“We are in the cancel culture part of the tragedy cycle.”
This is the declaration of Adam Goldstein, vice president of strategic initiatives for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, writing at the organization’s website.
In the piece, dated Sept. 12, he chronicles almost three dozen incidents of individuals being sanctioned, suspended or terminated for public remarks following the tragic killing of Charlie Kirk.
The vast majority of these incidents concern schools, colleges and universities. The examples exhibit a pattern of public outrage, which gets the attention of a public official, who then calls for sanction, followed by the sanction being administered by another public entity.
As a typical example, Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn called for the firing of a Cumberland University professor on Sept. 11, the day after Kirk’s death. On Sept. 12, the professor was dismissed, along with a member of the university staff.
Goldstein says that this is a cycle of “the cancel culture machine. It goes like this: A tragedy happens. Someone reacts by celebrating that tragedy for whatever reason. Then the social media mob comes to demand this person be fired, expelled, or otherwise punished for their views.”
I’m appreciative of Goldstein’s work to compile, publicize and criticize these actions, but I have an important point of disagreement. Most of these are not incidents of cancel culture.
It’s censorship.
The problem is not about “social media mobs” making demands, but on the public officials in power following through and punishing those views.
Whatever anyone thinks about people saying things on social media, all of it (providing it doesn’t run afoul of the law) is a form of protected speech. Some may decry the effect of that speech, but this doesn’t make it not speech. Charlie Kirk’s Professor Watchlist was a documented vector of threats and harassment directed toward college faculty, but the website itself is too is an example of speech, even when the website called for professors to be fired.
The public discussion about these issues has been unfortunately muddled for years, including by FIRE president Greg Lukianoff, who, along with his Coddling the American Mind co-author Jonathan Haidt, invented a psychological pathology they called “safetyism” in order to delegitimize student speech they believed to be “illiberal.”
The “cancel culture” narrative had much the same effect, by categorizing contentious speech where people were advocating for particular outcomes—without having the power to directly enact those outcomes—as something akin to censorship. Whatever one thinks of the phenomenon as a whole or individual examples of it, it was never censorship.
United States senators calling for firings and then college presidents complying is straight-up censorship.
These distinctions very much matter in this moment, because it is clear that numerous government officials are interested in using the response to Kirk’s death as a pretext to crack down on speech they don’t approve of. The United States State Department is “warning” immigrants not to “mock” Kirk’s death.
Legal remedies to illegal firings are also no longer guaranteed in a system where politicians are willing to use the weight of their office to crush dissent. At Clemson, one employee was fired and two faculty members were removed from teaching duties after complaints originating with the Clemson College Republicans surfaced. The South Carolina attorney general, Republican Alan Wilson, issued an opinion holding Clemson harmless if it fired the employees claiming, without evidence, the speech was tantamount to threats.
Other state legislators overtly threatened the school’s state funding should officials fail to act.
Coercion, intimidation.
Representative Clay Higgins declared that he is “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.”
The same Clay Higgins sponsored the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act in 2023, in which he said, “The American people have the right to speak their truths, and federal bureaucrats should not be dictating what is or isn’t true. We must continue to uphold the First Amendment as our founding fathers intended.”
In 2021, Blackburn, who called for the firing the Cumberland University professor, introduced an anti–cancel culture resolution, declaring, “Cancel culture is a barrier to a free marketplace of ideas and remains antithetical to the preservation and perpetuation of global democracy.”
It is tempting to nail Blackburn and Higgins as hypocrites, but again, this mistakes the underlying aim of the larger political project for surface-level features. Blackburn and Higgins were against “cancel culture” because they did not approve of the potential consequences for speech with which they agreed. They are now calling for sanctions against speech and speakers with which they disagree. In both cases, they are using their power to promote speech of which they approve and discount that of which they don’t approve.
The major difference is that instruments of the state are acting on these calls to sanction, suspend and fire people.
Like I said, censorship.
The only thing that’s changed is the locus of power and a presidential administration that is more than willing to use the instruments of the state to intimidate and silence the opposition.
This isn’t cancel culture; it’s authoritarianism.
As I say, I’m appreciative of FIRE’s attention to these incidents, but the facts of what’s going on show the limits of trying to adjudicate freedoms—including academic freedom—entirely through the lens of free speech. If we’re going to preserve our freedoms, I think it’s important that, at the very least, we use the most accurate descriptive language we can.
FIRE’s Goldstein is wrong. We aren’t in the “cancel culture” part of the cycle.
We’re in the retaliation, censorship, coercion, authoritarianism part of the cycle, and the wheels are turning ever faster.
