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The right, has for the past decade or so taken a moral high ground with regards to cancelation. Seems that now they've adopted a "turnaround is fair play" menta
by armenarmen 1y ago
The right, has for the past decade or so taken a moral high ground with regards to cancelation. Seems that now they've adopted a "turnaround is fair play" mentality.
- paxys 1y agoThe right is simply good at PR. People forget that they invented cancel culture. Dixie Chicks anyone?
- armenarmen 1y agoI had totally forgotten about that!
- XorNot 1y agoVideo games all through the 90s as well.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- panarchy 1y agoSatanic Panic before that.
- xnx 1y ago> 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.
- user982 1y agoHypocrisy is a show of power.
- pupppet 1y agoThey protect their own above all else. Is their own a POS? Oh well.
- asdff 1y agoNot always. See what they said about the old guard such as mccain.
- HK-NC 1y ago[flagged]
- kelnos 1y agoNo it doesn't, and I'm so tired of these garbage false equivalencies.
- mrtesthah 1y agoThe right (and by that I specifically mean fascists) will use words in whatever way maximizes their power over others.
- suzdude 1y ago> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect
- VikingCoder 1y agoSorry, I thought you were going to end your line with "McCarthyism".
- justin66 1y ago> 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.
- ndiddy 1y agoFreedom 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.
- wrs 1y agoTurns out they're not all that big on "free speech" in general! Who knew.
- armenarmen 1y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 1y agoThat remains true! But the First Amendment very clearly says it can’t be the government doing the consequencing.
- rat87 1y agoThe right was also calling to cancel people back then. They've just gotten more flagrant now. I'm not sure you can even call it hypocrisy since they don't even pretend to have principles besides whatever Trump wants. The government is blackmailing private companies now. I don't watch Kimmel but looking up stories his comments didn't seem at all offensive, please tell me what I missed.
- bigyabai 1y agoWhich is why we're all shocked that the order came from the FCC chair and not the business owner.
- thatswrong0 1y agoThe FCC chairman threatened to pull ABC's broadcast license over Kimmel's comments. That's pretty much a direct 1st amendment violation.
- good8675309 1y agoAnd they also shared this: https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
- thatswrong0 1y agoThe FCC Chairman threatened ABC over Kimmel's comments. This is not applicable.
- epicureanideal 1y agoIs there some way the two sides could reliably arrive at a truce on the issue of cancellation?
- armenarmen 1y agoPrisoners' 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
- XorNot 1y agoWho 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?
- techpineapple 1y agoI 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.
- xp84 1y agoCouldn't agree more with this. The majority of Americans think that the "leftest and rightest" people they know are absolute wackos.
- fullshark 1y ago[flagged]
- lawlessone 1y agoAre things like racism and sexism being bad exclusive to the left?
- UtopiaPunk 1y agoPronouns? Or do you mean something else?
- ceejayoz 1y ago> The right, has for the past decade or so taken a moral high ground with regards to cancelation. Have you been in a coma for that decade?
- kulahan 1y agoMan, 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.
- ceejayoz 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._national_anthem_kneeling_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._national_anthem_kneeling_...
- PaulHoule 1y agoI 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-assassination-fear-politics.html 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 1y agoThis is one of those interminable sprawling message board arguments that has a really simple resolution nobody wants to accept, which is that commitment to free expression and "right/left" are mostly orthogonal, and both the right and the left weaponize commitment to free expression when it makes sense for them to.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoi 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.
- CamperBob2 1y ago...but i wouldn't consider a leader who operated concentration camps to be leftist by any stretch. And that's my cue to take yet another hit to my HN karma by asking, incredulously, "WTF are they teaching kids in school these days?"
- ceejayoz 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America... > During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country. > During World War II, the camps were referred to both as relocation centers and concentration camps by government officials and in the press. Roosevelt himself referred to the camps as concentration camps on different occasions, including at a press conference held on October 20, 1942. > In a 1961 interview, Harry S. Truman stated "They were concentration camps. They called it relocation but they put them in concentration camps, and I was against it. We were in a period of emergency, but it was still the wrong thing to do." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp > Not to be confused with Extermination camp. A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitation or punishment.
- yongjik 1y agoIMO, being able to cry louder for persecution complex does not equal a moral high ground.
- throwawa14223 1y agoI believe they changed when the government put pressure on social media during COVID. I think that caused a huge attitude shift among the right.
- zzgo 1y agoBill 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.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoWasn'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.
- rat87 1y agoThey have not in any sense taken any high ground The right has consistently tried to cancel people, has tried to censor people, has complained/played the refs about moderation saying their rights to say racist stuff was being infringed even when it was a moderation decision by a private company not the government And then under Trump it's only gotten worse/more divorced from any principles
- bitlax 1y ago[flagged]
- GeekyBear 1y ago> The right, has for the past decade or so taken a moral high ground with regards to cancelation. If you are going to morally judge the actions behind cancellation attempts, "I don't find Dave Chappelle's jokes funny" is not morally equivalent to "I don't think people should celebrate the murder of those they disagree with."
- maxerickson 1y agoJimmy Kimmel didn't celebrate a murder. He criticized the cynical exploitation of a murder.
- tonfreed 1y agoWhy would we defend the rights of someone that refuses to defend ours?
- JohnFen 1y agoBecause "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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bediger4000 1y agoI'm not denying what you've observed there, but how does this square up with cancel culture is bad, as we've heard at length from any number of moralizers, including many HN posters and the NYT editorial board. Was I to understand those moralizers as having said that cancelling conservatives was bad, but cancelling the more liberal is at least ok?
- FireBeyond 1y agoWhat utter garbage. It’s not the left canceling Starbucks at Christmas time, or any company that dares sport a rainbow in any marketing whatsoever.
- nxm 1y agoIt is the left cancelling any right of Marx speaker at college campuses though
- vjjsejj 1y agoI know time flies by.. but 2016 was almost 10 years ago. Also, lets ignore the fact that there is a difference between consumers boycotting something and a government agency outright threatening a private company.