This Is Not “Cancel Culture.” This Is Organized State Repression.

“Previously a voice for the canceled, they’re now the ones
canceling,” intoned NBC News last month in a story, headlined “Trump
and Republicans find themselves on the other side of the cancel culture wars,”
on the right-wing blitzkrieg against anyone who dared criticize Charlie Kirk in
the weeks after his assassination. The New York Times reported that in
seeking to punish offensive speech, Republicans were “trying
to rebrand a practice they once maligned.” Former President Barack Obama
made a similar comparison after Jimmy Kimmel was suspended
amid the Trump administration’s threats to retaliate against media outlets.
“After years of complaining about cancel culture,” Obama wrote on X,
“the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level…”

Obama is right that the Trump administration’s attacks are “new
and dangerous,” but where he’s wrong—perhaps in a clumsy attempt to be
evenhanded—is that they don’t even belong in the same conversation as “cancel
culture.” This is organized state repression, veering crassly and thuggishly
into a reign of terror.

To use one of Obama’s favorite phrases, let’s be clear: “Cancel culture”
refers to the prosecutorial and Puritanical style of liberalism that became
popular on the internet during the second half of the Obama administration and
intensified during Trump’s first term, when the algorithms rewarded outrage but
we were all still relatively new to the power and incentives of social media. It
was a bad vibe. Discursive mistakes—insensitive jokes, ill-conceived tweets—could
attract a mob of internet denunciation. The term could be overused, at times
seeming to imply that people were out of line in criticizing celebrities and
other powerful people for abusive behavior. But at its worst, cancel culture
undermined solidarities, encouraged the bullying of some vulnerable people, and
drove others to the right. Even worse, some of its targets lost their
livelihoods.

This last aspect of cancel culture was its most pernicious,
and at the time I called
it “‘You’re Fired!’ liberalism.” (Yes, I was invoking The Apprentice.)
I argued that while trying to get opponents dismissed from their jobs was an
appropriate tactic for the right, given their apparent comfort with the cruelly
precarious conditions for employees under neoliberal capitalism, it was
unworthy of the left and would only expand the “anxious, resentful electorate
that put Trump into power.” Unfortunately, I was right about that.

As misguided as “cancel culture” was, though, that’s not
what Trump and his minions are up to today. Yes, the right’s leading
influencers, from Vice
President JD Vance to Laura
Loomer, have whipped up the MAGA mob to get people—not only public figures
like Jimmy Kimmel, but public schoolteachers and crossing guards—fired from
their jobs for opinions on Kirk that it deems unacceptable.

But the Trump administration’s approach to unwelcome speech is far worse
than that. “Cancel culture” never involved the machinery of the federal
government, yet Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is banning
journalists from the Pentagon who won’t agree to government-imposed
restrictions on their reporting, and has deemed these new rules—rejected by
every legitimate news outlet—necessary to regulate a “very disruptive” press.
Speaking of the Pentagon, Hegseth is also presiding over McCarthyite investigations
within the agency to root out employees who aren’t fans
of Charlie Kirk.

Then there is the misuse of law enforcement powers to punish
anti-Trump public figures. Last month, in a
Truth Social post, Trump told Attorney General Pam Bondi that failure to
prosecute his political adversaries was “killing our reputation and
credibility.” Soon afterward, federal
prosecutors brought weak and clearly contrived cases against James Comey
and New
York Attorney General Tish James. While the charges against John Bolton
aren’t considered to be quite as flimsy, the prosecution of Trump’s own former national
security adviser is obviously
nakedly political in the same way.

“Cancel culture” just isn’t an adequate description for
moves like that, nor for the blatant witch hunts Trump’s government is
conducting against countless regular people who have never held significant
positions of power, but have participated in peaceful protest, written an op-ed,
or posted on social media. Trump is using the federal government’s powers to
try to deport such people when he doesn’t agree with their politics, including
student activists like Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil, Tufts University’s
Rumeysa Ozturk, and many others. At least six people
have had their visas cancelled because of remarks made about Charlie Kirk
on social media, a move that Trump’s State Department is not trying to hide,
but has celebrated in an X thread.

Then there are the threats of violence. As juvenile as it
was for Trump to post an AI-generated video of himself as a king dumping poop
on the “No Kings” demonstrations, it’s also quite scary, especially from a
president who has already demonstrated his willingness to send in the military against
protesters, and who, during his first administration, asked
his staff if it would be possible to shoot Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

And for all the talk of liberal “cancel culture” within the
academy (where indeed, some students and professors did sometimes face blowback
for views offensive to the left), that’s no analogue to Trump’s assault on
academic freedom, which is easily the worst by the federal government since the
McCarthy era. Trump is using federal funding as a cudgel to punish or prevent
speech he does not like, whether at a protest on the green or in the curriculum
itself.

It’s not outlandish to suggest that aspects of left “cancel
culture” contributed to what we’re seeing today. Cancel culture may have
softened us up to accept an illiberal logic, undermining values like free
speech and academic freedom. On campus, for example, notions that speech
shouldn’t be allowed if it makes people feel “unsafe”—an argument sometimes
used against allowing certain conservative speakers on campus—has been deployed
effectively by the right to argue that pro-Palestinian protest, or criticism of
Kirk, is violent or hateful. And conservatives are now using
the liberal term “consequence culture” to argue that irresponsible speech
should have dire consequences for offenders’ lives.

But to equate Trump’s current repression with “cancel
culture” is to trivialize it. While cancel culture was intolerant and
unpleasant, Trump’s policies are making complaints about it seem quaint. Indeed,
some of cancel culture’s most prominent targets emerged from their ordeals richer
and better-known than they were before. There is no better example than Bari
Weiss, who
made her name by departing the New York Times in a huff over that
institution’s liberal groupthink; earlier this month, she was put
in charge of CBS News. Running a news organization in 2025 is no cakewalk,
but it’s fair to say that a much grimmer fate awaits those whom Trump and his
minions want to immiserate, put behind bars, or even eject from the country for
daring to criticize MAGA darlings—or the Mad King himself.