Activists from the left have tried to “cancel” me multiple times. I lost an academic job opportunity despite the support of a large majority of the department and the dean because two self-described Marxists in the department threatened to “go to war” if I were given an offer (the search committee chair told me this!). An elected official tried at least twice to get me fired from different jobs by calling the Board of Trustees and the executive leadership of my employers. When that didn’t work, he called my wife’s employer and accused her of belonging to a militia.
Given these experiences, you might think I would cheer demands by some on the right to start “canceling the left.” Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr called for the suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after Kimmel’s false remarks about the killing of Charlie Kirk. Vice President JD Vance has said that those who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death should lose their jobs, with Donald Trump, Jr. even deploying the excuse-phrase once used by the woke left — “Consequence Culture” — to describe the cancellations. Again echoing woke-left terminology, Attorney General Pam Bondi has claimed that “hate speech” is not protected by the First Amendment. Conservative gadfly Chris Rufo advocates a broader censorship campaign against the left: “The ‘shoe has been on the other foot’ for at least a hundred years. Turnabout is fair play. . . The only way to get a good equilibrium is an effective, strategic tit-for-tat.”
The whole controversy is yet another opportunity for the nationalist New Right to accuse the traditional right of timidity, of being too bound by norms of civility and adherence to the Constitution. In this case, they have a kernel of plausibility: if those who practiced cancel culture in the first instance never suffer any consequences for their overreach, what is their incentive not to do it again when they have the opportunity?
The fatal flaw in the pro-cancellation right’s position is its collectivization of the left. If cancellations are justified only in retaliation for previous cancellations, then they need to be directed toward those individuals who carried out cancellations, not the more than 100 million Americans who might identify as left-of-center. I haven’t heard even allegations that Jimmy Kimmel ever got anyone fired for his political views.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he fired some executives who were responsible for decisions to ban conservatives for their sincere expression of political beliefs. This is the only kind of “tit for tat” that makes sense. We can’t even call Musk’s actions “cancellations,” because the executives were fired not for their speech but for their actions that harmed users and undermined the platform.
How should we treat the expression of opinions we find abhorrent? John Stuart Mill got this question mostly right over 150 years ago in On Liberty. In that essay, Mill defended the freedom of the individual to think, speak, and act freely so long as he causes no definite harm to any other person. “The only freedom which deserves the name,” Mill wrote, “is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
Importantly, Mill understood that “the moral coercion of public opinion” could be as harmful as government-imposed punishments and censorship. Mill opposed the “cancel culture” of his day, though then it had less to do with firing people for their political views and more to do with shunning people for their views and lifestyles.
Mill’s essay isn’t perfect — he gets very mixed up about what “coercion” means and which types of voluntary acts are exempt from social control — but he gives us strong reasons to think that both public censorship and private punishment of the expression of viewpoints will have harmful consequences. First, canceling people for their views will prevent us from hearing views that may be true, or at least that may contain part of the truth. Second, preventing people from speaking falsehoods will prevent us from acquiring a lively understanding of the truth and will make people more susceptible to falling into error. The way left-wing cancel culture caused some young people, especially young men, to experiment with “forbidden” far-right ideologies is an example of this. If the right starts canceling the left across the board, then it may well revive the left’s interest in free speech, but it will also make the left “cool” again. (See: the 1950s and 1960s.)
Is it ever appropriate to fire someone for speech? Of course. If you go into the public square and shout negative things about your employer, it’s reasonable for your employer to fire you. If your speech gives us good reason to think you will do your job poorly, then it is reasonable to fire you. Churches shouldn’t be required to employ preachers who profess atheism, for example. For this same reason, it seems reasonable to fire schoolteachers for expressing support for the Charlie Kirk killing. Many kids, especially high schoolers, admire Kirk and share his views. We don’t want them to have to be taught by someone who wants them dead.
Universities are different from K-12 institutions in this respect. Universities are supposed to be engaged in a no-holds-barred search for truth. If that’s the goal, they need to follow the same standard of free speech that the government is supposed to follow. Members of the university community are all adults and should be expected to “put on their big-boy pants” and deal with whatever speech they may encounter on campus. College students making uninformed TikTok videos shouldn’t be punished for the views they express, no matter how odious. Neither should professors.
If private institutions should not generally “cancel” expressions of political opinion they disagree with, then so much more should the government stay out of it. Furthermore, if private institutions do err and “cancel” speech they shouldn’t, the government should also stay out of those decisions. Society benefits from a rough-and-tumble process of debate and learning from a multiplicity of examples. If a big company starts canceling conservatives, then conservatives’ appropriate response is to boycott them, not run to the government for help. Then other companies will learn what risks they run by acting unreasonably against a political out-group.
In fact, I’d say that’s just what happened over the last half-decade; as a result, businesses are now much more likely to stay out of political controversies.
Let’s trust the marketplace of ideas and stop trying to punish people for their thoughts, only for their harmful actions against others.