Cancel Culture Is Bad. Cancel Government Is Intolerable.

The time to bring together a massive Coalition to Save American Freedom is now.

For years, conservatives and those farther to the right have made “cancel culture” a major issue. They had a point. Beginning as an attempt to convince people to stop using offensive terms to designate human beings of different ethnicities, gender, or sexual orientation and to tell the whole story about historical figures who had long been unequivocally glorified, the “woke” movement metastasized into un-American policing of speech, ruining the careers of decent people, and demanding not the full story of historical figures, but only their bad sides. Self-styled “social justice warriors,” many of whom never did anything to aid the cause of social justice other than to search through past comments by people to “cancel” them, came to constitute a serious curtailment on American freedom.

Republicans campaigned vehemently against “cancel culture” and that position played a significant part in many of their political victories. In his second inaugural address in January, Trump pledged “to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” He continued, “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. … We will not allow that to happen. It will not happen again.”

Outrageous as they are, none of the innumerable other 180° turns by Mr. Trump — a read through of his 2025 inaugural address today is a through-the-looking-glass experience — is as much of a mortal threat to the American Republic as his reversal on free speech. As I wrote the day after the murder of Charlie Kirk, Trump is plainly trying to use the shooting as his “Reichstag Fire “moment to consolidate all power in his hands. He is making no attempt to hide his intention to cancel anyone who says anything of which he does not approve. His praising of the completely unwarranted firing of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel this week was followed by a presidential directive to NBC to cancel Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers: “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT.”

Marching Towards Berlin in the 1930s

Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr, who is now marching towards Berlin in the 1930s at his Führer’s command, has previously called such actions what they are. “Free speech is the counterweight — it is the check on government control,” Carr posted on X in 2023. “That is why censorship is the authoritarian's dream.”

He was right then and dead — as in the death of the American Republic — wrong now.

As citizens we must immediately do what Trump said on Fox News last week he “couldn’t care less” about doing: bring the country together. Waiting for the midterm elections more than thirteen months from now is not an option. If we do not act now, there will be no freedom and democracy left to defend.

We must come together in the tens of millions as American citizens of all parties, ethnicities, genders, social or economic philosophies, and so on, to say, “Hell, no! We are not going to let you bring the American Experiment in freedom, equality, and self-government to an end!” Whatever it takes — short of violence — joining hands with political opponents, flooding the streets in massive protests, a general strike.

I am ready to work with anyone who commits to protecting the First Amendment and our freedoms and maintaining the Republic, regardless of how much we have disagreed in the past.

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Some Hopeful Signs

There are some hopeful signs. Karl Rove wrote an excellent column in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday evening, “‘They’ Didn’t Kill Charlie Kirk.” In it he neatly employs a favorite whipping boy of the right, “pronouns,” to make the crucial point. “No, Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed by ‘them.’ ‘They’ didn’t pull the trigger. One person did, apparently a young man driven by impulse and a terrible hate,” Rove writes, “‘he’ and ‘him’ are the correct pronouns for this horrendous act.” Using this terrible murder “to retaliate against political rivals [which is exactly what Trump and his minions are doing] is wrong and dangerous. It will further divide and embitter our country. No good thing will come of it.”

Tucker Carlson is even farther from me in the positions he takes. In my only appearance on his Fox News show, in late 2016, following Trump’s first election, I had Carlson visibly foaming at the mouth (if only slightly) before he cut the camera off after I refused to play the role of liberal patsy for him and wouldn’t let him talk over me. He didn’t seem to be much into free speech for the other side then. On Thurday, however, Carlson came out with a full-throated endorsement of free speech for all. If the Trumpists use the Kirk shooting, he said, “to bring hate speech laws to this country … there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience.” He continued, “if they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think. There’s nothing they can’t do to you, because they don’t consider you human.”

And on Friday, Ted Cruz showed the first sign that his backbone may, ever so slightly, be making an effort to regenerate since it made a brief, illusory appearance when he called the January 6, 2021, insurrection a “violent terrorist attack on the Capitol where we saw the men and women of law enforcement … risk their lives to defend the men and women who serve in this Capitol.” He quickly retreated from that truth under attack by rightwing media. Before that, Cruz’s backbone had dissolved when he crawled back to Trump after the latter had suggested that Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination and that his wife was ugly.

On Friday, though, Senator Cruz said FCC Chair Carr’s message that the Kimmel suspension could be done the easy way or the hard way, “dangerous as hell” and “right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ “If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We don’t like what you, the media, have said; we’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like’ — that will end up bad for conservatives.”

This Nation Must Demand ‘Action, and Action Now’

I propose a gathering — those who can make it in person and others via Zoom — of leaders and activists from all pro-democracy groups, publications, websites, podcasts, Substacks, what have you we — no later than next week to work out a plan for rapidly bringing together millions of Americans into a Coalition to Save American Freedom and plan massive actions to take place in the very near future.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt put it in his 1933 Inaugural Address, “This Nation asks for action, and action now.”

Author and historian Robert S. McElvaine writes the Musings & Amusings Substack.