This Isn't Right Wing Cancel Culture — It's a Purge.

Conservatives are seizing the opportunity to remake culture to their liking.

Before Charlie Kirk’s body was cold, the American right was waving his bloody shirt. First was the demand that everyone mourn the podcaster as if he were a figure of national note. The New York Yankees held a moment of silence for Kirk, followed by all but four NFL teams. (The teams that didn’t host a pre-game vigil went 4-0 last Sunday.) Next came the virtue signaling from across and beyond the political spectrum. Everyone from politicos to sports reporters closed their eyes, imagined a leftist celebrating the assassination, then bravely stated that behavior (which, again, was imaginary) was disgusting. Prominent media figures, most notably not exclusively Ezra Klein, chose to whitewash Kirk’s legacy, misrepresenting the TPUSA founder as a proponent of good faith debate, which ignored Kirk’s long history of inciting violence against allegedly-woke college educators through his Professor Watchlist. As one professor put it, ‘that list ruined lives.’¹ With the nation stoking their victimhood complex, conservatives entered the lesser-known stage of grief — weaponization.

If there’s one thing the right does better than any competing faction, it’s storytelling. Their ability to weave narratives parallels the greatest novelists ever known. During the election, they turned a video of a Black sanitation worker cleaning up roadkill into a fable of Haitian immigrants eating neighborhood pets in Springfield, Ohio. While the right speaks of Hollywood as the incarnation of evil, the conservative movement has been most effective under the direction of showmen. Not just actors such as Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, but the Limbaughs, Kirks, Shapiros, Bannons, and other propagandists yelling hallucinations of cities overrun with Mad Max roving gangs into a digestible narrative for their audiences. The right’s appetite for celebrity strongmen is so prevalent that every conservative is trying to get in on the game and climb to political stardom. After hearing the shot that ended Charlie Kirk’s life, every member of the Trump Administration raced to their nearest podcast microphone, including the deputy director of the FBI, who probably had more important things to do.

The podcaster government.

Any screenwriter or GOP strategist will tell you, the best stories have a victim. Falsely canonizing Kirk as yet another casualty of left-wing violence — which is minuscule compared to right-wing terrorism — every level of the Republican machine sharpened their pitchforks, lit their torches, and embarked on a witch hunt comparable to McCarthyism. What started as, according to them, calling out people who celebrated Kirk’s murder, the targets of hysteria soon expanded to those who had joked about Kirk, or even criticized him while condemning his killing. Only a few days after the shooting, there was a crowd-sourced ‘database’ of people who had said mean things about Kirk online.² Simply quoting their perfect special boy was enough to land you on their list of personas non grata. Volunteers were encouraged to identify problematic people, dox them (post their personal information online), and call their employers to get them fired. Not that it would have made it okay, but the targets weren’t celebrating the assassination. Many condemned the killing before stating they disagreed with Kirk’s work, such as a Ball State University administrator who was targeted and fired for this benign post.³

What made this episode more significant than typical flaming (the bombardment of an online target user with messages, posts, etc.) was that it was backed and directed by members of the federal government. Several Republican Congresspeople encouraged their followers to get in on the crusade. Representative Nancy Mace spent her days calling local businesses to get her own constituents fired. Bat shit insane, yet not unthinkable for the Republican Party.

As the campaign accelerated with each successful kill, many were quick to accuse the right of hypocrisy. “Wait, you guys spent the last decade complaining about cancel culture? But now you’re doing it!” The right’s response (example below) was, as expected, pathetic. Their moral panic crusade is not only akin to the progressive cancel culture they claimed to oppose for the last decade, but it’s objectively worse, for reasons we’ll cover shortly. However, calling conservatives ‘hypocrites’ is inaccurate.

A hypocrite is someone who acts opposite to their beliefs. To accuse the right of hypocrisy is to mistakenly assume they believe in the speech rights. Not just the 1st Amendment’s limitations on government censorship, but a genuine opposition to derailing people’s lives for crude jokes or off-color comments. As the past and present of the conservative movement show, they never believed everyone should have free speech. They only wanted it for themselves. Conservatives aren’t opposed to state censorship, or even online campaigns to end someone’s livelihood for saying something as trivial as “Charlie Kirk’s face was too small for his head.” (See below.) They believe those things shouldn’t happen to them. As for their opponents — liberals, leftists, Black people — they want cancellation. This is not hypocrisy. This is fascism.

With this understanding in mind, the right’s actions over the last few weeks make more sense. The goal of this campaign isn’t to punish people who said mean things about Charlie Kirk, but to seize the opportunity to expel liberals and leftists from key social positions. This isn’t much of a secret. The group behind the doxing database, the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation, stated their goal was to ‘clear out Leftwing Radicals and reshape the rank-and-file of America's institutions [in] Academia. Law enforcement. The military. Finance. Law. Government. Bureaucracy. Medicine and healthcare, too.”⁴

As expected, the White House is also eagerly pushing for a political purge. Earlier this week, two senior administration officials admitted so to The New York Times.

Two senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal planning, said that cabinet secretaries and federal department heads were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives.

The goal, they said, was to categorize as domestic terrorism left-wing activity that they said led to violence, a continuation of existing efforts by federal agencies to try to punish liberal groups they have accused of funding or otherwise supporting violent protests. One tactic has been to target the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that are critical of Mr. Trump or conservatives.

An administration official said officials would be investigating people behind the recent burning of Teslas in apparent protest of Elon Musk and assaults against immigration agents, and would be looking to draw links between those episodes and organized liberal groups.⁵

While they make sure to start their claims with opposition to leftwing violence, they give the game up by admitting they’re targeting those ‘critical’ of Trump and saying they intend to ‘draw links’ between groups — not identify links, but create them.⁶ Since these quotes were published, the Trump Administration has manifested this strategy. Facing pressure from Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr, ABC indefinitely suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for criticizing Charlie Kirk and calling the alleged shooter ‘one of MAGA’s own.’⁷ Yesterday, Trump took the claims further, saying the FCC should revoke the broadcast licenses of channels that criticize him.⁸

While ‘cancel culture’ has been a popular term in recent years, that is not what we are seeing. The ongoing rightist campaign is very different from the phenomenon of social justice-minded individuals getting mad when public figures stray from the latest social norms. I won’t deny that such effort went too far, but at no point were left-wing cancellations enabled, directed, and carried out by the United States federal government with the explicit purpose of cleansing everyone who doesn’t subscribe to every point of their platform from public life. I wouldn’t call it a silver lining, but the through line of the right’s attempt to forcibly remake culture to their liking by excommunicating teachers, nurses, and entertainers who don’t praise the Very Special Boy President comes from a recognition that their project isn’t working.

At the start of the year, there was a declaration that the right had achieved its long-stated dream of capturing American culture. Bankers told reporters they ‘felt liberated’ and could say slurs at work. Joe Rogan endorsed a Republican. The owners of popular social media sites sat front row at Trump’s inauguration. No longer would they be the weird MAGA uncle at Thanksgiving or catching side eye at Washington cocktail parties. The reprieve was fantastic, but it was short-lived. As soon as the Administration unleashed masked goons into the street and built concentration camps, the country remembered why it dislikes Republicans. Trump’s approval is at a pitiful 39%, an all-time low for his second term.⁹ Oscar winners are shouting ‘fuck ICE’ from the podium, and the entire country is accusing the GOP of protecting an international pedophile ring. The GOP is back to being unpopular pariahs, and it’s eating them alive.

Rather than change their politics to fit America’s cultural preference, the Republican Party is trying to change culture by force. I’m dubious it will work.

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1. https://www.404media.co/charlie-kirk-was-not-practicing-politics-the-right-way/

2. https://www.axios.com/2025/09/15/charlie-kirks-death-celebration-consquences

3. https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/ball-state-fires-administrator-after-facebook-post-on-charlie-kirks-assassination-university-termination-disruption/531-ac5b2fb5-9464-4d7d-9b2a-bfe93f901423

4. https://www.axios.com/2025/09/15/charlie-kirks-death-celebration-consquences

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/jd-vance-charlie-kirk-show.html

6. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/17/doj-removes-study-on-far-right-attacks/86206037007/

7. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/18/entertainment/abc-jimmy-kimmel-what-comes-next

8. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09/18/us/trump-news#trump-fcc-licenses

9. https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-approval-rating-hits-new-second-term-low-poll-2130955