During the second Trump administration, one concept has appeared again and again in the news cycle: the idea of ‘being cancelled.’ Once a hallmark of right-wing internet activism, it seems to have faded away into the background of coverage in the era of Trump. The concept of cancellation in our digital era primarily refers to the phenomenon of people facing consequences, such as being banned from social media or losing their jobs, for something they said online.
On this level, cancellation is definitely a real thing. People get banned from social media all the time for saying things that are racist, antisemitic, homophobic, etc. Arguably, this is a positive thing. While the user may have lost a platform to express their beliefs, those beliefs are not something we should broadly encourage in society. People are not being meaningfully oppressed by being banned from Twitter for saying slurs. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that no one can criticize what you say or that a private company doesn’t have the power to remove content that they deem harmful from their platform.
However, the phenomenon of cancellation becomes more serious when it carries real-life consequences, such as losing a job or losing legal status. Recently, there was a wave of firings related mainly to online comments posted in the aftermath of the shooting of Charlie Kirk. However, the usual wave of online backlash from the right over “cancel culture” seemed to be replaced by one of encouragement.
This was most prominently seen with comedian Jimmy Kimmel, whose late-night show was suspended for a week after he made comments on Charlie Kirk, until public pressure forced him back on air. In this case, his ‘cancellation’ was largely a product of backlash from right-wing media and influencers, prompting Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr to threaten action against networks if they aired Kimmel. This was all over relatively mundane comments Kimmel made in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. He did not in any way celebrate Kirk’s death, instead saying that the right was trying to “characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”
This was enough to trigger a backlash that warranted his cancellation. However, it’s worth noting that his life would probably not have been meaningfully worse off if he had been taken off the air. He would’ve been out of the spotlight, sure, but he would still have a massive amount of wealth accumulated from his television career. It’d be difficult to make his life meaningfully worse short of jail time. In this way, public figures can’t really be cancelled.
However, the calculus changes for private individuals. Without the wealth and power of being a public figure, private individuals can actually be ‘cancelled’ in the traditional sense. There was plenty of this in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. One teacher in Alabama was fired for simply calling attention to a school shooting that took place on the day of Kirk’s assassination. Here, it’s easy to see how losing your job would have a significant negative impact on your life, which is not the same for public figures.
However, Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension was largely cheered on by those on the right who, above all, wanted to punish those on the left with whom they disagreed. They saw a key opportunity to exploit the death of Kirk to try to weed progressives out of public life on a scale that had not been seen prior. The only other real example was with Pro-Palestinian protesters who faced a concerted effort by the Trump administration to weed them out of academia and public life more broadly.
This was seen most shockingly in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student whose visa was revoked and was then arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for his activism despite not having a criminal record. The arrest of Mahmood Khalil was also meaningfully different from past cancellations, as he was sanctioned directly by the U.S. government rather than fired by a private citizen or corporation.
In this way, his arrest was significantly worse than past cases of cancellation: it meaningfully infringed upon his right to freedom of speech in a way that other cancellations did not. In addition, deportation and detention are significantly worse than losing a job. However, much like in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, people largely saw active encouragement by the same people on the right that had for years railed against cancellation. Sec. of State Marco Rubio, who said in 2021 that “There are people live in fear of admitting who they voted for, what they think about a specific issue because your business will be targeted,” in 2025 said in reference to Khalil’s arrest that “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters so they can be deported.”
What these two examples show is that while cancellation is definitely real, it has not lost relevance because it is no longer a problem. Discourse has faded because those who popularised the term are now in power and see a pathway to destroy their political enemies by weaponising institutions and social media against them. Fundamentally, the right never really cared about cancellation; they only cared about having their views broadcast across the public space.