As the pendulum of social power swings back and forth between the right and left, it’s been revealed that each side has failed to put forth a complete argument for where the lines on speech should be. Both perspectives clearly have structural flaws in their proposal.
The aftermath of the George Floyd cancellations led so many people on the right to take the stance that no opinion should ever warrant excommunication from society, make you lose your job, ruin friendships, or have any negative effect, really. These people decided to oppose cancel culture outright, no exceptions.
The smart political operatives on the left responded by saying, “you have freedom of speech, but not freedom from consequences.” This was then used to justify their ruthless investigation into the past of anyone that even appeared to be opposed to their ideological orthodoxy. They may not be able to get you in legal trouble, but they could ruin your life in every other way.
The modern left still has no problem removing people from society who once made a racist joke, because they believe that everything you do and think are genuinely fundamental to your personhood. An incorrect viewpoint should get you fired. It should tear up a relationship. The accidental exposure that you indeed hold one of these incorrect opinions usually just revealed a crack that inevitably traces all the way back to your rotten heart.
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In response to this totalitarian perspective, the mainstream right tried to divorce the two concepts from each other entirely. They insisted that your job was a mechanical process. Political opinions wouldn’t ever corrupt your ability to fill out a spreadsheet. Therefore, what your politics are should be irrelevant to your employer. The right would use this logic to defend employing communists and fascists. They said it didn’t matter to them.
The right also made the argument that you could have vastly different political opinions and still keep strong friendships. They believed that these two things could also be entirely separated. There was allegedly no crossover between who you were as a person and what you believed both morally and politically.
They claimed that free-speech was absolute. There were to be no exceptions, outside of the very limited things which are already established.
The struggle over cancel culture raged on for years within this ideological dichotomy. As certain celebrities and companies eventually went on to successfully stand their ground against the backlash, it seemed like the right had repelled the once-overwhelming forces of cancellation.
Eventually, we reached the point where most of the people who the left had targeted for destruction ended up fundraising enormous amounts of money as a response. Shiloh Hendrix is probably the best example of this.
With this growing trend, woke appeared to have lost its cultural preeminence, and the power balance looked to have leveled out.
Unfortunately, nobody ever did decide on where the line should be drawn. We had reverted back to relying on a sort of collective unconscious to determine what was an acceptable verbal offense, and also for what did need to be societally prosecuted. The problem was that there were still no explicit rules that had been spelled out. In fact, both sides still trended toward something absurd.
The left’s core issue was its inability to establish a limiting principle. If everything you did, said, and believed was a reflection of your character, then nothing was off limits to judge you on. You could be scrutinized to any degree, and if something you did or said now conflicted with the dominant view of society, you too could be put under the guillotine for your past.
The right-wing view went wrong in its assertion that you could have both a mechanical and personal version of yourself. The assumption was that it didn’t matter if you were a communist so long as you were able to do the job. The problem is, obviously, that you can’t completely divorce these things. The way you felt about certain things would clearly contribute to how you acted. To suggest otherwise was absurd, and even the right-wing knew it at the time. Morality is entirely linked to your general opinions.
Both sides could not draw a reasonable line. And so, nobody did.
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The speech debate is only one front in a much larger struggle over whether Western societies still possess the will to define and defend their own limits. When every boundary is treated as negotiable, power flows to those who are willing to exploit that vacuum.
That erosion of civilizational confidence is central to Bostian Marco Turk’s War in the Name of Peace, a work that examines how ideological softness has left Europe vulnerable to internal subversion and external pressure.
But the murder of Charlie Kirk then brought this massive gap in understanding right back to the forefront. His death exposed the fact that neither side had actually solved this problem. The right immediately supported the cancellations of anyone celebrating Kirk’s death. They viewed the celebration of political violence to be over the line.
They didn’t call for criminal prosecution, but their revised argument was that a company is entirely within their right to not want to employ somebody who supports murder.
I obviously agree that support for murder is over the line, but the right’s original argument didn’t account for it. So, I noticed that it seemed impossible to distinguish our mindset, in kind, from the left. It was only a matter of degree in which they differed.
The left had proudly preached that a company should absolutely have the freedom not to employ someone who is racist, for instance. But when the right started to say that they felt companies should be able to do the same regarding the celebration of murder, the left recoiled and denounced the proposition.
This reaction proved that the discussion over free-speech was purely a matter of preference, not a fundamental distinction in operating logic. The right-wing had different lines, and that’s fine, but if we want to win, we need to go deeper than that.
After the reactions to Kirk’s death that came from the left, the right thought it could broadly provide a loose, yet objective criteria for what is socially unacceptable. In actuality, they couldn’t do that without just agreeing with the left’s logic.
The left views racism to be a worse offense than murder, that’s why murder is an acceptable response to racism for them. The right disagrees on how bad racism is, but we do agree that there is an inexcusable opinion that can be had. In fact, we decided that celebrating Charlie’s death was an unacceptable opinion.
An important difference here, and what confirms the reason that the right-wing must win, is that those of us who can actually think deeply understand that if we have a society where unpopular opinions are answered with murder, there is no possibility of us maintaining a functional society. We have to keep violence out of the arena here.
While we recognize that, there is clearly rhetoric coming from people like Hasan Piker, Steven Bonnell, and even major news hosts, that continually incites the left’s violence. The problem is that it’s often not technically and legally incendiary.
We know we have to stop the escalation of violence if we want to keep a society, and yet we can see that people are finding ways to skirt around the current rules. So, the question is: how do we stop this on a systemic level?
I truly don’t know how to properly legislate against this, but the underlying problem is fairly clear. We often singularly hold an individual who committed a violent act responsible. The logic for this revolves around the idea that it’s impossible to know with certainty how your words will be interpreted. For instance, should J.D. Salinger have been held responsible for John Lennon’s death? We often reflexively say no to that type of question, but I think that instinct is likely helping us dig our own grave.
Nobody would deny that the mainstream media absolutely greenlit Trump’s assassination attempts. The left was only upset that they weren’t successful. With that being the case, we can’t just keep saying that, “it’s all good because of free speech”. That’s simply unacceptable. Our current boundaries are clearly not strong enough to avoid this internal subversion. Even still, many conservatives who are actually operating on liberal presumptions refuse to recognize this.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald once gave his perspective on whether or not the people who say things which lead to others committing violence should be held responsible:
“I remember in the 1990s there was this spate of killing of abortion doctors and Bill O’Reilly, you know, was a very vocal uh pro-life uh pundit and always has been. He used to go on his Fox shows and rail against abortion is murder. And he would show abortion clinics and abortion doctors where a lot of these abortions were taking place, late term abortions, ones that he thought were particularly offensive, you know, reporting on them. And several of those doctors, I think at least one, but several of these types of doctors were murdered by people who believe that what they were doing is murder. And there was this big effort to blame Bill O’Reilly as though if you go on air and you condemn abortion as murder, you’re then responsible if somebody listens to you and goes and kills an abortion doctor because they now believe that that abortion doctor is engaged in murder. And a very similar thing happened in 2022 when there was that white supremacist massacre in Buffalo where that crazy guy went in and shot 10 black people and that uh Buffalo supermarket and left a manifesto talking about the great replacement theory. And I remember huge amounts of Democrats in the media tried to blame you by saying that you advocate the great replacement theory and that uh and he does it too. Therefore, you’re to blame.”
“In reality, you didn’t advocate the theory that he advocated. He had nothing to do with anything that you did. But let’s assume that you had... I always thought it was very dangerous to try and eliminate this line that says there’s a crucial line between expressing political views but not advocating violence or engaging violence and people who actually go and pick up a gun in the name of that cause and murder someone and you can’t start reaching that line.”
The problem with Glenn’s view is that this type of rhetoric he’s talking about obviously does lead to violence on some level. I’m not arguing that this means it should necessarily be off limits or perhaps prosecutable. I really don’t have an answer, actually, but we are lying to ourselves if we keep pretending that whoever took violent action is always the only one who can be credited with any responsibility.
There is obvious overlap between what public figures are saying, and what people end up doing. The problem is that there is no clear line here. So, everybody chooses to just ignore the details because it gets pretty complicated at a fundamental level. Or, they do as Glenn has done and they trust that the open system will be self-correcting and sustaining.
Glenn wants to essentially take an unconditional stance on the matter. Like usual with liberal presuppositions, his mindset is looking for a universal system which doesn’t have to concern itself with any context. He, and many others, want an operating system that can plug in a certain situation and spit out an exact response that is entirely consistent and in line with established morals and principles. They don’t want to entrust sovereignty to anyone. Everything has to work within the rules of the system for them to be comfortable with it.
Unfortunately, there is no reality where this can be how things always work. Liberalism has shown us that we can’t ever create these self-sustaining systems. The question of who decides on the exception remains unanswered.
We are refusing to even consider the fact that perhaps our current protections aren’t good enough. This refusal has actually allowed something sinister to slither through the cracks while we’ve been blindly trusting the current system.
I don’t know where the best place to draw the line is, but what I do know is that we can’t let people continue to exploit loop holes, or dance around the rules on a technicality as they undermine and subvert our systems. That is what is happening right now. Any legalistic ambiguity around speech is being pounced on to unilaterally service the left. A strange amount of people on the right are just conceding for some reason.
The left immediately responded to the right’s cancellation attempts by saying, “But you said you were against cancel culture!” The left doesn’t actually care. They don’t all of a sudden support free-speech, they don’t even have principles. They were just trying to use the last weapon in their arsenal to hopefully dupe conservatives into digging their own grave. And it worked for many of us.
There were even some genuine cucks who decided that they should honor that commitment to unconditional free-speech based on the direction from the left. As a result, these people refused to call for any repercussions for those on the left and their celebration of murder. They actually spoke out against any of these psychos losing their jobs or basically having any consequences whatsoever. They proudly announced that they were anti-cancel culture.
They would tell us all that if they had chosen to support the cancellation of leftists, that would only justify the left’s cancellation of them in the future. Do they not realize that it’s already being used against us at every turn? We don’t have to wonder about the use of power here. We know it’s coming. It already came!
This refusal to use force would only be the correct approach if the line hadn’t been crossed. Not only has it been crossed, but we know that they don’t even view it as any type of constraint in the first place.
When the right chooses to have this bizarre apathy to power, it just leads to our defeat. We can’t keep this mindset.
If we exclusively decide to stand on principle even when we know it’s going to lead to death, destruction, and subversion, then it’s just the same old beautiful loser approach we always see from the right-wing. If the current approach to free-speech leads to leftist subversion and eventually a leftist government, then we simply cannot support it.
The equivalent reasoning can be applied to pornography. We can’t decide to just blindly accept a flimsy argument for porn being free speech, and then permanently exempt it from ever being banned. If we are actively being subverted, then we have to protect ourselves. Otherwise, what’s the entire point? Suffer the loss of your society just so you can be proud that you never swayed from your principles?
I don’t know what the correct legalistic decision will ultimately be, but the definition of what is unacceptable speech has definitely been set aside. It will have to be properly addressed soon.
We will need to come up with as objective of a line as possible. We’ll need an updated, definable framework for acceptable speech, or the left is going to walk all over us both rhetorically and violently.
Stay tuned: The Right Wing Coalition’s first book, American History Z, is forthcoming from Arktos.
The Right Wing Coalition currently writes from Texas. After completing his undergraduate degree at the turn of the last decade, he moved away from the Pacific Northwest to escape his liberal home state. Though he has primarily worked in real estate development since completing college, he also did a short stint at Tesla and even published a novel. In addition to his career, he is earning a Master’s degree while also writing and recording political commentary for his YouTube channel, The Right Wing Coalition. He’s currently writing a book about the political awakening of Gen-Z that will be published by Arktos Media.
Well written.