The Free Speech Warriors Who Now Love Cancel Culture

As Trump once again calls for Jimmy Kimmel’s firing, many purported defenders of the First Amendment have betrayed their signature cause.

(Photo illustration by The Bulwark / Photos Shutterstock)

THIS HAS BEEN A BAD WEEK for certain free-speech warriors who once hailed Donald Trump as their champion—like, say, New York Post and Free Press columnist Martin Gurri, who gushed in January 2025 that Trump’s return to the presidency also meant the return of “speech that is unencumbered and unafraid.” Right now, the Trump administration is trying to cancel a comedian over a joke about Melania Trump and jail a critic over a social media photo of seashells on a beach.

The joke by ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, about Melania having a “glow like an expectant widow,” was part of his spoof of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner two days before the event. No one took any offense at the time, but the line drew attention after the assassination attempt at the dinner, with people claiming it was a call for murder (rather than a joke about a rich old man’s much younger trophy wife waiting for widowhood). The first lady and the president both publicly called for Kimmel’s firing.

Yesterday, Trump reiterated the demand for Kimmel’s firing in a more insistent tone—and his post was also shared by the official White House account on X.

These demands for Kimmel’s head would be bad enough all by themselves. But it appears that they are also being backed up by a threat of retaliation. On Tuesday, a day after Donald and Melania Trump first posted about Kimmel, the Federal Communications Commission ordered a supposedly unrelated early review of all station licenses owned by ABC. (FCC commissioner Brendan Carr has previously threatened to revoke the licenses of overly critical TV networks and bragged about Trump “winning” against the “fake news media,” citing the departure of several talk show hosts as an example.)

In the second part of Trump’s two-pronged attack on undesirable speech, former FBI director and Trump nemesis James Comey was indicted over an almost year-old social media post of a photo of seashells laid out to form the letters “86 47,” supposedly “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to President Trump.” (“Eighty-six” is restaurant- and bar-related jargon for removing a customer or canceling an order, and while it has been occasionally used in the sense of “kill,” there were plenty of “86 46” jokes—including t-shirts sold on major shopping sites—under Joe Biden.) Even self-admitted Comey hater Jonathan Turley grudgingly conceded that the case failed the First Amendment test.

So, where are the “cancel culture” resisters on the right? For instance, people like the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who tweeted in November 2019 that “comedians should not lose their jobs for telling jokes, and professors should not lose their jobs for discussing ideas”? Oh, there they are.

Meanwhile, Fox News “libertarian” commentator Kennedy responded to the calls for Kimmel’s firing by opining that Kimmel’s words were “incendiary” and that “If I were ABC, I would look at this and wonder why we’re spending so much money on someone who is so divisive and so unfunny.” (With libertarians like that…)

Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer, the “wokeness” critic and vocal free speech advocate who has lately occupied a mostly anti-anti-Trump perch, stepped in to say that presidents and first ladies are allowed to express a “personal opinion” about firing journalists and that such expression isn’t the same as an official order from the White House. It’s true that First Amendment jurisprudence is fuzzy on when pressure—as opposed to direct coercion—by government officials crosses the lawful line.¹ But you’d think that Shermer, who has castigated “the totalitarian left” for almost entirely non-governmental social pressures to curb allegedly harmful speech, would be a little more concerned about demands to “immediately” fire a media personality coming from people at the apex of political power.²

And Outkick website founder Clay Travis stepped into a rather embarrassing “This you?” moment with an X post gloating about the Comey indictment:

There was also this irony-rich moment from the Washington Post’s resident Trump apologist Marc Thiessen:

“Consequences of offensive speech”? Where did we hear that before? Why, in the summer of 2020, during the controversy over the famous Harper’s magazine “Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” which criticized the chilly climate for speech created by the surge of social justice activism. Many progressives pushed back, arguing that speech has consequences. “This isn’t cancel culture. This is consequence culture,” wrote writer and editor Alisha Grauso in a since-deleted tweet. Later, the same phrase was used by actor LeVar Burton on The View and writer Roxane Gay on a Mother Jones podcast.

It was a bad argument then (when the “consequences” include being fired for a mildly edgy joke or a tweet questioning the tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement, that is “cancel culture,” and it does create a hostile cultural climate for free expression). It’s an even worse argument now, when calls for these “consequences” do not issue from lefty Twitter but from the White House—and are backed by threats from federal regulators. Or when, as in the Comey case, the “consequences” include being hauled into court.

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A FEW TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DEFENDERS (and anti-anti-Trumpers) have openly invoked “cancellation” incidents from a few years ago to justify the demands for Kimmel’s firing.

The Bachelor fiasco mentioned by Kelly (and also by Shermer, who complained about double standards in giving Kimmel a “free pass”), was indeed one of the most disgraceful episodes in the annals of illiberal progressivism. As it happens, I wrote about it in a 2021 piece on “cancel culture” for The Bulwark. A Bachelor contestant named Rachael Kirkconnell, in a season featuring the reality show’s first black “bachelor,” became the target of a social media campaign accusing her of racism. The initial claim—that as a high school student, Kirkconnell had bullied other white girls for dating black classmates—was never corroborated, but Kirkconnell haters went scouring her digital footprint for other incriminating evidence against her. Eventually, they came up with a 2018 college photo showing her at an outdoor event featuring antebellum-style “Southern belle” ball gowns; this was described as a “plantation-themed” party. Amid an online outcry, Kirkconnell posted an abject apology repenting her “racism” and “ignorance.” Chris Harrison’s offense was to urge some “grace” for Kirkconnell and to argue that such parties were not seen as offensive in 2018. (Indeed, in 2019, National Public Radio did a report on the modern multiracial face of antebellum-dress formals.) Harrison also apologized; even so, he ended up stepping away from the show for the remainder of the season and then permanently exiting the franchise. Yes, it was a weird time.

But here’s the thing. First of all, and most obviously, Kelly’s “their standards” tit-for-tat would give us “cancel culture” for all, not a free society. (Not to mention that we’re long past “peak woke.”) But secondly, and very importantly, no government official called for Chris Harrison’s head in 2021. Imagine for a moment that Joe Biden—or Kamala Harris—had made social media posts at the time urging that Harrison be “fired immediately.” I promise you that every right-winger and every antiwoke warrior would be up in arms blasting them as a totalitarian menace to the First Amendment and to American democracy.

There is a tendency on the left these days to suggest that the critics of left-wing illiberalism from five or six years ago, including the Harper’s letter signatories, have been hypocritically silent about the Trump administration’s assaults on free speech rights. This is, as I have argued elsewhere, a drastic exaggeration: a lot of people have been consistent. (To name just a few: writers Anne Applebaum, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Jonathan Rauch, and David Frum; academic and author Steven Pinker; former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen; pro-democracy activist Garry Kasparov.)³ Last but not least, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which emerged as a premier voice against speech suppression in the 2010s, and its president Greg Lukianoff have been in the forefront of opposition to Trumpian authoritarianism—including this week.

Unfortunately, not everyone has passed the test with flying colors. Some have offered, at best, tepid criticism hedged with whataboutism. As of this writing, the Free Press, which once made untrammeled speech its signature issue, has yet to publish anything about the White House campaign to cancel Kimmel except for a brief news item about the president’s and the first lady’s posts urging ABC to act. And the site’s only critique of the Comey indictment so far focuses on the fact that it’s likely to “backfire” against Trump.

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THE FIRST BIG WAVE OF RIGHT-WING “cancel culture” (or is it “consequence culture”?) under the second Trump administration followed the murder of Charlie Kirk, when not only various media figures and online randos but Vice President JD Vance embraced snitching to employers on people who said uncomplimentary things about Kirk online. The fallout from that controversy still continues. Earlier this week, best-selling author and civics educator Sharon McMahon was disinvited from delivering a graduation address at Utah Valley University (where Kirk was shot) because of her Instagram comments shortly after the assassination: While McMahon deplored the murder and said that her “heart [was] broken for his family,” her second post tried to explain negative reactions to Kirk and was seen as attacking him. McMahon told Newsweek that her removal as graduation speaker was the result of “an organized, coercive pressure campaign on the part of government officials, both congressional officials and state level officials, along with Turning Point USA”; on X, this campaign was led by Utah Sen. Mike Lee.

The aggressive White House push for Kimmel’s firing, the FCC’s bullying tactics toward ABC, and Comey’s indictment raise the attacks on speech to a new level. Meanwhile, some right-wingers apparently want cancel culture on steroids. Speaking at a Turning Point USA event on Tuesday, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh called for the arrest of left-wing livestreamer Hasan Piker and other unnamed “Democrats [and] media figures who have called for violence against conservatives.” Never mind that, however obnoxious and even toxic Piker’s rhetoric may be, none of it crosses the boundaries of constitutionally protected speech.

Not long ago, a lot of conservatives argued—like Ajit Paj, FCC commissioner during the first Trump term—that we need a “culture of free speech” that goes beyond the First Amendment and discourages nongovernmental pressures that stifle speech and debate. Today, it looks like more and more people on the right would happily scale back the First Amendment to punish speech they dislike.

1. Under the Biden administration, a lot of conservatives saw tyranny in some Biden administration staffers’ communications with Twitter and Facebook officials about removing COVID-19-related misinformation. To what extent these communications, which involved no threats of retaliation for noncompliance, constituted improper coercion is a complicated question. But it’s worth noting that the controversy about it prompted Trump to issue an executive order—one of his first after taking office in 2025—on “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”

2. After getting some pushback, Shermer finally conceded that the demand for Kimmel’s firing from Trump and from the official White House account crossed the line.

3. Full disclosure: I was among the signatories of the Harper’s Letter.