The New Rules For Getting Canceled

Woke 1.0 might be over, but cancel culture never left. Over the past few weeks, we have watched a Michigan credit union CEO lose her job after posting a family photo with AI-generated “Lake America” sweatshirts. We saw the Portland Trail Blazers hire 29-year-old Braiden Bell as their new play-by-play broadcaster — and fire him just hours later after “offensive” tweets he wrote as a teenager resurfaced. 

Then came Kelly Carnes, the executive director of the Baltimore Rock Opera Society, who was fired after backlash over wearing cornrows at Burning Man. Meanwhile, a Pittsburgh LGBTQ bar canceled its next event after a drag performer was accused of blackface. The bar received such serious death threats that the venue said it was no longer safe to continue. 

These cases are different, and I do not personally agree with every action or statement involved. But that is exactly the point: In a free society, people will say things we find offensive, ignorant, or even morally repugnant. We do not have to agree with them. The danger begins when disagreement causes people to be punished, paying with their careers, their livelihoods, their reputations, and even threats against their lives.

Cancel culture reflects the belief that people who step outside an approved set of ideas should be punished into conformity. And once that becomes normal, it is much easier for the same dynamic to move from social pressure into institutions and the halls of government.

The fertile ground for this censorship is already visible on both sides of American politics. The socialist Left and political Right may believe very different things, but the underlying instinct looks remarkably similar.

On the socialist Left, the meaning of “oppression” has expanded far beyond its traditional focus on class exploitation. Over time, socialist movements have increasingly applied that framework to race and colonialism, gender and sexuality, housing, health care, and now even body size, fitness, and cultural expectations around health. When the category of “oppression” expands, so does the range of ideas and behaviors that can be labeled harmful. Once disagreement is treated as harm, then suppressing it becomes easier to justify. 

On the Right, we see the same temptation take a different form. The Trump administration has repeatedly clashed with members of the press it considers dishonest or unfair, including in efforts to restrict access over how news organizations described events or the terminology they used. The logic is familiar: If I believe your speech is false or harmful, why should you be allowed the same access or platform? Once government begins deciding which journalists, viewpoints, or descriptions deserve access based on whether those in charge approve of them, disagreement is no longer merely being criticized; it is being met with state power.

It’s not that America has already reached authoritarian censorship, but that both sides are showing the same dangerous instinct: expanding what counts as intolerable while becoming more comfortable using power against it. The question then becomes who gets to enforce it, and how far they are willing to go.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in “The German Ideology” that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” meaning that those who control society’s major institutions often shape which ideas dominate public life. Marxist-Leninist governments took that much further: The ruling political class did not merely influence ideas; it used the state to enforce them. In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party controlled media, publishing, libraries, and artistic institutions, while those who challenged the official line could face censorship, imprisonment, exile, or worse. That is the historical warning: The real danger begins when those in power are no longer content to argue for their ideas, but gain the authority to punish people for rejecting them.

That is why individual liberty matters most when someone is saying something we despise. Freedom of expression means very little if we only protect ideas with which we already agree. A free society requires the maturity to look at an idea we hate and say, “I completely disagree with you — and you still have the right to say it.”

So here is my sophisticated prescription for surviving offensive ideas in 2026: Grow up and be an adult. Know what you believe, defend it, challenge bad ideas, and condemn genuinely harmful behavior when necessary. But maturity also means refusing to let someone else’s words become an excuse to abandon your own principles.

That is the great irony of cancel culture. It so often claims the moral high ground while using methods that contradict the very values it says it is defending. You cannot claim to oppose hatred while responding with hatred, fight oppression by coercing people into conformity, or preach peace while threatening someone’s life. If our response requires us to become what we claim to oppose, we have not overcome the problem; we have become part of it.

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Holly Jean Soto is a liberty and economics communicator dedicated to making complex economic, social, and political ideas accessible to everyday audiences. She graduated from George Mason University with a bachelor’s degree in economics and is a Young Voices contributor.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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