> The right is simply good at PR

One of the defining characteristics of the right is not placing any value on logical consistency. Being a hypocrite will not lose you any support with them.

Sorry, I thought you were going to end your line with "McCarthyism".

Freedom Fries, Satanic Panic, Save our Children, Red Scare. If anything the liberals being able to cancel people is a historical anomaly, and now we're seeing things return to their natural order.

> People forget that they invented cancel culture. Dixie Chicks anyone?

You can go a lot further back than that. McCarthyism was a powerful cancel culture and vestiges of that still manifest today. Linguistically, the weird and inexplicable way anything to the left of fascism in America can be described as "communism" if someone is in the mood to be pejorative is a vestige of McCarthy, or something even further back from the First Red Scare, I think.

I had totally forgotten about that!

Video games all through the 90s as well.

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But there is a massive difference here. The left uses social pressure to silence people they don't like, the right uses government power to silence people they don't like.

These are not even close to the same.

The horseshoe is a bit like a boomerang in that regard, both in form and function!

i get what you're saying but "the left" has basically zero political power in the united states. it never has. the closest we ever were was with FDR but i wouldn't consider a leader who operated concentration camps to be leftist by any stretch.

we have a right wing and then a righter wing. bernie sanders is an anomaly, elizabeth warren is just left of center, and i can't think of too many other current politicians at the national level who actually lean left. i guess nominally "the squad" but they mostly present fairly centrist platforms by worldwide standards. no current politicians at the national stage are talking about meaningful economic reform (as in, away from capitalism), police abolition, nationalized health care, or any other typical leftist ideas - not that i'm trying to argue any of these points in this thread - just providing examples of what i mean by "leftist".

whether or not "the left" weaponizes commitment to free expression, "the right" is the only side of that binary who has ever wielded serious political power, and they use it to extremely destructive ends at all times.

maybe someday if we ever have a political party that actually represents leftwing politics we can judge them as harshly. i'll wait.

I first saw a moral panic over ‘cancel culture’ circa 2013 from The Atlantic and the opinion page of the New York Times. (The first because it’s demo is the naive liberal and pearl clutching parents of college students and the second because folks like Brooks and Blow don’t want to be canceled themselves). It was until 2017 or so that conservatives noticed the phenomenon and started to talk about it in The National Review and such.

Ezra Klein, who I generally respect, said he got more crap over

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assa...

than anything else he’s written but I think it was unfortunate that he chose the words because Kirk, among other things, promoted Trump’s lies about the 2000 election, bussed people to the Jan 6 riot, and had a hit list of professors he wanted to punish just like David Horowitz, dad of the Andressen-Horowitz Horowitz. That bit about “prove me wrong” was always disingenuous, it would fool the pearl clutching parents who read The Atlantic and the likes of Ezra Klein. Probably the most harmful thing about illiberal campus leftists is that they allowed illiberal rightists to appear to take the high ground.

Man, can you at least elaborate? This kind of comment isn’t what I wanna see HN devolve into.

He’s definitely right with that sentence. Do you not think it’s generally true that the right has been on the defensive with regards to cancel culture, and thus is constantly preaching about how cancelling is wrong?

The few times they’ve gotten to go on the offensive, they play the same game, cancelling whoever it is they’re upset about. It’s horseshoe theory all over again.

I don’t think they need to. I think they just need to shake hands and say it’s okay to have a different opinion.

There have been a number of studies around the world, plus some real world examples (Utah gubernatorial 2020) where showing your opponents in a sympathetic light can make a big difference in reductions in political polarization.

It’s especially effective when signaled by the “elite”: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00323217241300...

Edit: I hear plenty of stories of people abandoning family members over a difference of political opinion. My MIL won’t talk to a niece of hers after the niece made the same decision. I won’t go so far as to say that’s never warranted, but it seems these days that it’s happening a lot more.

To me, this implies we’re losing acceptability of political “others”.

Prisoners' dilemma at scale. I don't think a truce is doable unless reporting someone for having what you believe to be unsavory opinions becomes a major social faux pas

The left 'cancelling' a product or a public figure is literally just exercising consumer choice. People get fired because they are bleeding ad dollars over lack of views. I'm not sure how you can prevent that without being even more authoritarian.

Someone was just murdered for his opinions so no, that doesn’t seem likely. I think that’s one cancelation too far, and I don’t think there’s going to be any meaningful coming back from it.

I think the problem is it’s not the moderate 80% of each party that’s doing it, so all of the people who might be inclined to a truce are already at the table waiting.

Who do you imagine represents the "sides" in negotiations? Do they have names and group bodies which they represent? Are they able to sign and enforce diplomatic agreements?

What truce? Sometimes cancelation is good, sometimes it's not. It depends on the why. Also Republican principles these days are just to blindly follow whatever Trump wants including complaining about cancelation and renaming bases to confederate generals and blackmailing companies into firing people

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_body_count_conspiracy_... dates back at least to the mid 90s.

Because "their" rights and "our" rights (whoever "us" and "them" happen to be) are one and the same. You wouldn't be defending or attacking "their" rights, you'd be defending or attacking rights in general, and that includes yours.

Bill Maher rather famously lost his job on ABC 20+ years ago related to his comments about the 9/11 hijackers. I don't think conservatives cancelling people in the media for speech they don't like is anything new within the last 5 years.

Wasn't a lot of that pressure coming from a right wing government? COVID's initial year and a bit was under the first Trump admin.

Jimmy Kimmel didn't celebrate a murder. He criticized the cynical exploitation of a murder.