So much of the discourse of cancel culture on the right is not really a principled stance in favor of free speech; that is a cover for their actual principle, which is the stifling of speech they disagree with and free speech absolutism for anything that comes out of the mouths of their allies.
I'm glad Cathy brings up Michael Shermer. I used to listen to his podcast quite frequently, but not so much anymore. He just ended up overreacting to the excesses of the left and is another one of these folks who sloppily conflates online progressive activists with the Democratic Party. I'd guess that if he voted in 2024 he voted for Harris, but he uses his platform to spread false equivalence. I still rarely listen to his podcast, depending on the topic or guest, but the one that really soured me on him was his podcast with Katherine Stewart on March 11, 2025, author of Money, Lies, and God as well as The Power Worshipers. From what I recall, he tried his both sides schtick on her and she wasn't having it and somewhat embarrassed him in the process. She gave him very effective pushback, which I don't think Shermer was used to from his typical guest.
"Meanwhile, Fox News 'libertarian' commentator Kennedy responded to the calls for Kimmel’s firing by opining that Kimmel’s words were 'incendiary'.... "
Such shameless people are of course not libertarians, or even conservatives, but rabid AUTHORITARIANS with obscene double-standards for laws, morals, norms, personal responsibility, etc. "Free speech" to them applies only if it serves the cult.
Everyone’s pretending that the left started cancel culture. The Right started it. People used to get canceled for being gay. Canceled for being divorced. Cancelled because your kid got pregnant when they were a teenager. Canceling books. Canceling Disney bc of a non-white cartoon character. The fucking don’t say gay Bill in Florida. I really wish the left would stop taking it and instead push back on these bullshit arguments. They started cancel culture. They just didn’t like it when it got turned on them for their racist fucking bullshit. The pile on nature of the internet is the problem.
And I agree people opining on this should give some acknowledgement to this.
Along with the fundamental difference between someone's Right to be an offensive bigot, to that person's Right to call them out for it. Both-sidesing this requires a huge caveat if it's being dealt with honestly, not just unquestioningly repeating tropes and cherry-picking outrage-baiting examples of 'wokism' and ''Cancel Culture''.
Or worse, unequivocally supporting the bigot's Constitutional Right to abuse, while half-heartedly granting that people at least shouldn't be locked up for challenging and shaming them for it.
first off, I'd like to thank the author for ruining Kimmel’s expectant widow joke by explaining it. lol.
secondly, I like how the author discusses free speech from a libertarian standpoint and then comments are turned off on certain types of article (not sure whose decision it is but it is interesting).
lastly, cancel culture related to Jimmy Kimmel and James Comey is one thing, but there are certain rather more important things being canceled by the Right that aren't mentioned in this discussion of cancellation because the Never Trumper perspective likes to schmooze with the liberals until actual social justice, and therefore the 14th rather than the 1st amendment, comes into the picture. Gert, you mention in your post supporting a bigot's constitutional right to abuse vs half-heartedly opposing jail time for those being accused of bigotry by the Right. but I am thinking of some bigotry embedded in the roots of conservative thought that is 1) part of Republican cancel culture and 2) is becoming so mainstream that it is being solidified into policy and law.
I mean, people realize that Project 2025 has its roots in the Reagan administration, right? anyone ever hear of the Mandate for Leadership by the Heritage Foundation? yeah…this has been going on *a while*. as Amanda says, there has been a predominant cancel culture in conservative politics that predates what is being called social justice warrior wokeism here. but there still is one, and it is bigoted, it extends well beyond Trump, and it is itself in need of consequences that will unfortunately never manifest.
for instance, the cancellation of trans people in general (and specifically in policies enacted by Hegseth in the military, and he has a list of racist and misogynistic aims there as well). then there's the cancellation of education about the history of slavery in this country…the cancellation of slavery itself!...by local and national authorities alike who want to clap back at critical race theory (as if they know what it is). along with slavery, election integrity is being cancelled, with officials challenging election results, promoting conspiracy theories about “stolen elections,” and implementing restrictive voting measures. even more seriously, there's the cancellation by state reps and their loyal voters, as well as SCOTUS, of women needing or wanting an abortion to the point where people are crossing state lines or going to jail for it like some waking nightmare version of The Handmaid’s Tale. and also there's the extreme cancellation of undocumented (and documented??) immigrants by ICE either into veritable gulags across the nation or onto flights to Venezuela. yet somehow Kimmel is the focus of hundreds of think-pieces.
the indictment of Comey is ridiculous and will go nowhere, although admittedly these “trumped" up charges against his enemies are getting out of hand, and the problem the media has with free speech is a real one, but probably only as long as Trump is in office. so what happens with Republican policies once he's gone? I think it's existentially easier for Never Trumper conservatives writing blogger journalism to focus on these types of Trump-centric stories than to face the ones that reveal the nefarious and rather more insidious realities of little-c conservatism as it is in the US at large right now.
You make powerful points about ''cancel culture'' in terms which reach far beyond the right to free speech unconstrained by government, and indeed far more impactful if you are the person having your citizenship revoked by fiat for example, and being imprisoned or deported as a result.
The Libertarian and Conservative approach to Rights in general strikes me as often glib. Rights either have to be justified within some Moral framework of Oughts, or they are simply biases or preferences. And if you attempt to ground Rights in Oughts, (Moral Duties) then you inevitably find that other Rights emerge which will often sit uneasily together. And so you really do have to weigh the types of harms which you and Amanda reference alongside the benefits within context.
And to simply assert that Free Speech is an inalienable Right, regardless of what harm results (from bigotry, to inciting hatred and violence and shouting ''fire'' in a crowded building) is no more than prioritizing your own preference. Unsurprisingly it's usually people who aren't being rounded up by Ice, or having their bodily autonomy removed by Pro-Lifers and Terfs, or made homeless, etc who view Free Speech as some special sacred God-Given Right above all others.
Not forgetting too, that the right to speak does not oblige others to give you a Platform to broadcast your speech.
There really needs to be a more thoughtful and nuanced analysis than we're being offered here.
great point about the argument surrounding free speech itself being a matter of having the privilege to debate it.
the issues you raise date all the way back to Hobbes... as in, at what point does your right to pursue happiness infringe upon my right to pursue happiness? his answer was intervention by the state (or rather the enlightened monarch). which we can understand now as the law. European countries have a more mature perspective on free speech, if you ask me, which takes seriously the Hobbesian problem. whereas the US deals with it in typical Wild West fashion. honestly you could say the Wiccan rede deals with the problem better than the hand-wave nature of the First Amendment... "an' it harm no one, do as ye will." at the point when it harms another, is where your rights should stop and theirs begin. maybe that's a hot take or maybe it's an obvious one or maybe it's an unAmerican one, I don't know.
Right. I think even Conservatives and Libertarians can grasp that basic principle, in theory at least. Otherwise they're simply demanding Rights on the basis of privilege, as you say.
So it becomes a question of when Government should step in to weigh competing Rights and interests. Progressives generally believe that we aren't bound to the old ways and lean towards principles like care, community and fairness. Signs like ''No Blacks Here'' were first 'cancelled' by protest, shaming and boycotts, then eventually by government. The 'informal' social contract where social 'cancellation' sits is always in a degree of flux, and you can only hope it's in an overall progressive direction.
People with a mind to, like Young and the so easily scandalized Right Wing media, will always be able to dredge up outliers for rage-bait like icing on cakes, while ignoring nuance and deeper questions. Currently the Conservatives and Libertarians have the upper hand, in part because of such tactics. And I hope more progressively minded people don't fall for it and feel like they aren't allowed to speak up and fight for their values. Consequences really do matter.
Gert Mann said: “The 'informal' social contract where social 'cancellation' sits is always in a degree of flux, and you can only hope it's in an overall progressive direction.”
yes, because the law does often follow, as you say. and sometimes it leads as well, for instance in desegregation, which was forced upon the South by federal authorities. this is where the small-government philosophy of conservatives confuses me. from Reconstruction to the New Deal to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, as ugly as it is, The Leviathan is still less ugly than human nature. noted anti-woke scientist and philosopher Steven Pinker has pointed out that the most reliable aspect of the scientific method is other scientists, meaning that falsifiability comes easier when personal bias is withdrawn from the equation. I'm not sure what is enabled more by small government -- personal bias or greed -- but I do know that the social safety net and the regulation of markets softens the impact on society of bias and greed, and it takes a big government to counteract the grandiose biased impulses of conservative cancel culture. as you say, the social cancellation meter is always in flux, and the times in history where it falls upon the conservative side…well, let's just say I'd rather have the Great Society than the Gilded Age or McCarthyism any day of the week.
Gert Mann said: “Progressives generally believe that we aren't bound to the old ways and lean towards principles like care, community and fairness.”
yeah, and conservatives tend toward authority, while libertarians lean into individual liberty. we already know where the authoritarian urge has led us, and as for individual liberties, well we've already discussed how overlapping conceptions thereof produce conflict even at the most basic level of human existence, let alone in a complex and already stratified society in which individuals are born with varying amounts of liberties or are granted liberties without earning them based on possession of certain statuses.
Gert Mann said: “People with a mind to, like Young and the so easily scandalized Right Wing media, will always be able to dredge up outliers for rage-bait like icing on cakes, while ignoring nuance and deeper questions… And I hope more progressively minded people don't fall for it and feel like they aren't allowed to speak up and fight for their values. Consequences really do matter”
entire careers based on exceptions…imagine. I too hope that progressives do not get overwhelmed by the disheartening amount of press coverage that denigrates all things far left. the anti-woke crowd is loud and proud, not least because they occupy both sides of the political divide. but i believe that a culture of consequences can help us come to a more just and moderate version of cancel culture in which accountability overrides shaming and solidarity withstands the cynicism of the chumbox.
The core value of Trumpism is hypocrisy. It started with an openly expressed doctrine that the chief defender of "religious and moral values" did not need to exemplify them himself, and with the notion that a dire cultural emergency called for bending norms and flouting rules. The basic idea is: "We should be making the rules - not following rules that other people make."
Christian nationalists around Trump have advocated a vigorous use of state power to uphold - i.e. enforce - their own cultural values and assert the primacy of their religious creed. Some of them advocate laws against blasphemy and even defend the medieval Inquisition, saying that the state has an obligation to defend "revealed truth."
Obviously, Trump has never actually believed in freedom of speech. As it turns out, the same goes for most of his defenders - if not for the same reasons.
They have not betrayed their signature cause. They have just revealed it for what it truly is. It is not free speech it is Donald T**** and MAGA. And to that cause, they have always been true.
FYI, my comment about the "signature cause" did not refer to MAGA! It referred to the Free Press and Bari Weiss (who was outspokenly anti-Trump until 3-4 years ago -- even her "Intellectual Dark Web" article in 2018 criticized IDW members who focused on left-wing intolerance and factual distortions but ignored such behavior on the right).
What does "responsibility and consequences" mean? I don't think anyone came to the defense (for instance) of the New York lawyer who got fired after a viral video showed him yelling at two Starbucks waitresses for speaking Spanish and threatening to call ICE on them. But there were a lot of genuinely outrageous cases, reported, for instance, here by Anne Applebaum: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/ Among them, a composer who got dropped by his publisher and former clients after he posted an Instagram statement condemning arson during the George Floyd protests.
The idea that free speech means speech without any consequence is philosophically incoherent and was a major problem with the Harper's letter. The consequences meted out are in most cases themselves expressions of speech or free association, and so you end up with a "first speaker" problem in which one person can freely speak but the other can't, and how you determine this is whomever you arbitrarily choose as the one who is speaking vs the one who is shouting back. In practice, this usually means that important people who express themselves through elite-sanctioned channels get to be completely free from consequences while everyone else needs to shut up.
The important distinction for the Kimmel case and so many others is that you have the power of the state being used to punish him, and that is a clear 1st Amendment violation. But if ABC wanted to fire him without being coerced into it by Trump and the FCC, that would be their right. The joke he told would not validate that decision, but you can easily imagine things that would. I happen to think that we should, as a society, try to be tolerant and forgiving (not the Right's strong suit) and not jump down someone's throat every time they say something asinine, but not one person genuinely thinks you can never be fired no matter how insane and offensive your speech.
I agree that there's no right to say whatever you want without consequences (even if we're talking about matters of opinion rather than factual error). I don't think anyone would take the position that it's wrong for a TV station to drop a host or commentator who expressed extreme views universally regarded (except by a radical fringe) as odious. (E.g., slavery wasn't so bad, or gay and trans people should be herded into concentration camps, or the October 7 attack on Israel was a heroic action, or Israel has a right to wipe out every man, woman and child in Gaza in retaliation for October 7, or women shouldn't be able to vote, or Hitler was a misunderstood German patriot, etc.) I think advocates of a "free speech culture" would argue, however, that in a free society, "beyond the pale" speech should be very narrowly defined and the "Overton window" for acceptable speech/expression and debate should be as wide as possible. The problem is that in the 2010s (and especially in 2020) there was a strong shift to redefine those boundaries and not only to exclude a lot of recently mainstream views but to stigmatize speech/expression perceived as "harmful" because of supposedly bigoted implications. (Like the idea that partying in "Southern belle" gowns is offensive because it celebrates plantation culture.)
With respect, I also think the "first speaker" argument is a fallacy. No one denies anyone's right to criticize a speaker/writer, or argue against his or her opinions--certainly the Harper's Letter made no such argument. The problem is speech suppression, not criticism. Is it a First Amendment problem when a publisher drops a book or cancels its promotional tour because a bunch of people online are screaming that it's offensive? No, but I think it's a problem for freedom of speech/expression, especially if this becomes a pattern. And I apply this principle even when the offended people come from a viewpoint that I also share. You couldn't possibly be more against the current regime in Russia or the war in Ukraine than I am. But I also thought it was completely outrageous when Elizabeth Gilbert was browbeaten into withdrawing a novel set in 1930s Russia because some pro-Ukraine activists objected to its sympathetic depiction of a (dissident) Russian family. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/12/books/elizabeth-gilbert-book-russia.html Yes, people who think a book like that shouldn't be published have a right to express their opinion, and the rest of us have a right to tell them to stop being censorious assholes.
So much of the discourse of cancel culture on the right is not really a principled stance in favor of free speech; that is a cover for their actual principle, which is the stifling of speech they disagree with and free speech absolutism for anything that comes out of the mouths of their allies.
I'm glad Cathy brings up Michael Shermer. I used to listen to his podcast quite frequently, but not so much anymore. He just ended up overreacting to the excesses of the left and is another one of these folks who sloppily conflates online progressive activists with the Democratic Party. I'd guess that if he voted in 2024 he voted for Harris, but he uses his platform to spread false equivalence. I still rarely listen to his podcast, depending on the topic or guest, but the one that really soured me on him was his podcast with Katherine Stewart on March 11, 2025, author of Money, Lies, and God as well as The Power Worshipers. From what I recall, he tried his both sides schtick on her and she wasn't having it and somewhat embarrassed him in the process. She gave him very effective pushback, which I don't think Shermer was used to from his typical guest.
I gave up on him too.
I wasn't even aware of any of that.
"Meanwhile, Fox News 'libertarian' commentator Kennedy responded to the calls for Kimmel’s firing by opining that Kimmel’s words were 'incendiary'.... "
Such shameless people are of course not libertarians, or even conservatives, but rabid AUTHORITARIANS with obscene double-standards for laws, morals, norms, personal responsibility, etc. "Free speech" to them applies only if it serves the cult.
Everyone’s pretending that the left started cancel culture. The Right started it. People used to get canceled for being gay. Canceled for being divorced. Cancelled because your kid got pregnant when they were a teenager. Canceling books. Canceling Disney bc of a non-white cartoon character. The fucking don’t say gay Bill in Florida. I really wish the left would stop taking it and instead push back on these bullshit arguments. They started cancel culture. They just didn’t like it when it got turned on them for their racist fucking bullshit. The pile on nature of the internet is the problem.
Exactly right.
And I agree people opining on this should give some acknowledgement to this.
Along with the fundamental difference between someone's Right to be an offensive bigot, to that person's Right to call them out for it. Both-sidesing this requires a huge caveat if it's being dealt with honestly, not just unquestioningly repeating tropes and cherry-picking outrage-baiting examples of 'wokism' and ''Cancel Culture''.
Or worse, unequivocally supporting the bigot's Constitutional Right to abuse, while half-heartedly granting that people at least shouldn't be locked up for challenging and shaming them for it.
hello again Gertie! I mean Gert...
first off, I'd like to thank the author for ruining Kimmel’s expectant widow joke by explaining it. lol.
secondly, I like how the author discusses free speech from a libertarian standpoint and then comments are turned off on certain types of article (not sure whose decision it is but it is interesting).
lastly, cancel culture related to Jimmy Kimmel and James Comey is one thing, but there are certain rather more important things being canceled by the Right that aren't mentioned in this discussion of cancellation because the Never Trumper perspective likes to schmooze with the liberals until actual social justice, and therefore the 14th rather than the 1st amendment, comes into the picture. Gert, you mention in your post supporting a bigot's constitutional right to abuse vs half-heartedly opposing jail time for those being accused of bigotry by the Right. but I am thinking of some bigotry embedded in the roots of conservative thought that is 1) part of Republican cancel culture and 2) is becoming so mainstream that it is being solidified into policy and law.
I mean, people realize that Project 2025 has its roots in the Reagan administration, right? anyone ever hear of the Mandate for Leadership by the Heritage Foundation? yeah…this has been going on *a while*. as Amanda says, there has been a predominant cancel culture in conservative politics that predates what is being called social justice warrior wokeism here. but there still is one, and it is bigoted, it extends well beyond Trump, and it is itself in need of consequences that will unfortunately never manifest.
for instance, the cancellation of trans people in general (and specifically in policies enacted by Hegseth in the military, and he has a list of racist and misogynistic aims there as well). then there's the cancellation of education about the history of slavery in this country…the cancellation of slavery itself!...by local and national authorities alike who want to clap back at critical race theory (as if they know what it is). along with slavery, election integrity is being cancelled, with officials challenging election results, promoting conspiracy theories about “stolen elections,” and implementing restrictive voting measures. even more seriously, there's the cancellation by state reps and their loyal voters, as well as SCOTUS, of women needing or wanting an abortion to the point where people are crossing state lines or going to jail for it like some waking nightmare version of The Handmaid’s Tale. and also there's the extreme cancellation of undocumented (and documented??) immigrants by ICE either into veritable gulags across the nation or onto flights to Venezuela. yet somehow Kimmel is the focus of hundreds of think-pieces.
the indictment of Comey is ridiculous and will go nowhere, although admittedly these “trumped" up charges against his enemies are getting out of hand, and the problem the media has with free speech is a real one, but probably only as long as Trump is in office. so what happens with Republican policies once he's gone? I think it's existentially easier for Never Trumper conservatives writing blogger journalism to focus on these types of Trump-centric stories than to face the ones that reveal the nefarious and rather more insidious realities of little-c conservatism as it is in the US at large right now.
Hello Lostie - may I call you that?
You make powerful points about ''cancel culture'' in terms which reach far beyond the right to free speech unconstrained by government, and indeed far more impactful if you are the person having your citizenship revoked by fiat for example, and being imprisoned or deported as a result.
The Libertarian and Conservative approach to Rights in general strikes me as often glib. Rights either have to be justified within some Moral framework of Oughts, or they are simply biases or preferences. And if you attempt to ground Rights in Oughts, (Moral Duties) then you inevitably find that other Rights emerge which will often sit uneasily together. And so you really do have to weigh the types of harms which you and Amanda reference alongside the benefits within context.
And to simply assert that Free Speech is an inalienable Right, regardless of what harm results (from bigotry, to inciting hatred and violence and shouting ''fire'' in a crowded building) is no more than prioritizing your own preference. Unsurprisingly it's usually people who aren't being rounded up by Ice, or having their bodily autonomy removed by Pro-Lifers and Terfs, or made homeless, etc who view Free Speech as some special sacred God-Given Right above all others.
Not forgetting too, that the right to speak does not oblige others to give you a Platform to broadcast your speech.
There really needs to be a more thoughtful and nuanced analysis than we're being offered here.
Gert, you may call me whatever pleases you! :)
great point about the argument surrounding free speech itself being a matter of having the privilege to debate it.
the issues you raise date all the way back to Hobbes... as in, at what point does your right to pursue happiness infringe upon my right to pursue happiness? his answer was intervention by the state (or rather the enlightened monarch). which we can understand now as the law. European countries have a more mature perspective on free speech, if you ask me, which takes seriously the Hobbesian problem. whereas the US deals with it in typical Wild West fashion. honestly you could say the Wiccan rede deals with the problem better than the hand-wave nature of the First Amendment... "an' it harm no one, do as ye will." at the point when it harms another, is where your rights should stop and theirs begin. maybe that's a hot take or maybe it's an obvious one or maybe it's an unAmerican one, I don't know.
Right. I think even Conservatives and Libertarians can grasp that basic principle, in theory at least. Otherwise they're simply demanding Rights on the basis of privilege, as you say.
So it becomes a question of when Government should step in to weigh competing Rights and interests. Progressives generally believe that we aren't bound to the old ways and lean towards principles like care, community and fairness. Signs like ''No Blacks Here'' were first 'cancelled' by protest, shaming and boycotts, then eventually by government. The 'informal' social contract where social 'cancellation' sits is always in a degree of flux, and you can only hope it's in an overall progressive direction.
People with a mind to, like Young and the so easily scandalized Right Wing media, will always be able to dredge up outliers for rage-bait like icing on cakes, while ignoring nuance and deeper questions. Currently the Conservatives and Libertarians have the upper hand, in part because of such tactics. And I hope more progressively minded people don't fall for it and feel like they aren't allowed to speak up and fight for their values. Consequences really do matter.
Gert Mann said: “The 'informal' social contract where social 'cancellation' sits is always in a degree of flux, and you can only hope it's in an overall progressive direction.”
yes, because the law does often follow, as you say. and sometimes it leads as well, for instance in desegregation, which was forced upon the South by federal authorities. this is where the small-government philosophy of conservatives confuses me. from Reconstruction to the New Deal to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, as ugly as it is, The Leviathan is still less ugly than human nature. noted anti-woke scientist and philosopher Steven Pinker has pointed out that the most reliable aspect of the scientific method is other scientists, meaning that falsifiability comes easier when personal bias is withdrawn from the equation. I'm not sure what is enabled more by small government -- personal bias or greed -- but I do know that the social safety net and the regulation of markets softens the impact on society of bias and greed, and it takes a big government to counteract the grandiose biased impulses of conservative cancel culture. as you say, the social cancellation meter is always in flux, and the times in history where it falls upon the conservative side…well, let's just say I'd rather have the Great Society than the Gilded Age or McCarthyism any day of the week.
Gert Mann said: “Progressives generally believe that we aren't bound to the old ways and lean towards principles like care, community and fairness.”
yeah, and conservatives tend toward authority, while libertarians lean into individual liberty. we already know where the authoritarian urge has led us, and as for individual liberties, well we've already discussed how overlapping conceptions thereof produce conflict even at the most basic level of human existence, let alone in a complex and already stratified society in which individuals are born with varying amounts of liberties or are granted liberties without earning them based on possession of certain statuses.
Gert Mann said: “People with a mind to, like Young and the so easily scandalized Right Wing media, will always be able to dredge up outliers for rage-bait like icing on cakes, while ignoring nuance and deeper questions… And I hope more progressively minded people don't fall for it and feel like they aren't allowed to speak up and fight for their values. Consequences really do matter”
entire careers based on exceptions…imagine. I too hope that progressives do not get overwhelmed by the disheartening amount of press coverage that denigrates all things far left. the anti-woke crowd is loud and proud, not least because they occupy both sides of the political divide. but i believe that a culture of consequences can help us come to a more just and moderate version of cancel culture in which accountability overrides shaming and solidarity withstands the cynicism of the chumbox.
And where is Matt Taibbi's outrage over this 🤣
He’s another disappointment.
The core value of Trumpism is hypocrisy. It started with an openly expressed doctrine that the chief defender of "religious and moral values" did not need to exemplify them himself, and with the notion that a dire cultural emergency called for bending norms and flouting rules. The basic idea is: "We should be making the rules - not following rules that other people make."
Christian nationalists around Trump have advocated a vigorous use of state power to uphold - i.e. enforce - their own cultural values and assert the primacy of their religious creed. Some of them advocate laws against blasphemy and even defend the medieval Inquisition, saying that the state has an obligation to defend "revealed truth."
Obviously, Trump has never actually believed in freedom of speech. As it turns out, the same goes for most of his defenders - if not for the same reasons.
Free speech for me, not for thee
They have not betrayed their signature cause. They have just revealed it for what it truly is. It is not free speech it is Donald T**** and MAGA. And to that cause, they have always been true.
FYI, my comment about the "signature cause" did not refer to MAGA! It referred to the Free Press and Bari Weiss (who was outspokenly anti-Trump until 3-4 years ago -- even her "Intellectual Dark Web" article in 2018 criticized IDW members who focused on left-wing intolerance and factual distortions but ignored such behavior on the right).
What does "responsibility and consequences" mean? I don't think anyone came to the defense (for instance) of the New York lawyer who got fired after a viral video showed him yelling at two Starbucks waitresses for speaking Spanish and threatening to call ICE on them. But there were a lot of genuinely outrageous cases, reported, for instance, here by Anne Applebaum: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/ Among them, a composer who got dropped by his publisher and former clients after he posted an Instagram statement condemning arson during the George Floyd protests.
The idea that free speech means speech without any consequence is philosophically incoherent and was a major problem with the Harper's letter. The consequences meted out are in most cases themselves expressions of speech or free association, and so you end up with a "first speaker" problem in which one person can freely speak but the other can't, and how you determine this is whomever you arbitrarily choose as the one who is speaking vs the one who is shouting back. In practice, this usually means that important people who express themselves through elite-sanctioned channels get to be completely free from consequences while everyone else needs to shut up.
The important distinction for the Kimmel case and so many others is that you have the power of the state being used to punish him, and that is a clear 1st Amendment violation. But if ABC wanted to fire him without being coerced into it by Trump and the FCC, that would be their right. The joke he told would not validate that decision, but you can easily imagine things that would. I happen to think that we should, as a society, try to be tolerant and forgiving (not the Right's strong suit) and not jump down someone's throat every time they say something asinine, but not one person genuinely thinks you can never be fired no matter how insane and offensive your speech.
I agree that there's no right to say whatever you want without consequences (even if we're talking about matters of opinion rather than factual error). I don't think anyone would take the position that it's wrong for a TV station to drop a host or commentator who expressed extreme views universally regarded (except by a radical fringe) as odious. (E.g., slavery wasn't so bad, or gay and trans people should be herded into concentration camps, or the October 7 attack on Israel was a heroic action, or Israel has a right to wipe out every man, woman and child in Gaza in retaliation for October 7, or women shouldn't be able to vote, or Hitler was a misunderstood German patriot, etc.) I think advocates of a "free speech culture" would argue, however, that in a free society, "beyond the pale" speech should be very narrowly defined and the "Overton window" for acceptable speech/expression and debate should be as wide as possible. The problem is that in the 2010s (and especially in 2020) there was a strong shift to redefine those boundaries and not only to exclude a lot of recently mainstream views but to stigmatize speech/expression perceived as "harmful" because of supposedly bigoted implications. (Like the idea that partying in "Southern belle" gowns is offensive because it celebrates plantation culture.)
With respect, I also think the "first speaker" argument is a fallacy. No one denies anyone's right to criticize a speaker/writer, or argue against his or her opinions--certainly the Harper's Letter made no such argument. The problem is speech suppression, not criticism. Is it a First Amendment problem when a publisher drops a book or cancels its promotional tour because a bunch of people online are screaming that it's offensive? No, but I think it's a problem for freedom of speech/expression, especially if this becomes a pattern. And I apply this principle even when the offended people come from a viewpoint that I also share. You couldn't possibly be more against the current regime in Russia or the war in Ukraine than I am. But I also thought it was completely outrageous when Elizabeth Gilbert was browbeaten into withdrawing a novel set in 1930s Russia because some pro-Ukraine activists objected to its sympathetic depiction of a (dissident) Russian family. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/12/books/elizabeth-gilbert-book-russia.html Yes, people who think a book like that shouldn't be published have a right to express their opinion, and the rest of us have a right to tell them to stop being censorious assholes.
Appreciate the factual correction.