Perhaps it should have been expected. Following the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk last week, portions of the American Right have embarked on a campaign of revenge. It started with MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd being fired by the channel for foolishly speculating, right after Kirk was shot, that the perpetrator could have been a “supporter shooting their gun off in celebration”. Shortly before the conservative activist’s death was confirmed, Dowd called him “divisive” and suggested that his rhetoric had contributed to the attempt on his life. Widespread online calls for Dowd to be sacked eventually forced MSNBC’s hand.

Now, several days later, dozens of people across America have been fired, suspended or been put under investigation for expressing schadenfreude over Kirk’s death. These include schoolteachers, academics, video game developers, and firemen. There’s now a database going around, called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers”, which documents the social media posts as well as the names, addresses and employment details of thousands of people deemed to have “celebrated” Kirk’s death and to have “support[ed] political violence”.

After his death, Comedy Central pulled an episode of South Park broadcast last month that poked fun of Kirk as a Right-wing “debate bro”. Some MAGA supporters have blamed the animated show for contributing to the shooting, yet Kirk himself said he found the episode “awesome and hilarious”. He saw the satirical depiction as proof that the conservative ideas he was spreading on American college campuses had penetrated popular culture.

This desire to see opponents punished is not limited to Right-wing influencers — it has also been expressed by politicians with power. Republican senator Marsha Blackburn and Congressman Andy Ogles, both from Tennessee, called for the removal of Cumberland University professor Michael Rex over posts in which he labelled Kirk a “fascist” and attributed his death to “kharma”; Rex was duly fired. Louisiana representative Clay Higgins posted on X that Congressional power should be used to influence “big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination”.

A corrosive mob mentality has stretched beyond America, too. In Britain, former prime minister Liz Truss has demanded that Oxford Union president-elect George Abaraonye be expelled from the university, after he made light of Kirk’s murder in a WhatsApp group. According to the Lotus Eaters podcast, “we need to pile onto these people…if they are employed, contact their employers…these people need to know that there are practical and financial consequences.”

If it wasn’t already evident that “cancel culture” can be wielded by conservatives as well as the Left, then it should be now. Indeed, this form — often attributed to the “woke Right” — currently seems to be ascendant, as those who previously found themselves on the end of progressive censorship wage revenge, rationalizing their actions with similar talk of “holding people to account” and how “speech has consequences”. Last month, conservative activist Christopher Rufo tried to get writer Doreen St Felix fired from her job at The New Yorker on account of her decade-old tweets decrying whiteness as evil, even though this is a tactic he claims to oppose. Since the Kirk shooting, Rufo has openly called for a COINTELPRO 2.0 against the “radical left”.

An insidious Schmittian attitude has colonized public debate, in which allies are granted free speech while enemies are subjected to cancellation methods. It is now clear that many on the Right opposed the censorious Left less on a point of principle and more because they were on the receiving end. It should be a point of bipartisan agreement that people should not lose their livelihoods over opinions, however odious, they express as private citizens, and elected representatives shouldn’t be pushing this trend.

The more entrenched “cancel culture” becomes, regardless of which side is responsible, the less space there is for dissenting opinions. The result is a society in which fear dominates, and those eagerly joining the mob today may find that, by tomorrow, they are the ones at risk.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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