When Vice President JD Vance sat down to host an episode of Charlie Kirk’s podcast days after the conservative activist’s assassination, he came with a directive. “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” he said. “And hell, call their employer.”
Not that right-wing activists needed the encouragement: Conservatives had already begun scouring social media for comments like that, along with posts they deemed too critical of Mr. Kirk’s career, in an effort to get the people who made them fired, tossed off social media or even imprisoned.
The purge has come with such speed and force that it feels like the beginning of a new era: the rise of the censorious right. But Mr. Vance’s comments signaled that what had started as a run-of-the-mill social media campaign was becoming a whole-of-government effort.
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened ABC over comments made by the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”). Representative Nancy Mace requested that the Department of Education sever federal funding to any school that refused to take action against employees who made objectionable comments, while Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the Department of Justice “will absolutely target” people using “hate speech” (after strong backlash, she reframed “hate speech” as unlawful threats of violence). Critics have branded these conservative cancelers the “woke right.”
“It’s the idea that the illiberalism that has swallowed the progressive left — what we often refer to as wokeness — has come for the right,” The Free Press’s Bari Weiss explained in the introduction to a podcast on the subject. And while conservatives are split over whether this is a positive development or a negative one, they all seem to agree on one point: The right learned its vengeance politics from the left. “Turnabout is fair play,” the conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted on X. Right-wing cancel culture was simply “an effective, strategic tit-for-tat.”
That argument rests on a flawed premise: that the right had been devoted to open debate and restrained government power, only reluctantly abandoning these principles to counter left-wing illiberalism. But the right did not learn cancel culture from the left; the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. It took decades for its free-speech faction to develop, and even then, it has only ever been a minority part of the coalition.
The conservative movement that arose at the start of the Cold War readily married government power and private efforts to crack down on its political opponents. Take the case of Counterattack, the newsletter of an anti-communist organization with the anodyne name of American Business Consultants. Funded by the textile millionaire Alfred Kohlberg, Counterattack began publishing in 1947 with hiring managers in mind, regularly publishing the names of people it believed had communist sympathies.
In 1950, Counterattack published a lengthy pamphlet called “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.” The cover featured an outstretched red hand cradling a microphone; the interior contained 151 names of people and a list of their suspected connections to communism. Though pitched as a list of “Red Fascists and their sympathizers,” “Red Channels” targeted people for their involvement with unions, civil liberties groups and Black civil rights activism. Philip Loeb, who lost his role as one of the stars of the TV series “The Goldbergs” because his name appeared in the pamphlet, was included for supporting groups like the Committee to End Jim Crow in Baseball and the Stop Censorship Committee.
The blacklisting of the 1940s and 1950s comprised both public and private efforts. Counterattack began publishing just a few months before the first Hollywood blacklist began in the midst of a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation. Senator Joseph McCarthy announced his dubious list of 205 communists in the State Department a few months before the publication of “Red Channels.”
Leaders in higher education, film, broadcasting and government used mass firings, loyalty oaths and censorship to purge both supposed and actual leftists from their institutions over the next several years — a reminder that ostensibly liberal industries quickly came to the aid of largely right-wing censors. And while McCarthy would ultimately be censured by his Senate colleagues and disgraced in the public eye, he remained a hero of right-wing activists like William F. Buckley Jr. (who, in his 1951 book “God and Man at Yale,” derided academic freedom and sought to pressure colleges to teach conservative orthodoxies).
For the right, this crackdown wasn’t a sign of the excesses of the early Cold War but rather the proper role of government: to police public life to make sure it conformed to conservative values. Communists remained a constant target during the Cold War, as did people who broke from traditional gender and sexual norms. Thousands of gay men and women lost their government jobs in the so-called Lavender Scare as part of the anti-communist crackdown that started in the 1940s.
Even after that wave of persecution ebbed, gay people could be arrested or fired if outed. When Miami approved new employment and housing protections for gay people in the 1970s, the singer Anita Bryant fought back with the Save Our Children campaign, which led to the successful repeal of those protections.
Conservative politicians inspired by Bryant sought not just to reverse employment protections but to establish state-level bans on gay employment. John Briggs, a California state senator, organized a ballot proposition to ban all openly gay men and women — and anyone who advocated “homosexual activity” — from serving as public-school teachers, teaching aides, counselors or administrators. While the Briggs initiative failed, gaining about 40 percent of the vote in 1978, legislators in Oklahoma passed a similar measure in their state (later, an appeals court found that part of the law violated the First Amendment; the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s decision).
The 1990s were a turning point in this dynamic. Not because right-wing censoriousness went away: the mobilization of conservatives, especially evangelicals, around culture-wars politics led to campaigns against museum exhibits, rap music, federal funding for the arts, television shows, Madonna. But it was also the decade when the right discovered “political correctness” as a powerful charge against liberal inroads on issues of gender, racism and sexuality. The right delighted in skewering liberals as the new thought police, priggish censors who sought to narrow the scope of debate in the name of inclusiveness.
As these arguments gained traction in national media and a sympathetic hearing from some liberals, right-wing activists found new value in identifying with free speech. Placing themselves on the side of First Amendment rights helped counter the unpopular politics of right-wing censorship drives. They found easy foils on the left, as universities established new “hate speech” codes in reaction to rising racism and far-right activism (“hate speech” versus “free speech” became the new divide in the 1990s). After decades of pursuing restrictions on public life, the right incorporated free speech into its broader rhetoric of freedom.
The War on Terror placed hard limits on that newfound libertarian streak, however. Though the civil-liberties faction would remain part of the conservative coalition, the new era after Sept. 11 tilted the scales back toward using state power and social pressure against perceived enemies. The White House press secretary denounced Bill Maher, the host of “Politically Incorrect” (note the show’s name), after he insisted that the terrorists who carried out the attacks were not cowards (interestingly, most people missed that the conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza, a guest on that night’s show, also insisted that they were not cowards: “You have a whole bunch of guys who were willing to give their life; none of them backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete. These are warriors.”) Not long after, ABC canceled the show.
Nor did it take progressive keyboard warriors to teach the right how to use the internet for cancellation campaigns. When Van Jones was appointed as an adviser for the Obama administration’s green-jobs initiative, the right-wing broadcaster Glenn Beck and the blog WorldNetDaily began a sustained attack on him.
They were soon joined by Republican politicians like Representative Mike Pence, who called for Mr. Jones to resign or be fired. “His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate,” Mr. Pence said. Conservatives rifled through Mr. Jones’s past statements, accusing him of making offensive comments about Republicans (he once called them something unprintable) and signing a conspiracy-minded petition about the Bush administration and the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Jones ultimately resigned.
Or consider Shirley Sherrod, who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the state director of rural development in Georgia. One morning in 2010, a website run by the right-wing activist Andrew Breitbart posted a video of Ms. Sherrod, deceptively edited to make it appear that she used her position to discriminate against white farmers.
As the outrage built throughout the day across right-wing media and the internet, the Obama administration quickly moved to appease the online mob and forced Ms. Sherrod to resign. (After the release of the full recording, the administration apologized and offered to rehire her.) The Sherrod incident was an important moment in a longstanding turn toward framing the Obama administration as anti-white; a year earlier, Mr. Beck made his infamous claim that President Barack Obama was “a racist” who had a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
In light of this long history, it makes no sense to suggest that a tolerant right was forced by an intolerant left into adopting cancel culture. Book-banning groups like Moms for Liberty did not need liberals to teach them anything; right-wing campaigns against pro-L.G.B.T.Q. books like “Heather Has Two Mommies” and “And Tango Makes Three” flourished in the 1990s and 2000s.
Groups like the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation, which have targeted people to be fired for their comments about Mr. Kirk, built on decades of right-wing list-making and firing campaigns. The censorious right does not represent the entirety of conservatism, but it is one of the movement’s most persistent and dominant strains.
And that is something both liberals and conservatives must reckon with in the months and years ahead. So much of the hand-wringing over cancel culture in recent years has assumed that the right is naturally disposed to protect open debate and a live-and-let-live culture, and that progressives were the real problem. And yes, there has been extensive debate among progressives about the limits of free speech, as well as the proper way to respond to disinformation and waves of racist invective on social media.
But long before concerns surfaced about the “woke right,” long before the campaigns to cancel Mr. Kirk’s critics, it was clear that the right’s vision of power involved sharp limits on its opponents and on their free expression. That vision relied not on debates, but on the muscular use of government power and social pressure to enforce the right’s values — and its hierarchies.
The Trump administration’s full-scale assault on civil liberties may force more Americans to finally contend with that reality.
Nicole Hemmer, the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” is an associate professor of history and the director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
Source photographs by Tetra Images, Smithore and MirageC/Getty Images.
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