OCTOBER 3, 2025 | OPINION | By Fiona Frankel
The term ‘cancel culture’ is most often associated with the political left, whether that be through a verbal attack on someone for misgendering, a comment section calling out racism or the public condemnation of J.K. Rowling for transphobia. The left is, according to some conservatives, intolerant of opinions differing from their own and unwilling to work across the aisle with those who don’t conform to a woke agenda. Liberals purportedly exist in a self-assured bubble, unwilling to accept others’ points of view as anything other than attacks on marginalized identities.
On the flip side, conservatives have expressed fear of retaliation against sharing their opinions online, and data from the Cato Institute indicates that 77% of conservatives feel they have to self-censor political expression, as compared to 52% of liberals. The Heritage Foundation characterizes people who call themselves “progressive liberals” as being at the core of movements to shut down debates on college campuses and restrict freedom of speech. “They are eager to cut corners, bend the Constitution, make up laws through questionable court rulings, and generally abuse the rules and the Constitution in order to get their way.”
In an increasingly polarized political climate, it is liberals, not conservatives, who are most often blamed for intolerance. Those who claim this do not solely exist on the right: political journalist Ezra Klein described people getting upset after he proposed the Democratic Party running pro-life candidates.
Former President Barack Obama encouraged young activists to abandon cancel culture, saying, “That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change…If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”
Ignoring the party responsible for cancel culture for a moment, it is important to remember both its roots and its effects. The phenomenon emerged largely in the 2010s with the rise of the #MeToo movement, a campaign against sexual assault that led to the accusations against and subsequent consequences for celebrities, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey and Matt Lauer.
Were these men canceled? When Weinstein was found guilty of raping Jane Doe #1 in a hotel room in 2013, one of over eighty women accusing him of sexual assault, was he canceled? As the Black Lives Matter movement took hold in 2020, were the individuals called out for the use of racial slurs or offensive behavior canceled? When Donald Trump, the current President of the United States, bragged about “[grabbing] women by the pussy,” when he referred to neo-Nazi protesters as “very fine people,” when he referred to African nations as “shithole” countries, was he canceled?
Arguably, no – he was reelected; the conversation about who promotes cancel culture often omits the fact of its ineffectiveness. Weinstein was sentenced to thirty-nine years in prison, a conviction recently overturned pending retrial.
White celebrities, including Morgan Wallen, Justin Bieber and Joe Rogan were all recorded saying the n-word, and have since maintained successful platforms with individual net worths approaching the hundreds of millions. And President Trump continues to spew vitriolic rhetoric to this day, inciting violence and stoking political animosity.
It is not overreaching to state that cancel culture does not work. It does not hold people accountable nor ruin futures in the ways the right claims it does. What does destroy lives, however, is the ways in which the Trump administration has attacked its opponents, weaponizing the power of the executive branch against citizens.
Former FBI Director James Comey was recently indicted by a federal grand jury in Virginia, after Comey investigated Trump for collusion with Russia in the 2016 election. Former CISA cybersecurity official Chris Krebs is facing a politically motivated investigation following his refutation of Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020. Many pro-Palestinian student protesters have also fallen victim to violent attacks by the federal government. Rumeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student, was kidnapped by plainclothes DHS officers and detained for six weeks at an ICE immigration center, following her co-authoring of an opinion editorial in the The Tufts Daily that called for the institution’s divestment from Israel. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, was arrested and detained by ICE for over three months, nearly a year after his leadership in the pro-Palestinian protests at the university.
Trump’s intolerance for his political opponents bleeds into his rhetoric as well as his actions. Most recently, at the Charlie Kirk Memorial Service, Trump spoke as to how he differed from Kirk’s approach to politics, saying, “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.” During his 2024 campaign, he promised to deploy the National Guard to handle “radical left lunatics,” a pledge he has followed through with in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, California and most recently Portland, Oregon.
And yet, the Democratic Party is blamed time and time again for intolerance of political rivals. In today’s media atmosphere, the left’s refusal to accept racial epithets, allow for the eradication of DEI and CRT and greet yet another mass shooting with “thoughts and prayers” is somehow on par with the Republican Party undermining civil liberties, punishing free speech by weaponizing immigration law and targeting political dissenters. The idea of cancel culture has been manipulated by the right to victimize themselves, as they continue to use this very phenomenon through far more violent, life-altering maneuvers.