Free speech absolutists created a rhetorical weapon for the left to hypocritically deploy against conservatives in insisting it’s wrong to impose any social penalties on anyone for any reason under the label “cancel culture.”
But the term “cancel culture” really indicates the left’s efforts to institute an Americanized form of the Communist Chinese social credit system. Cancel culture and holding people accountable are two different things. And here’s why.
The truth is, it’s not wrong to enforce social norms. It’s absolutely necessary for every functioning culture. What is truly wrong is enforcing antisocial norms.
The left is insisting we should be ashamed of urging the removal of a low-ratings comedian from ABC stations because he essentially endorsed and fomented the assassination of a political opponent. But it’s a linguistic bait and switch.
The Cancel Culture Bait and Switch
First, freedom of speech does not apply to incitements to violence. Endorsing or inciting murder is not an exercise of free speech, it is a potentially actionable abuse of free speech.
Second, as everyone is aware, leftists don’t give two figs about free speech. Like genuine communists, they lie, lie, lie, lie. Their feigned “defense” of “free speech” only occurs when the right thinks about applying the left’s standards against them to make them stop destroying our country. In truth, they are free speech’s most ardent destroyers.
As The Federalist and others have repeatedly shown, Democrats back not free speech but a license for themselves to incite violence and erase equal application of the laws from their political enemies. Since the origins of Progressivism, the left has supported not individual and equal rights for all but unequal rights assigned by Party hierarchy. Their stance on speech exactly aligns with this essentially communist principle.
Third, free speech is not an absolute principle. Even the most Tylenol-chugging libertarians agree that incitements to violence, libel, fraud, dishonest marketing, and other exceptions exist to enforce responsible speech.
Speech Is Protected If It Aims at Truth
That brings us to the last item: that free speech ought in a self-governing society to be directed by what is good. The very point of having a First Amendment is to protect the use of speech to search for and express truth.
That is why the very first item the First Amendment protects is the “free exercise” of the Christian religion. The Founders saw free speech as inseparably connected to religious exercise because religion communicates eternal truths, and no human can find or affirm the truth without speech.
The philosophers and theologians the Founders built our nation on noted mankind is different from animals precisely in our capacity for rational thought and speech. Language is intimately connected with and expressive of the soul. So the very purpose of protecting speech is to protect the soul’s search for, and expression of, truth. This is why people who use their language capacities chiefly to lie, foment existential evils, and manipulate justly have their speech curtailed by libel, incitement, fraud, and treason laws.
Why Apologies Are Necessary
This is why it is necessary to demand that people who publicly transgressed, like Jimmy Kimmel, publicly apologize for bad behavior. An apology communicates that the transgressor accepts his community’s standards and agrees to abide by them in the future.
To refuse to apologize is to declare oneself outside of a society by rejecting its obligations. People may choose to do that and accept the consequences, but they cannot at the same time be accepted into a society and give their middle finger to that society’s standards.
This is called, in the Founders’ thinking, entering the social compact. And part of our social compact is an utter rejection of using bullets instead of words to push political goals on fellow citizens. By continuing to celebrate and support Charlie Kirk’s assassination and urge murders of immigration law enforcement officers, the left is openly declaring they consider themselves outside our laws and outside our society.
You don’t get to use an edited version of the Constitution to demolish the real Constitution. And you don’t get to declare yourselves an enemy of America and pretend Americans should subsidize your declarations with public funding or public communications infrastructure.
Cancel Culture Is Right If the Target Did Wrong
All of that is to say that applying just consequences to bad behavior is not “cancel culture.” Cancel culture means applying social penalties for stupid and evil reasons. Applying penalties for good reasons is justice.
Social penalties must be imposed on bad behavior, just as good parents must apply appropriate punishments to naughty children — because if people face zero consequences for bad behavior, bad behavior will accelerate. And it is wicked to force citizens to live inside the chaos created by just authorities refusing to restrain evildoers.
If criminals are not caught, prosecuted, and penalized, crime increases. It’s a direct and obvious correlation. If people who incite, cheer, and encourage domestic terrorism face zero consequences of any kind for such abominable and socially destructive behavior, domestic terrorism will undoubtedly increase. This is very obvious to people who can think their way out of a wet paper bag Sharpied over with “cancel culture bad.”
Canceling someone for supporting marriage between a man and a woman — as former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was defenestrated for, in one of the earliest instances of cancel culture — is cancel culture, not accountability. That’s because the natural family is a core bedrock for society, without which vast numbers of children turn into wards of the state.
It was wrong to cancel Eich because he was doing something good. He was punished for righteousness. That is bad, bad, bad, bad. Only an evil society does that. (Yet in eternity he will indeed meet his reward, as will those who savaged him for his goodness.) But dumping Eich from his company if he supported the homosexual practice of child trafficking via surrogacy would be entirely legit, because child trafficking is evil.
Justice Punishes Evil and Rewards Good
Today’s Democrats call good evil and evil good. Their criteria for cancellation are opposite to eternal justice, because their ethics are the opposite of Christian justice, which is defined clearly in the Bible. And the Bible is not only true but the moral system on which America lives or dies — another thing the American Founders unequivocally believed and wrote into our supreme laws.
That is why it is not wrong but right to impose warranted social, financial, and legal consequences on people who cheer assassinations. It is, in fact, absolutely necessary to justly punish people who do evil if we want to have a good society. Rewarding good and punishing evil is not cancel culture, it is exactly what justice is. And ensuring justice is the chief function of a good government.
Any government or society that rewards evil and punishes good is itself evil. Any government or society that punishes evil and rewards good is good. This is not rocket science, folks. This is Bible 101 and the American Founding 101. Even preschoolers can understand it. You’d have to be a fool not to.
