The Difference Between Left and Right Cancel Culture Explained
Both Left and Right wield cancel culture, but not the same way. One builds empires of exile, the other strikes like guerillas without lasting power.
When Disney suspended Jimmy Kimmel after his remarks on the Charlie Kirk assassination, much of the Western world rushed to frame it as another case of cancel culture. And to be fair, there’s something to that. Kimmel deliberately mischaracterized the assassin as a MAGA supporter — a cheap shot and a lie, certainly, but whether that is a fireable offence is up for debate. After all, peddling partisan falsehoods with a grin is practically in the job description of a corporate late-night host. If cancellation really means exile for every misstep or partisan jab, then we are well past the point of sanity.
But here’s the twist: Kimmel absolutely should have been fired — just not for that. He should have been fired for looking into a camera, at the height of a pandemic, and sneering: “Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in. We’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.” He wasn’t joking about politicians or celebrities. He was laughing about letting one in four ordinary people — neighbours, coworkers, family members — die without medical care. That wasn’t satire. That was dehumanizing propaganda, dressed up as comedy.
And yet, Kimmel was back on air within a week. His swift reinstatement proved something important: right-wing cancel culture is real, but it is weak. It operates like guerilla warfare — disruptive, embarrassing, noisy — but incapable of holding ground. The Left, by contrast, has built something closer to an empire: standing institutions with military-grade psychological weapons, able to coordinate campaigns that exile opponents permanently. The asymmetry could not be clearer.
This essay will trace those two trajectories. First, I’ll map how the Left’s radicalization unfolded in five stages — from speech policing to outright justification of violence — a progression that made something like the Kirk assassination not an unintended tragedy but a logical endpoint. Second, I’ll place that framework against my own “lived experience” of cancellation and Maoist-style struggle session, not for malice or misconduct but for refusing to kneel to a rigid orthodoxy. And third, I’ll make the case that justified cancellation is not about politics or identity at all, but about psychology: a society’s right to reject psychopathy, narcissism, sadism, and deceit, no matter which flag they fly.
Because in the end, the stakes are simple. If the sane majority doesn’t draw a line between dissent and pathology, our future won’t be civil discourse — it will be chaos masquerading as virtue.
.
Two Kinds of Power
Before moving forward, it’s important to clarify the terms. Cancel culture is not a meme or a punchline. It is the coordinated social, economic, and institutional punishment of individuals for speech or conduct that violates prevailing orthodoxies. It can take the form of online mobs, HR interventions, professional exile, financial deplatforming, or cultural blacklisting. In every case, the purpose is the same: not to debate but to destroy.
When I speak of the Left and the Right, I am not referring to every citizen who casts a ballot. Most voters, regardless of party, are neither activists nor ideologues. What I mean are the institutional currents that dominate cultural life: media, academia, entertainment, NGOs, and increasingly corporate bureaucracies on the Left; and, on the Right, populist counter-movements, independent media, and certain political factions. These are the forces shaping the narratives and wielding power — not your neighbour who happens to lean liberal or conservative.
It is also essential to distinguish between cultural cancellation and state censorship. Cultural cancellation is the rejection of an individual by mobs, institutions, or industries. State censorship is the use of coercive power — laws, police, courts — to silence dissent. They are not the same. One relies on shame and social punishment, the other on force. Both are dangerous, but conflating them obscures the scale of what has been happening.
Finally, and most importantly, this essay is not a tribal scorecard between Left and Right. I am not interested in tallying which “side” is more virtuous. That is a fool’s game. The real divide is not between political tribes but between sanity and pathology. A society cannot function if it normalizes narcissism, sadism, deceit, and psychopathy — no matter which flag those behaviours fly under. My argument is simple: we must reject pathology, whether it comes dressed in rainbow colours or draped in a national flag.
The Five Stages of Radicalization
Cancel culture didn’t have a thunderous arrival; it crept in like fog. Across the West, institutions have moved stepwise from redefining disagreement as harm, to punishing dissenters, to deputizing state-adjacent systems, to casting people out of economic life, and finally to treating political violence as an understandable—sometimes even laudable—response. The steps below are not a conspiracy chart; they are a chronology of cultural norms shifting, one ratchet-click at a time.
Stage One (2010–2015): Words Become Violence
The opening move was linguistic. “Safety” migrated from the physical to the emotional and epistemic. On campuses, the culture of safetyism—safe spaces, trigger warnings, bias-response teams—framed exposure to disliked ideas as a form of injury, normalizing administrative interventions against speech that once would have been countered by argument. This trend was widely observed at the time, not merely imagined in hindsight. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s 2015 Atlantic cover story diagnosed the shift:
“It presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”
It’s easy to dismiss all that as a campus fad. It wasn’t. That vocabulary—harm, trauma, unsafe—is the grammar that later justified shutting people out of civic, professional, and digital life. Once words are cast as violence, suppressing words becomes self-defence.
Stage Two (2016–2020): Cultural Cancellation
The next move left the seminar room for the public square. If exposure to dissent is harm, then those who cause such “harm” must be removed.
Mob pressure as policy. At Evergreen State College (Washington), biology professor Bret Weinstein, a lifelong progressive, objected to a novel “Day of Absence” that proposed whites stay off campus for a day. Protests escalated; campus police told him they couldn’t guarantee his safety; he ultimately resigned in a settlement.
No-platforming by force. At UC Berkeley, riots over a planned talk by Milo Yiannopoulos led police to evacuate the speaker and cancel the event amid smashed windows, fires, and six-figure property damage—on a campus that calls itself the “birthplace of the Free Speech Movement.”
Cultural erasure at scale. J.K. Rowling has faced threats for defending free speech, sex-based language, and women’s spaces; Scottish police confirmed investigations into death threats after her Rushdie tweet in 2022.
Whether one likes or loathes any of these figures is beside the point. The rule being written was simple: when ideas offend woke orthodoxy, force—social, reputational, sometimes physical—replaces debate.
Stage Three (2020–2022): Systemic Censorship
COVID took the logic national. “Misinformation” and “disinformation” became the justification for the systematic erasure of dissent.
Government–platform entanglement. Lawsuits and reporting have documented extensive back-and-forth between U.S. officials and platforms over what to remove, a controversy now at the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri. The case record collects communications showing officials pressing platforms to act on speech deemed harmful.
Targeting dissenters. Journalist Alex Berenson was permanently banned by Twitter in 2021 over COVID views; he sued and was reinstated after a settlement in 2022. He later filed suit alleging government pressure; mainstream outlets covered both the reinstatement and his subsequent claims.
Election-adjacent suppression. Twitter and Meta blocked the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop weeks before the 2020 election, a decision former Twitter executives later told Congress was a “mistake.”
Deplatforming a sitting head of state. Twitter permanently suspended President Trump on January 8, 2021, citing risks of further violence—an unprecedented act that illustrated platforms’ willingness to end even the most consequential speech access when it crosses an ever-shifting line.
Across the Atlantic, the same managerial impulse gathered legal muscle. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) now imposes sweeping duties on platforms to police “illegal and harmful” content, with escalating reporting and risk-mitigation obligations—a standing invitation for state-shaped speech control.
Point being: the censor’s switch moved from “cultural habit” to “governance lever.”
Stage Four (2022–2023): Structural Exile
Once censorship becomes systemic, the next step is obvious: treat wrongthink as professional misconduct and civic unworthiness.
Licences as leashes. In Ontario, the College of Psychologists ordered Jordan Peterson into a compulsory social-media “re-education” program under threat of losing his licence. His offence was not malpractice with patients, but public speech: refusing to parrot state-approved narratives on climate change, the sterilization of children in the name of “gender-affirming care,” and the cult of body positivity.
Entertainment gatekeeping. In 2021, actress Gina Carano was fired from The Mandalorian after a social-media post comparing COVID-era mandates and the segregation of society to the tactics of totalitarian regimes. Studio executives branded her remarks “abhorrent,” setting off years of litigation that only recently settled. Whatever one thinks of her analogy, the precedent is plain: in Hollywood, ideological conformity now ranks as highly as acting chops when it comes to keeping a role.
Mandates as exclusion. Across much of the Western world, governments imposed vaccine mandates that barred the unvaccinated from ordinary life. Tens of thousands of people—including military members, nurses, and other essential workers—lost their jobs for refusing an ineffective experimental pharmaceutical product. Others were shut out of restaurants, theatres, concerts, sporting events, and even basic travel. Far from a limited public-health measure, the mandates became a blunt instrument of structural exclusion, dividing society into the permitted and the pariahs.
Policing speech that isn’t crime. In the UK, police spent years logging Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs)—speech where no law was broken but someone claimed offense—until the Court of Appeal ruled the practice unlawfully chilled expression, forcing a revised Code. Yet the climate persists: police still make more than 12,000 arrests a year—around 30 people every day—for “offensive” or “hateful” posts on social media. The existence of a formal machinery for criminalizing perception, rather than action, shows how far the safety logic has traveled.
Structural exile differs from cultural outrage in kind, not just degree. It uses credentials, licenses, contracts, and laws as enforcement tools. If you think the wrong thoughts, the penalty isn’t a nasty quote-tweet; it’s unemployment, removal of credentials, or criminal punishment.
Stage Five (2024–2025): Violence Moves From Unthinkable to “Understandable”
When a culture spends a decade insisting that words are violence and dissenters are dangerous, real violence eventually becomes narratively available. Most people will never cheer it outright. But too many have learned the trick of looking away—or worse, explaining it away.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk made this grotesquely clear. While his death was mourned by many, a significant portion of society erupted with rationalizations and even celebrations. Some claimed he had “provoked” it simply by speaking in public. Others suggested it would “teach conservatives a lesson,” that fear itself was a proper deterrent. Professors mused aloud that a bullet was “too humane” for people like him. Commentators smirked that perhaps more deaths would silence the Right once and for all. These were not anonymous trolls in basements; they were academics, journalists, and cultural influencers—people entrusted with shaping public discourse.
This is the bleak dividend of a culture that has normalized dehumanization. Once you can laugh, on national television, about letting a quarter of your fellow citizens die without medical care—Jimmy Kimmel’s infamous line: “Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in… Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy”—it is only a short step to laughing about the killing of a political opponent.
This is not about branding every progressive complicit in murder. It is about naming the ratchet: redefine harm → erase dissenters → weaponize institutions → exile the noncompliant → tolerate, explain, or even celebrate violence. Once a society runs that story enough times, the ending begins to write itself.
What the Stages Reveal
The five stages should not be read as a deterministic prophecy but as a framework that makes sense of the past decade:
Redefinition (words = violence) supplies the moral justification.
Cultural cancellation supplies the enforcement habit.
Systemic censorship supplies the machinery.
Structural exile supplies the penalties.
Violence normalization supplies the terrible endgame.
The Right is hardly saintly; it contains grifters, opportunists, and some who would happily wield the same tools if handed the keys. But it has not built this institutional ratchet. Its “cancellations” tend to be responses to overt cruelty or the open celebration of harm—behaviours any stable culture must reject—rather than the suppression of heterodox opinion itself. The asymmetry matters because institutions matter: what universities teach, what regulators codify, what platforms police, and what courts bless becomes the atmosphere we all breathe.
If the atmosphere says “hurt feelings are harm, and harms must be prevented at once,” then mobs and ministries become partners. If the atmosphere says “a neighbour who thinks wrongly is an existential threat,” then a punch, a brick, or a bullet starts to feel like a policy.
The alternative isn’t a free-for-all. It’s a moral and civilizational reset: we argue about ideas and punish pathology—not opinions—with social refusal. We do not let bureaucracies launder ideology into law. And we remember that the first task of a free society is not to keep every citizen comfortable; it is to keep them human.
A “Lived Experience”
The five stages of radicalization can sound theoretical until you live through one. I did. Not in politics, not as a celebrity, but in the banality of a workplace where the ordinary rules of decency were replaced overnight by the logic of exile.
At first, nothing was wrong. I had been at the job a few months, fitting in well enough. There were no complaints, no conflicts. My colleagues and I got along. I was even dating one of the managers. Then, one afternoon, a co-worker who identified as a “queer woman” stumbled across my social media. What she found wasn’t harassment, or threats, or even anything aimed at my colleagues. What she found were opinions. That was enough.
Within hours, group chats sprang up condemning me as “hateful,” “dangerous,” and “misogynist.” The charges were left deliberately vague. If the accusations had to be specific, they might have to be defended. Instead, the act of accusation became the evidence itself. The “queer woman” declared they “didn’t feel safe” working with me, though none could point to a single thing I had ever done in the workplace or said online to endanger anyone.
I tried the one response adults are supposed to reach for: conversation. I messaged the ringleader directly. “If you’d like to ask me about anything I believe, I’ll answer you openly,” I said. “I don’t think my views are hateful or dangerous, but if I’m wrong, I’d rather talk than fight.” The reply came back cold: dialogue itself would be “dehumanizing.” My attempt at conversation was treated as another form of harm. In other words, the trial was over before it began.
The mob grew louder. My girlfriend was harassed during her shifts, pressured to denounce me. Management told me I had broken no rules, but that I would have to keep working alongside the same person who was orchestrating my social destruction. Colleagues who privately admitted they disagreed with the mob stayed silent in public. The silent majority once again chose safety over honesty.
This is what a twenty-first-century struggle session looks like: accusations made in whispers, verdicts handed down without evidence, and guilt made non-negotiable. There was no path to redemption. When I asked what, exactly, I had said that was dangerous, there was no answer. To ask for clarity was itself proof of guilt: only a hateful person would want examples. Every move was incriminating.
The psychological effect is hard to overstate. This was not mere disagreement. It was exile. My humanity was made conditional. The truth of my daily conduct—that I had never mistreated anyone, that I got along with my colleagues, that I showed up and did my work—was erased by the narrative. A disordered mind declared me a danger, and therefore I was a danger.
The story didn’t stop at work—it came home with me. The pressure campaign seeped into my relationship until my girlfriend finally broke. She admitted no man had ever treated her with such respect and kindness, yet said she couldn’t keep seeing me. The social pressure was unbearable. In that moment, the duality of cancel culture was laid bare. Reality testified that I had treated her well. Ideology insisted I was a bigot and misogynist. And ideology won.
In miniature, I experienced the same sequence I had mapped in the broader culture: disagreement redefined as harm, dialogue rejected, institutions enlisted, exile imposed. The only stage missing was physical violence. And if that sounds unthinkable, just remember how quickly academics and commentators now rationalize assassination. Once a society accepts the fiction that words are violence, real violence becomes the next “reasonable” step.
This is why I say Leftist cancel culture is not about accountability. It is about domination through fear. It doesn’t correct; it annihilates. It doesn’t protect the vulnerable; it weaponizes them. It doesn’t deal in truth; it enforces delusion.
What I went through is happening to thousands upon thousands of people across the West. Teachers disciplined for questioning dogma. Doctors stripped of credentials for refusing to mouth slogans. Workers blacklisted for opinions that turned out, in hindsight, to be correct. In every case, reality is sacrificed to preserve the fiction that disagreement itself is violence.
I don’t tell this story for sympathy. I accepted long ago that speaking freely can cost jobs, reputations, relationships, even lives. I tell it because it shows the pathology up close. Leftist cancel culture is not the rejection of cruelty but the rejection of conscience. It is not sanity refusing insanity; it is insanity refusing sanity. And until the sane majority is willing to say so out loud, the mobs will continue to win.
Empire and Guerillas
The Kimmel saga captures the asymmetry between Left and Right cancel culture. Conservatives celebrated his suspension as proof the rules were finally being applied in reverse. But within days he was back on air. The Right had landed a punch, but the empire had already patched itself up.
That is the core difference. Left-wing cancel culture is an empire: it commands bureaucratic weapons, cultural supply lines, and institutional legitimacy. HR departments, accreditation boards, publishers, tech platforms, and regulators coordinate campaigns that erase people from public life. Exile is systemic and enduring.
Right-wing cancel culture is guerilla warfare: disruptive but fleeting. Its tools are boycotts, affiliate pressure, and outrage cycles. These can sting, but they fade because there are no institutions to carry them forward. The asymmetry runs deep:
Weapons: the Left fields bureaucratic armies; the Right throws cultural stones.
Endurance: the Left sustains campaigns; the Right flares and retreats.
Permanence: the Left erases; the Right bruises.
Legitimacy: the Left calls it justice; the Right is branded hypocritical when it imitates the tactic.
Critics say conservatives are hypocrites—denouncing cancellation when it hurts them, cheering it when it hurts opponents. There’s some truth to that. But it misses the distinction: the Right has no machine for systematic exile. Its cancellations are reactions, not campaigns. And when the Right overreaches, its own coalition often pushes back. Pam Bondi’s threat to weaponize hate-speech laws against detractors of Charlie Kirk was met with immediate criticism from conservatives themselves. The Left, by contrast, has cheered every escalation—from safe spaces to mobbing, censorship, and now grotesque justifications of violence.
It is also worth noting that much of what passes for “right-wing cancellation” looks more like market behaviour than mob behaviour: boycotts, consumer backlash, or politicians roasted for hypocrisy. That is not the same as HR departments, universities, and regulators colluding to erase someone from professional life. To equate the two is to confuse the heckler’s veto with the commissar’s pen.
None of this is to romanticize the Right. There are pathological voices there too, some eager for revenge. But so far, the Right has not built a system that defines disagreement as harm, deputizes bureaucracies to punish speech, or rationalizes violence against opponents. That difference matters.
So when critics say “both sides cancel,” the answer is simple: not in the same way, not with the same tools, and not with the same moral logic. The Left’s version typically punishes rational and respectful disagreement; the Right’s, when it happens, punishes pathology. One erases people for thinking “wrongly.” The other removes those who revel in cruelty. Conflating the two is dishonest.
The asymmetry is structural. Only one side has built institutions of exile. Only one side has redefined harm into heresy. Only one side is now flirting with violence as politics. The Right, flawed and inconsistent though it may be, still shows the ability to pull back when it overreaches. That is a difference worth defending.
A Moral Framework: Sanity Against Pathology
Up to this point I have laid out the asymmetry: the Left has institutionalized cancellation, while the Right has, at worst, flirted with hypocrisy and opportunism. But to rebuild a culture of sanity, we cannot stop at pointing fingers. We must articulate a moral framework — a principle of when cancellation is wrong, and when it is necessary. Without it, we risk either sliding back into totalitarian reflexes or surrendering to chaos.
The framework is simple: cancellation should never be based on ideology, identity, or mere opinion. It should be based only on pathology.
Why Not Ideology or Identity
History shows us where ideological cancellation leads. The Soviets canceled dissidents in the name of communism. The Nazis canceled Jews and “degenerates” in the name of racial purity. Mao canceled intellectuals in the name of revolution. Each demanded ideological conformity as proof of loyalty. Each reduced human beings to labels, and then erased them.
The modern Left repeats the pattern. It punishes people not for what they do, but for what they believe — or worse, what others say they believe. To be skeptical of gender ideology, to question climate orthodoxy, to resist racial essentialism, is to risk professional and social exile. These cancellations are not corrections of behaviour. They are attempts to police thought. That is not justice; that is tyranny.
Equally, cancellation cannot be about identity. To say someone is unfit because they are male, white, straight, religious, or any other immutable category is to invert the very principle of equality. It is to declare people guilty by birth. This is not merely unjust; it is insane. A society that punishes people for who they are rather than what they do is a society at war with reality.
Pathology as the Standard
If ideology and identity are off the table, what remains? Pathology. Human beings across all times and cultures have recognized that some behaviours corrode the social fabric so thoroughly they cannot be tolerated. Not disagreements, not errors, not eccentricities — but behaviours rooted in the darkest corners of human psychology.
Modern psychology gives us a vocabulary for these: the Dark Tetrad.
Psychopathy: the impulsive disregard for consequences, the willingness to destabilize family, community, or country for a short-term gain in power.
Narcissism: the delusion that one’s self-image must be affirmed at all costs, and that dissent is itself an act of aggression.
Machiavellianism: the cold use of deceit and manipulation, treating language not as a bridge to understanding but as a weapon to control.
Sadism: the open delight in the suffering of others.
These traits transcend party lines, religions, races, and nations. They are not liberal or conservative, not male or female, not Western or Eastern. They are human failings, and when unchecked, they metastasize into cruelty and tyranny.
A society that refuses to recognize and reject these traits is a society that has lost its immune system. It cannot distinguish between disagreement and disease. It cannot tell the difference between honest opposition and pathological destruction. And when that distinction is lost, pathology always wins.
Applying the Lens
This framework makes sense of the cultural chaos around us. Consider a few examples:
Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about letting unvaccinated people die was not an “opinion” in the marketplace of ideas. It was sadism — laughing at the death of millions of fellow citizens. A culture that tolerates this is not celebrating free speech; it is indulging pathology.
Jordan Peterson’s criticism of compelled pronouns was not pathology. You can disagree with his arguments, but his conduct was sane: reasoned, evidence-based, respectful. The attempt to force him into re-education was not a defense of the vulnerable; it was institutional narcissism — demanding he affirm a delusion or be exiled.
The Evergreen mob’s pursuit of Bret Weinstein was not a “student protest.” It was a sadistic hunt, driven by Machiavellian manipulation and enforced by group narcissism. Their demand was not justice but humiliation.
Rowling’s insistence on women’s spaces was not pathology. She defended a biological reality. Her cancellation was an act of ideological tyranny, punishing sanity as if it were cruelty.
These cases become clear when you apply the lens. Sanity can be disagreed with, argued against, even disproven. But pathology cannot be reasoned with. It must be rejected.
The Role of Sanity
This is why I say the real divide in our culture is not Left versus Right. It is sanity versus pathology. A liberal who believes in free debate and equal treatment is sane. A conservative who manipulates facts and revels in cruelty is pathological. Our allegiance should not be to party, but to sanity.
Sanity is not perfect. It makes mistakes. It holds views that will later be proven wrong. But sanity is open to evidence, open to debate, open to correction. Pathology is not. It lies, it bullies, it punishes, it delights in pain. Sanity accepts the humanity of its opponents. Pathology denies it.
That is why cancel culture, as currently practiced by the Left, is pathological. It denies humanity to its opponents. It delights in their suffering. It manipulates language to coerce conformity. It destabilizes institutions for short-term ideological power. It is psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism woven into cultural practice.
Redemption
There is one more element. A culture of sanity must not only reject pathology; it must offer redemption. People are not always born into the Dark Tetrad. They learn it, they fall into it, and they can escape it. If someone who once indulged in cruelty or deceit turns toward sanity — if they begin to speak truthfully, to treat others with dignity, to seek understanding rather than domination — they must be welcomed back.
This is not naïve forgiveness. It is a recognition that without redemption, cancellation becomes permanent exile, and exile breeds resentment that can harden into extremism. A sane society punishes pathology but praises repentance. It showers status on those who admit error and change course.
The Left has failed utterly at this. Once you are branded a bigot or a transgressor, no apology is enough, no penance sufficient. The demand is not correction but obliteration. That is pathology disguised as justice. A healthy society must do the opposite: punish cruelty, but celebrate change.
Why This Framework Matters
The danger of our current moment is that without a framework, we drift toward extremes. Some say “cancel nobody” — a recipe for tolerating sadists and psychopaths in positions of influence. Others say “cancel everybody who disagrees” — the road to totalitarianism. The only sane path is to cancel pathology, not opinion.
This framework is not a utopian checklist. It does not require state enforcement. It requires cultural maturity. It requires citizens, employers, institutions, and communities to recognize the difference between disagreement and destruction. It requires courage to say no to mobs, no to cruelty, no to narcissistic demands for affirmation.
If we fail, the ratchet will continue: harm redefined, dissent erased, systems weaponized, exile normalized, violence justified. If we succeed, we can rebuild a culture where people are free to argue fiercely, even offensively, without fear of exile — so long as they remain human in their conduct.
Conclusion of the Framework
Cancellation, rightly understood, is not the policing of opinion. It is the defense of sanity. It is the collective act of saying: we will not normalize psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, or sadism, no matter whose colors they wear. It is the recognition that evil is not partisan. It passes through every heart.
To rebuild a free society, we must restore that recognition. We must remember that the enemy is not disagreement but pathology. We must defend speech, even offensive speech, while refusing to tolerate cruelty. Only then can we reclaim a culture where people may be wrong, but not damned; where redemption is possible; and where sanity, not pathology, sets the boundaries of the permissible.
Reclaiming Sanity
Kimmel’s suspension and swift reinstatement was not a contradiction. It was a parable of the age. The Right can land blows, but only the Left has the institutions to enforce permanent exile. One fights like guerillas, the other commands like an empire. The danger is not that the Right is too weak. The danger is that the Left is too strong — that it has turned cancellation into a standing army of bureaucrats, regulators, and cultural enforcers. The solution is not to give the Right the same weapons, but to dismantle the empire’s machinery before it consumes us all.
Leftist cancel culture is not a culture at all. It is pathology backed by structural force masquerading as morality. It thrives by collapsing the difference between disagreement and danger, between speech and violence, between opinion and sin. Once that distinction is erased, mobs replace debates, exile replaces correction, violence replaces argument. I have lived through a small version of it myself, and what should have been a dispute became a struggle session — guilt predetermined, dialogue rejected, reality inverted. That was a microcosm of what is happening across the West.
The mistake would be to shrug and say “both sides are guilty.” The reality is not symmetrical. The Left has institutionalized cancellation as a reflex. The Right, flawed and sometimes hypocritical, has not built that machinery. Its cancellations are reactive, opportunistic, sometimes even corrective — but they do not amount to a system of exile. That difference is decisive.
So where should the line be drawn? Not around ideology. Not around identity. Around pathology. Psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism are the true enemies of a free society. They are not confined to Left or Right, but they flourish wherever power is sought through cruelty and dehumanization. When those traits are normalized, freedom collapses.
The path forward is not to cancel everyone, nor to cancel no one. It is to reject pathology while defending conscience. To say: you may be wrong but so long as you engage in good faith, you remain within the circle of debate. But if you manipulate, dehumanize, or revel in cruelty, you forfeit that place. And even then, redemption must remain possible. Exile without return is tyranny. A society that praises repentance strengthens its own immune system.
The stakes could not be higher. If the sane majority abdicates, we will be trapped between two extremes: one that justifies violence in the name of compassion, and another that answers violence with violence. Institutions will be hollowed out, free societies will die not with a bang, but with a bureaucratic shrug.
But this future is not inevitable. The line still runs through every human heart. We can choose courage over conformity, truth over delusion, sanity over pathology. If enough of us do, the ratchet can be broken. Freedom will not be saved by guerillas building their own empire, but by citizens reclaiming the ground on which both stand. Not Left versus Right. Not tribe versus tribe. But sanity against pathology.
Wow! This is why I’ve been dropping-by here, hoping to catch exactly THIS! At minimum this exposition is the perfect response to the “both sides” claim, but it is orders-of-magnitude greater than that and should be shared widely, Left and Right. Congratulations. Amen.