Cancel Culture Isn’t Self-Defense — It’s Poison

In the wake of the Left’s vile revelry over Charlie Kirk’s assassination, something troubling has emerged: many on the Right are suddenly embracing cancel culture. The very tactic we once denounced as corrosive and authoritarian is now being reframed as a weapon worth wielding.

I’ve long argued that canceling is not only wrong but also self-destructive. It corrodes the cancelers as much as the canceled, stripping away moral high ground and poisoning the very culture conservatives seek to defend.

Yet some have countered: we’re not pacifists, we can’t keep turning the other cheek. If they cancel us, we must cancel them.

At first, this sounds symmetrical, even fair. But the analogy collapses.

If someone punches you in the face, you’re justified in punching back. I’m fine with that.

But cancel mobs rarely strike the people who actually engaged in canceling someone on your side. Instead, they go after those who merely cheered it on. That’s not self-defense—it’s escalation. It’s the equivalent of being punched, then swinging at bystanders, anyone in the crowd who smirked or nodded approval.

Normalize that logic, and you’ve shifted from defense to assault. From justice to contagion. Fear spreads, speech shrinks, and mobbing multiplies. Even when it “works,” you haven’t won anything—the point hasn’t been made, their ideas haven’t been humiliated, the boss only fired the employee to make the PR nightmare stop.

Meanwhile, the culture you create ceases to respect free expression, drifting toward a low-grade totalitarianism where everyone is afraid to speak. Worse, your opponents retreat into private echo chambers where they become more extreme, their social currency less and less exchangeable with yours—so they care even less about your opinion. And once hidden, you can no longer even see them clearly enough to react to the real threat.

This dynamic doesn’t restore order; it dissolves it. It doesn’t discipline enemies; it trains your own side to imitate them. Cancel culture offers the illusion of strength but delivers actual weakness. It promises to defeat your enemies while teaching you to become them. And in the end, it leaves society less free, less stable, and less capable of withstanding real threats.

The alternative isn’t pacifism. It’s refusing to poison the well we all drink from. Some weapons are too destructive to wield—not because they can’t hurt your enemies, but because they inevitably destroy everything else along the way.