CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Cancel culture’s rules are changing and conservatives can seize the day

Editor’s note: The following essay first appeared in Ciy Journal and on the author’s Substack.

For the past decade, the political Right has lamented ‘cancel culture.’ The idea was that the Left unfairly stoked race and gender hysteria to restrict the terms of debate and to cast anyone deemed in violation of the mandated terms into a state of social annihilation. Teenagers who sang along with rap songs have been denied entry into college. Political figures who failed to use the latest euphemisms found themselves cast into the void. 

Now, with the second Trump administration, the rules of social annihilation are seemingly being rewritten in real time. The presidential appointments of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth might have been derailed, or not even attempted, in Trump’s first presidency. Yet, despite the salacious accusations against the two nominees, Senate Republicans held firm and confirmed both men.

Likewise, when left-wing journalists exposed a young DOGE staffer, Marko Elez, for pseudonymous social media posts, including ‘I was racist before it was cool’ and ‘normalize Indian hate,’ Elez resigned in what amounted to preemptive self-cancellation. Elez might have been ironically riding the ‘edge’ of the discourse, violating a taboo for a sense of thrill, but when his identity was revealed, he expected the old penalty. Then something different happened: Elez’s colleagues rallied to his support, with Vice President J. D. Vance arguing that ‘stupid social media activities should not ruin a kid’s life.’ What would have ended with a social death sentence five years ago instead became a short blip. The vice president rejected the calculus of left-wing cancel culture, demonstrating instead that forgiveness, loyalty, and a sense of proportion should be part of the decision-making process in such controversies. Elez was reinstated.

All of this is salutary, but in this period of renegotiation, the Right must take a deeper look at the dynamics of social cancellation and adopt a systematic method for moving forward. The Right’s longstanding proposal—to ‘cancel cancel culture’—might make for a good slogan, but it is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. The reality is that one cannot cancel cancel culture. Rules of etiquette, propriety, and acceptability will always exist; people who violate a society’s core taboos will always risk exclusion.

In other words, all cultures cancel. The question is, for what, and by whom.

Americans are tired of the narrow discourse and injustices of the past decade.

When the Left had power over the culture, it had a ready-made answer to the questions of values and power. It proposed intersectionality, critical race theory, and gender cultism as an operating ideology and guide for policing the discourse. If you violated the tenets of those theories in a work chat or a social media post, you placed yourself at risk of social consequences. The New York Times, The Atlantic, or Gawker could ruin a career or delete an individual from polite society by exposing an ideological faux pas. Even ostensibly right-wing institutions often buckled to their demands.

Now that the Right finds itself ascendant, it has the opportunity to provide a better answer to these questions. We should acknowledge that culture is a way for society to establish a particular hierarchy of values and to provide a way to police the boundaries. And then we should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward and provides a method for adjudicating the limits. From the perspective of practical politics, this will determine how the Right can protect its own members from unjust cancellation attempts and how it can enforce just consequences on political opponents who violate the new terms.

A number of upcoming events will put the new rules to the test. The confirmations of RFK Jr. and Pete Hegseth dominated headlines, but there will be lower-profile test cases for deputy secretary and assistant secretary nominees, who are perhaps more vulnerable. The Left will try to use past provocative public statements by these nominees against them. Republican senators should resist the temptation to react within that framing; instead, they should maintain a sense of proportion and treat each case in its fullest context. Social media posts, often imbued with irony and hyperbole, should no longer be grounds for automatic social and professional annihilation.

Americans are tired of the narrow discourse and injustices of the past decade. If we can rewrite the rules of cancel culture, then the Trump presidency could mark a new era of cultural freedom. And the Right can shift from a posture of permanent defense to one of governing in the name of its own principles.