentes Have Daddy Issues?” UnHerd, December 2025.
Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, The Cancelling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There Is a Solution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2023), 31.
Emily Bazelon, “The Trial That Unleashed Hysteria Over Child Abuse,” New York Times, March 9, 2014.
Carey Goldberg, “Proof Lacking for Ritual Abuse by Satanists,” New York Times, October 31, 1994.
Cara Giaimo, “The Bizarre Procter & Gamble Satanism Scare That Wouldn’t Die,” Atlas Obscura, August 31, 2016.
Jon Kelly, “The Children Who Went to Hell and Back,” BBC News Magazine, February 27, 2014.
Anna Merlan, “In the ’80s, the Devil Really Wanted You,” Vice, October 30, 2014.
Christopher Marsh, “Stalin as a Theological Student,” PoliticalTheology.com, May 10, 2010.
Ben Bayer, “The ‘Old’ Morality of the ‘New’ Religions,” New Ideal , April 26, 2021.
Lukianoff and Schlott, 160.
Geoff Shullenberger, “The Idiocy of the Epstein Mythology,” Compact, July 25, 2022.
Ben Bayer, “Never Forget – or Forgive – the Ongoing Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal,” New Ideal, October 29, 2025.
Claire Lehmann, “The New Medievals: Candace Owens, the Charlie Kirk Conspiracy, and the Politics of Paranoia,” Quillette, November 20, 2025.
Victor Davis Hanson, “The Murder of Charlie Kirk Was Not a George Floyd Moment,” victorhanson.com, November 22, 2025.
“APSU Professor Who Was Fired Over Charlie Kirk Post Shifted to Suspension,” ClarksvilleNow.com, November 2025.
“Enterprise College Fires Professor Over TikTok Comments,” WALB.com, September 15, 2025.
Michael Levenson, “Charlie Kirk’s Death Ignites a New Free Speech Fight,” New York Times, September 29, 2025.
ACLU of South Carolina, “Bregy v. Clemson University,” ACLU of South Carolina, accessed December 30, 2025.
Jason Szep and Joseph Tanfani, “The ‘Charlie Kirk Purge’: How 600 Americans Were Punished in a Pro-Trump Crackdown,” Reuters, November 19, 2025.
John Bushart, “The New Speech Police after Charlie Kirk,” New York Times, November 26, 2025.
Ellie Davis, Gavin Escott, and Claire Murphy, “Employees and Students at These Colleges Have Been Punished for Comments on Charlie Kirk’s Death,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2025.
“Charlie Kirk’s full memorial service,” FOX 9 Minneapolis–St. Paul YouTube channel, December 2025.
“Charlie Kirk’s full memorial service,” FOX 9 Minneapolis–St. Paul YouTube channel, December 2025
Image Credit: Paul Taylor / Stone / via Getty Images
The cancel culture phenomenon brings to mind Huxley's 'Brave New World' where social control isn't maintained through overt force but through psychological conditioning and social ostracism. Just as the World State used soma and conditioning to enforce conformity, today's cancel culture uses public shaming and career destruction to suppress dissent. Huxley warned about a society where people police each other's thoughts and speech - perhaps more relevant now than Orwell's vision of top-down totalitarianism. The debate over when criticism crosses into cancellation is essentially about finding the line between rational discourse and mob-driven conformity enforcement.
This is brilliant work reframing the whole cancel culture debate through the lens of witch hunting. I've been stuck in arguments where the term 'cancel culture' just muddles everything, and your point about religious fervor being the real driver clicks so hard. Last year I watched a freinds company go through something like this and the mob mentality was unreal. Calling it what it actualy is, witch hunting, strips away the euphemism and forces people to confront the irrational persecution at its core.