“After years of censoring speech, criminalizing politics, and transforming institutions into political monocultures, progressives have suddenly discovered the First Amendment,” writes American Enterprise Institute scholar Matthew Continetti.
Indeed, as many writers at PJ Media and elsewhere have pointed out, the assassination of Charlie Kirk has ushered in a new era. The pushback from the right has wrong-footed the left in ways that may have never been seen before. They’re off-balance, out of kilter, flummoxed, flabbergasted, and at a loss about how to respond.
The initial inclination among many on the left was to claim Kirk was a fascist and express joy at his death. That was met with a tsunami of conservative backlash that got dozens of people fired.
There’s a palpable sense of satisfaction on the right because of this flexing of conservative muscle. It has led to an organized campaign to expose the incendiary comments of many leftists who never dreamed that their rancid musings about Kirk’s death would cost them anything. Many even expected to be praised for their “enlightened” attitude.
“If we want to stop political violence like what happened to Charlie Kirk, we have to be honest about the people who are celebrating it and the people who are financing it,” wrote Vice President J.D. Vance on X.
This “naming and shaming” routine was invented by the left to censor the right and keep them muzzled. And payback is gonna be a — well, epic.
I’m going to use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk. If they ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of…
— Rep. Clay Higgins (@RepClayHiggins) September 11, 2025
The left is trying to equate the hysterical witch hunts of the 2010s for wrong-speak and “inappropriate” male interactions with females in the office with the current pushback against the left following Kirk’s assassination. “They do it too, only worse” is not an argument. It’s a cry for help.
It’s helpful to recall what those times were like.
Cancel culture refers to a set of practices used in the digital era to enforce progressively coded norms and figures of speech. Progressive activists declared certain topics and viewpoints beyond debate—and bullied individuals who thought otherwise into forced confessions, and institutions into firings. Men and women were punished, their lives ruined, for an errant remark, a simple mistake. Cancel culture was the mechanism for policing the boundaries of the “Great Awokening”: a project of cultural revolution by which traditional understandings of sex, merit, and American exceptionalism were systematically, and sometimes violently, overturned.
The extent of the stupidity and hysteria reached surreal levels. A New York Times writer was fired for telling a story about a trip to Peru with high school kids, where they discussed whether it was ever appropriate for a white person to use the “N-word,” even to quote someone else. The writer was fired, and a Slate writer was suspended for bringing the subject up at work.
Lz Wolfe, writing in Reason.com, fingers the real reason why cancel culture took hold then.
“It was never about morals, it was never about quality of product being produced; it was about power in the workplace, wrapped up in something that, to the young, resembled morals enough to give them plausible deniability,” she wrote.
Teachers have been especially (stupidly) vocal about Kirk’s death. Texas has revoked the licenses of 100 teachers whose social media posts or classroom comments crossed a line.
That such sentiments come from the mouths of “educators” is revealing. Cancel culture silences and deplatforms men and women who dissent from progressive dogma—who espouse traditional views of marriage, the scientific basis of biological sex, the ambiguous data behind climate change and policies to mitigate it, and the illogic and prejudice of disparate impact theory, to name a few. It is an instrument of indoctrination, coercively incentivizing opinions contrary to evidence and reason.
Defaming Charlie Kirk as a “Nazi bitch” is not engaging in debate. It is dehumanization. It is a license to kill. And it normalizes the ultimate cancellation.
“Scroll through progressive bastions such as Bluesky or The New York Times, however, and—with rare exceptions—you find no reckoning with Kirk’s positive legacy or views,” writes Continetti. “There is instead anxious speculation about how his death might affect protected groups and Democratic voters.”
The chasm between right and left is growing. When many on one side can justify murder for political reasons, it’s becoming more difficult to accept them as partners in the American experiment.
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