Ten Further Thoughts on Right-Wing Cancel Culture

On four eras of the culture war, and more

Building off my recent article on the differences between right-wing and left-wing cancel culture, here are ten points that are either new or things I touched on briefly in the earlier article and decided to expand on here.

1. Under left-wing cancel culture, there was a taboo on saying politically incorrect things about certain groups: blacks, transsexuals, women, etc. When you totaled all those groups, they comprised a majority of the left, basically including everyone except straight white males. But each taboo had its own force, and it was more like a logrolling thing than one grand narrative. Trans women were women, you couldn’t suggest blacks get stopped by the police more often because they commit more crime, etc. Sometimes ideas contradicted one another, like how you were supposed to believe each trans individual was born with the brain of the opposite sex, but also accept blank slatist ideas about gender. In contrast, with right-wing cancel culture, it is either conservatives themselves who are the identity group, or the person of Donald Trump. “They’re coming after you,” with “you” understood to be a conservative or a Trump supporter. George Floyd represented black people, a subset of the left, while Charlie Kirk was an avatar for conservatism as a movement. Similarly, Trump’s personal struggles are central to the conservative narrative. “They tried to impeach him, lock him up, then they tried to kill him!” This has a great many implications for the two forms of cancel culture.

2. During the Great Awokening, the media would cycle through these various moral panics. MeToo, Trans, BLM. One would rise in the course of a few months or years and then fall as our attention turned to another. The early 2010s had widespread coverage of the deaths of Trayvon Martin (2012) and Michael Brown (2014). In 2014, we saw the Laverne Cox Time cover declaring “The Transgender Tipping Point,” which was the approximate peak of the trans movement, as Obama began expanding civil rights protections. Feminism reached its height during the initial years of the first Trump administration, with 2017 seeing the Women’s March and the explosion of #MeToo. Then came the killing of George Floyd, and we were back to black issues. I asked ChatGPT for its judgment of the peaks of the black, transgender, and feminist movements in the era since 2010 and it gave me roughly the same timeline I had in my head. Meanwhile, the right’s narrative seems not to change all that much depending on what’s going on. It’s always snooty elites looking down on regular Americans, crazy hippies or other nonconformists, and foreigners and dark people portrayed as economic, political, and physical dangers.