The Left’s Cancel Culture Frankenstein Turns on It After Charlie Kirk’s Death

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve had a culture of about five years of what I would call cancel culture, deplatforming, doxing, blacklisting, using all sorts of methods to suppress free speech. That was one of the reasons why Elon Musk paid such an exorbitant sum for the old Twitter: to allow free speech.

And cancel culture said that if you voice something that was considered illiberal, you were gonna lose your job. We saw that through #MeToo, when a number of Hollywood luminaries and professors were fired because they had said or done something considered sexist or ill-advised. We saw that on matters of race after George Floyd.

But what’s happened now is the death of Charlie Kirk has kind of turned the tables. People who are using that death to comment in criticism of him before he is even buried are now facing, not censorship, but certain platforms, media platforms especially, are saying, “We just don’t want you to be here anymore. It’s not that we don’t like you. We’re not trying to censor you. We’re just giving you the Joy Reid treatment.”

Joy Reid, remember, was the cable media commentator who, night after night, could not finish a sentence without talking about “white people,” as her ratings went down and down. And she was finally let go. It wasn’t that people said that they were trying to silence her. They just said, “You can go do your own podcast.” In fact, she did her own podcast. I’ve watched one of them. And you can see why she was, indeed, fired. All she can talk about is “white people.” And people don’t want to hear that.

Recently, Karen Attiah, a columnist for The Washington Post, is very furious because, in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, she talked about him being a racist white man. And they felt, you know—Jeff Bezos is the owner. They just felt, you know, we’ve had enough of that. We saw a lot of that with Don Lemon. We see that with Al Sharpton. People are just tired of “race, race, race, race, race.”

Charlie Kirk had said something—he didn’t talk about black women, pejoratives, as a collective. He said that Ketanji Brown Jackson, a justice, and Joy Reid, in particular, a couple of other women—I think Michelle Obama—were not qualified, according to meritocratic standards. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But he said that DEI considerations had been used for their elevation or prominence.

In a way, I suppose he would say, why is Melania Trump not on Vogue but Michelle Obama was? I would say, I don’t know if it has anything to do with race or not, but it might have just as much to do with left-wing politics.

But nevertheless, they have been canceled and they’re very, very angry. And they feel that the Charles Kirk death/assassination has opened the gates of censorship. No, it hasn’t. It’s making a larger point, that when somebody dies, there’s a period, traditionally, of grace.

They’re also very angry because the murder of Iryna Zarutska opened the gates, they feel, of collectivizing, stereotyping black crime in a way that’s unfair. And they kind of say the Right wants a George Floyd moment.

But remember one thing, it’s very, very important about this dichotomy, this dialogue back and forth: When George Floyd died under police custody, he was used by the Left to advance a larger agenda, based on a premise. And we were told that George Floyd died violently while in police custody because this was a normal event in the United States, where police systematically killed suspect, unarmed black males. That was not true. That was not true.

The Washington Post found that of all the people who come in contact with the police—that’s a very important qualifier—black suspects who are unarmed are killed by police no more than their percentage in the demographic. Roland Fryer pointed that out, at his expense because, of course, he was criticized for doing it. He was the Harvard economist who did a study on it.

That’s very different than Iryna Zarutska because conservatives, like the late Charlie Kirk and others, were making a point that that represents a phenomenon that people are not talking about. Is it true or not? In the case of George Floyd, it prompted a conversation that the Left used when they knew the data was wrong. They knew that police were not shooting inordinate black, unarmed suspects, but they said they were. And the rest is history: defund the police, cashless bail, etc.

But in this case, it is true that Decarlos Brown and African American males between the ages of 15 to 40 compose a demographic of about 3% of the general population, and yet, they account for about half of all violent crimes and rare interracial crimes, such as we saw on the light rail in North Carolina. They are six to 10 times, depending on the nature of the violent crime, more likely to attack a white victim than a white victimizer is a black victim. That’s just a fact.

And that horrific death on the light rail brought attention to that reality in a way that conservatives wanted to point out that this was a national crisis.

But on the other hand, when liberals and leftists tried to say that George Floyd needed our attention to a national crisis, there was no empirical information, there was no data, there was no research that supported that position. And that was the difference.

And so, I think it’s very important—a final note—that when people want to comment on the death of Charlie Kirk, there’s two issues involved.

All of us, traditionally, in Judeo-Christian society, feel that there’s a grace period. That we do not attack people who have recently been dead. “Don’t speak ill of the dead.” It’s a famous Latin phrase.

Second, if you are going to speak ill of the dead and violate that canon, then you have to be accurate and not just—you have to point out that this represents something that is supported by evidence.

And in the case of George Floyd, there was no evidence for police overrepresentation of black suspects as victims. In the case of the Ukrainian immigrant, there was a lot of evidence that Decarlos Brown was not unusual, that he represented a particular demographic that inordinately was responsible for crime, and in rare cases of interracial crime, was inordinately represented as the victimizer class.

When people pointed that out, as Charlie Kirk did, he was not wrong for doing that. And it was wrong, in the wake of his death, to criticize him as a white man. And people lost their jobs, accordingly.

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