At their convention five years ago, President Donald Trump and his Republican Party rallied their supporters fervently against an idea they characterized as a rot on society: cancel culture.
Too many people, they argued one by one in prime-time speeches, were being publicly ostracized — in some cases losing their jobs — for exercising their constitutional right to free speech.
But the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was among the speakers at that 2020 convention, seems to have rapidly shifted how Trump and other Republicans see the boundaries of free speech and the rules of engagement for a once-loathed cancel culture.
Previously a voice for the canceled, they are now the ones canceling.
It’s a lying game.
Republican politicians and thought leaders pretend they are the victims of unfair persecution (“cancel culture”) and censorship in order to 1) encourage a sense of righteous indignation in their base, and 2) create pretext for them to perpetrate actual unfair persecution and censorship when they’re in power.
“If they can do it, why can’t we?”
Half of the Republican base doesn’t recognize this happening, and the other half doesn’t care because it’s working.
What? The government silencing you isn’t “cancel culture”, it’s censorship and a violation of the first amendment.
Whoever wrote this article is either brain dead or trying to gin up justification for what the state is doing.
Conservatives have also always — for all of human history — been the most prolific perpetrators of cancel culture.
There are no “cancel culture wars”. The right wing just pretended it was a thing so they could go after policies that were protecting people from bigotry, because it kept affecting them, because they are bigots. And the government punishing people for political speech is a quite different matter, and what the First Amendment was actually supposed to prevent. When MAGA claimed their First Amendment rights were being violated because they got fired by a private employer for violating anti-discrimination policies, or criticized online for expressing bigoted views, their rights were not being violated. When the government shamelessly and explicitly does everything it can to ruin private citizens’ lives because they expressed an unduly nonfascist opinion, people’s rights are absolutely being violated. Let’s not allow the media to frame this as a “both sides” thing.
They’ve always been on this side of it…
The media needs to stop pretending Republicans being against free speech is new, lots of still remember what it was like after 9/11.
This is how they’ve been acting for generations
Back then “Kill all Muslims” was free speech and “maybe we should stop interfering in the Middle East” was hate speech.
I got sent home from school on 9/11/02 because I legitimately forgot about 9/11 and wore a T-shirt that said “bad cop, no doughnut” completely by coincidence.
No one could explain to me how the two were connected, but I got a day off school at least.
It’s always been about blind loyalty. Which is why it’s so frustrating the billionaire media is still acting like they can’t figure out why this is happening.
Theyve ignored every other time to the point they legitimately can’t remember. That or they’re just lying
Republicans have zero values
Endless sane washing…
It’s all the media knows how to do.
That’s the side they’ve always been on
Humans have been ostracising those with aberrant or antisocial traits and behaviors for longer than civilization has existed. That’s just how we work, its nothing new. A lot of the time it’s simpleminded and damaging, but sometimes it’s for the good of the whole.
I think it’s perfectly okay to ostracise fascists and racists. I don’t think it’s okay for them to try to do the same for us. That’s not hYpOcRiSy, that’s how culture war works.
