Power
How cancel culture came for everyone
By Anne Branigin The Washington Post
Published Oct. 6, 2025
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Ernest Owens knew we had lost the plot on cancel culture when his younger brother declared he had been "canceled" - by his teacher.
Owens, a Philadelphia-based journalist and the author of "The Case for Cancel Culture," was skeptical. Did you do what they said you did? he asked his brother. (Yes.) And did you sign a code of conduct saying you would not do the thing you did? (Also yes.)
"You didn't get canceled," Owens told his brother. "You just didn't do what you were supposed to do."
Owens knows that his brother isn't the only one who sees cancel culture everywhere. "People have used the word 'cancel' so loosely," Owens said, "that everyone's calling everything a cancellation."
Some say canceling is an act of redress, a powerful display of solidarity. Others blame it on a mob. Still others have considered it an overblown moral panic or even a hoax.
For years, hatred of it unified the American right. Outspoken conservative celebrities such as Jason Aldean railed against it; Fox News feasted on it; across the country, politicians stumped on it.
But now that President Donald Trump and his allies have vowed to punish speech they don't like - the critics they accused of dancing on Charlie Kirk's grave, the left's "rhetorical assault on law enforcement," the comics of late-night television and their monologues - cancel culture has split the Magasphere. On one side are those who say being fired for an offensive social media post is simply "consequence culture"; on the other, those who worry about falling down the slippery slope of censorship.
These are familiar fault lines, paths well trodden since online shaming became a cultural flash point. And they highlight cancel culture's central truth: It tends to be cancel culture when your enemies, or perceived enemies, do it. When your team does it, it's justice.
"Everyone cancels," Owens said. "And everyone hates it."
But who's to blame for it?
For years, the American right has pointed at liberals, portraying them as humorless keyboard warriors trawling the internet for problematic posts and scolding their foes into submission (or out of their jobs).
Others, including Owens, have framed canceling as a valuable democratic tool - itself an expression of free speech. It happens when people want to address "a person, place or thing that they feel is detrimental to their way of life," Owens said. Boycotts are an example of cancel culture, as are organized grassroots campaigns. By Owens's definition, people have been practicing cancel culture across centuries and across the ideological spectrum.
The Target boycott that took place this year, after the retailer rescinded its commitment to diversity and inclusion policies, qualifies, according to Owens. So do the late-20th-century Christian evangelical campaigns against Hustler Magazine and the children's TV show "Teletubbies," both spearheaded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The treatment of the Chicks, whose careers stalled in the aughts after a conservative backlash, does too. And Trump's crusade against former congresswoman (and fellow Republican) Liz Cheney? Also cancel culture.
Even Kirk embodied many of cancel culture's paradoxes - making a career promoting his idea of debate while simultaneously launching a professor watch list that encouraged students to report left-leaning instructors.
Greg Lukianoff, a First Amendment lawyer and co-author of the book "The Canceling of the American Mind," sees it much more narrowly.
"A lot of times people will say, 'Oh, cancel culture has always existed,' but what they mean is conformity pressure … boycotting, ostracization," Lukianoff said. "The thing that let cancel culture exist in the form that we got to know and hate is essentially the ability to create an instantaneous appearance of a mob. And that really just isn't possible until you actually have something like social media."
• David and Goliath
Before we knew it as cancel culture, we called it by another name: online shaming.
The incident that came to define this phenomenon happened in December 2013, when a tweet posted by corporate communications director Justine Sacco triggered a deluge of righteous anger.
The tweet, in which Sacco joked about getting AIDS on a trip to South Africa ("Just kidding. I'm white!"), catapulted her to the No. 1 worldwide trend on Twitter, despite the fact that she had only 170 followers at the time.
Afterward, Sacco apologized to South Africans, calling her tweet "needless and careless." But so pivotal was the incident and its aftermath that it inspired years of debate and collective soul-searching, including in a 2015 book by the Welsh journalist Jon Ronson, "So You've Been Publicly Shamed."
Lukianoff said that the next year, he started seeing cancellation campaigns take off online. Campuses were on the front line of this ideological battle, as were comedians. A decade before Stephen Colbert's late-night CBS show was canceled (following a joke he made about CBS's parent company, Paramount, reaching a $16 million settlement with the president of the United States), there was the #CancelColbert campaign (following a satirical joke "The Colbert Report" show made on its official Twitter account).
A new kind of digital activism had emerged, one that was particularly useful for young people of color who felt maligned, dismissed or outright ignored by political leaders and popular media.
These online campaigns were soon used to address all manner of perceived injustices, such as in 2014, when Michael Brown, a Black teenager, was shot and killed by a Missouri police officer and #BlackLivesMatter helped rally people around the issue of racialized policing. Or to demand accountability for past offenses, as was the case when Owens called out singer Justin Timberlake for cultural appropriation in 2016.
"There's a David and Goliath effect to cancel culture," Owens said.
But when the targets of online campaigns were not famous or institutionally powerful, this dynamic was less clear. Was someone like Sacco, for example, a Goliath?
• 'Righteousness porn'
Scholar Eve Ng, who wrote a 2022 critical analysis of cancel culture, cited the 2017 #MeToo movement as the moment cancel culture "exploded." Suddenly, there emerged a lengthy catalogue of men who lost jobs, shows and public esteem after they were publicly accused of myriad kinds of sexual misconduct and abuse: Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken.
There was also an undeniable sense of mass schadenfreude - comeuppance as entertainment - coursing through these campaigns. Skepticism and, at times, outright fury and disgust began to bubble from those who saw themselves as targets, or potential targets, for running afoul of shifting cultural mores.
As the 2010s ended, "cancel culture" was still a term unfamiliar to most Americans, but more conservatives - and quite a few liberals - had started slinging pejoratives like "woke" (which, like "cancel," was rooted in Black culture), "triggered" and "snowflake" in response to these digital campaigns.
"If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, because, man, you see how woke I was?" former president Barack Obama commented at a 2019 summit.
Comedian Sarah Silverman also blasted cancel culture in a 2019 appearance on "The Bill Simmons Podcast," calling it "a perversion" and "righteousness porn." Discussing a movie role she lost because producers unearthed an old image of her wearing blackface for a comedy sketch, Silverman said, "It's like, if you're not on board, if you say the wrong thing, if you had a tweet once, everyone is, like, throwing the first stone."
"I think it's really scary, and it's a very odd thing that it's invaded the left primarily," Silverman said, "and the right will mimic it."
Even among proponents of canceling, there was disagreement about what it meant - and if these tactics were effective. Is cancellation a temporary state? Is a person "canceled" if their work still sells (as with J.K. Rowling)? If they remain popular (Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart)? If they get Grammys (Louis C.K.) or book deals (Josh Hawley)?
Whatever one felt about cancel culture in 2019, by 2020, it was inescapable.
• 'The very definition of totalitarianism'
When Trump addressed the phenomenon in front of Mount Rushmore in the summer of 2020, the country was reeling from the coronavirus pandemic and roiled by widespread racial justice protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of a police officer.
Speaking in front of the towering granite heads of former U.S. presidents, Trump took aim at the country's left wing: "One of their political weapons is cancel culture, driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees," he said.
"This is the very definition of totalitarianism," Trump continued, "and it is completely alien to our culture and our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America."
Cancel culture solidified its role as a bogeyman for the right in 2021. After a MAGA mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, Trump was removed from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Social media - and even dating apps - became hunting grounds to out riot participants to law enforcement.
The right's claims of censorship escalated after President Joe Biden took office. Stanford professor and covid contrarian Jay Bhattacharya, "shadow-banned" on Twitter for his views, argued that the Biden administration was behind his suppression on social media, a claim the Supreme Court rejected for lack f standing. (Bhattacharya is now director of the National Institutes of Health.) A furor also erupted when Twitter and Facebook restricted the distribution of a then-unverified New York Post article on Hunter Biden's laptop.
A 2021 YouGov poll found that the vast majority of Republicans saw cancel culture as a "somewhat or very serious problem" - one that they were most likely to be the victims of.
Four years later, experts who spoke to The Washington Post agreed that what we're seeing in the second Trump administration isn't actually cancel culture. It's worse.
• When cancellation becomes censorship
First Amendment lawyers have a term for what happened to Jimmy Kimmel: jawboning.
A legal term of art taken from the Bible's brawny hero, Samson ("with a donkey's jawbone I have killed a thousand men"), jawboning is when the government pressures a third party to censor on the government's behalf.
There was no sustained #CancelKimmel movement precipitating the suspension of the comedian's late-night show on ABC after a monologue referencing Charlie Kirk's death last month, as had been the case with these campaigns in the 2010s.
Nor were there allegations of backroom dealing. Rather, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission publicly issued a veiled threat to parent company Disney.
"We can do this the easy way or the hard way," Brendan Carr said on a conservative podcast. "These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead."
"What Carr did is a classic case of jawboning," said American Civil Liberties Union attorney Brian Hauss. (Carr later denied playing any role in Kimmel's suspension, blaming it instead on the show's ratings.)
"Cancel culture is one thing. Direct government pressure is something that's even worse," said Lukianoff, the free-speech lawyer. "Now you combine the two, and woof, that's a terrible formula for speech."
After U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi last month floated a crackdown on "hate speech" - a concept long reviled by the right - former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, himself subject to a literal cancellation, spoke out.
"If that does happen," Carlson said, "there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that. Ever." (Carlson's concerns were reflected in a September YouGov survey, which found a "new phenomenon": Most Americans now think freedom of speech is suffering.)
Cancel culture, far from fading away, could even take on disturbing new dimensions, say some free-speech advocates.
Hauss said that the Trump administration's willingness to weaponize its supporters' personal grievances, particularly in the wake of Kirk's death, amounts to "crowdsourcing a witch hunt."
Last week, in a callback to Trump's 2020 speech lambasting cancel culture, Vice President JD Vance blamed the left's "rhetorical assault on law enforcement" for a fatal shooting at a Dallas ICE facility.
Vance warned, "If your political rhetoric encourages violence against our law enforcement, you can go straight to hell, and you have no place in the political conversation of the United States of America."
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