Right Wing Cancel Culture Is Still Wrong

This post isn’t going to be terribly long because it’s not terribly complicated, and it should be relatively easy to understand.

I was unreasonably optimistic and painfully naive when I first entered the world of activism in 2015. I had zero previous personal experience with the political process apart from turning in my obligatory ballot in November, the boxes checked right down party lines.

When I got invited to speak as a panelist at the Values Voters Summit in DC during an election year and found my name on the speakers’ lineup directly above Donald Trump’s, I was embarrassed to admit that I had never even heard of the event before. There I was with these savvy career politicians, and, at that point, I didn’t even know the name of my state Senator. All I knew is that I kept getting invited to these big fancy places to share my story about being fired for opposing men in women’s locker rooms and that I was so pissed off about it happening that I was happy to shout about it from the rooftops in hoping of sparing other people from similar experiences.

But like I said, I was super naive. I actually believed back then that if I just managed to find the perfect combination of gentle wording, the people who opposed me would at least see that my heart was good (not hateful or bigoted), and we could have some rational discussions about our ideological differences. My friend and I even showed up for a coffee date with a local trans identified male in hopeful expectation of being able to work out some of our differences. He was at least 6’2” and downright abusive from the start. I checked out somewhere around the time when he started yelling at me about how hateful and hurtful it was for me to object to the presence of his naked body in the YMCA girls’ locker room.

But he wasn’t an isolated case. Within a few months, I got a front row seat to the terrifying antics of the trans mob. I don’t use that term hyperbolically. When we hosted a press conference at the UW Tacoma campus, dozens of angry students shouted us down, preventing us from speaking, and the local police told us it was literally unsafe to go outside.

We received hexes in the mail at our campaign office. The online abuse was off the charts. My inbox was constantly flooded with demonic filth ranging from pornographic images of Jesus to graphic descriptions of the sexual and physical violence these people wished upon me. They purchased voodoo dolls to use against my children. One psychotic individual somehow managed to track down my unlisted phone number and began blowing my phone up with deranged and violent messages about how he intended to see my die. I had to file a police report on that one.

And then they doxxed my family, even going so far as to publish my parents’ physical address online in their massive group forums, inviting targeted harassment.

It was reckless. It was dangerous. It was unhinged.

As the months went on, I was grieved to see so many other people who, like me, fell prey to the monster of cancel culture. Journalists were blacklisted. Therapists and teachers were fired. College campuses that were once known as the bastions of free speech were now in the habit of expelling students for the hate crime of using accurate pronouns. Our beliefs were deemed literal violence. I lost track of the number of times I was informed, by people who genuinely believed what they were saying, that I had children’s blood on my hands. The group I co-founded with a liberal lesbian radical feminist was named on the SPLC’s hatewatch list. Those who subscribed to material reality were on par with Nazis, and everyone knew that it was ok to kill a Nazi.

I was truly stunned by the justifications so many people made for their abhorrent totalitarian behavior. I wondered if they actually thought this was an effective strategy. Even if they succeeded in shutting us up a bit out of fear for our physical safety, all they were doing was making us resent them more. We didn’t miraculously come to see the light as a result of their abusive behavior.

None of it made any sense to me.

So this past week when I watched prominent people on the right participate in the same rage mob antics and cancel culture, I honestly couldn’t believe it was happening.

The rage mob was spearheaded by Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the hugely popular X page: “Libs of TikTok,” which now has over 3 million followers.

In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, a number of ugly- hearted social media users expressed public disappointment that the would-be shooter had missed. “Too bad they weren’t a better shooter,” one woman named Darcy Waldron Pinckney posted on Facebook.

It’s a really gross thing to say. There’s something wrong with people who think this way, but it is, nevertheless, their right to say whatever they think and feel. Pinckney was not suggesting that anyone stage a coup. She wasn’t issuing a credible threat of violence of her own. She just said something really nasty on social media. That is, unfortunately, how social media works. I mean, in my own activism, one guy told me he wished I’d get raped with a crucifix. It’s a demonic thing to say. And had I worried for my physical safety, I would have taken action. Instead, I saved the screenshot to illustrate the psychosis of the men I opposed, and I hit the block button. That’s a reasonable response.

But that’s not what happened to Pinckney. Instead, Chaya rallied her minions to ultimately harass this woman with the express intention of getting her fired from her job at Home Depot.

"Hi @HomeDepot!" Raichik wrote. "Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?"

The backlash was so swift and so severe that Home Depot ultimately ended up responding by letting the public know that Pinckney’s employment had been terminated.

And I want to know how this helps. What was really accomplished in getting an old lady fired from her job? Do you think this backlash and the thousands of hateful comments she received online and in person served to change her mind about Donald Trump? Do you think she’s going to vote for him now that so many of his most zealous followers have shown up at her physical place of employment to tell her to burn in hell?

For whatever reason, I don’t think so at all.

Chaya took similar action with a Pennsylvania firefighter named Tony who also expressed disappointment that the shooter had missed. Chaya posted Tony’s face, name, and vocation on her channels, and to date, the post has been viewed nearly 12 million times. Not only did the masses go after Tony’s employer to the degree that he tendered his public resignation, but they found all his personal websites etc. to try to get them shut down as well.

Then Chaya gloated upon confirmation that he had resigned, as though this mob rule she had unleashed were some tremendous victory of the free world instead of a mini terror campaign to punish ideological opponents for having the audacity to say things she disliked. And Chaya was not alone. I saw at least half a dozen other prominent right-wing influencers celebrating the effort.

And again, I get it. Using accurate pronouns is not even in the same ballpark as wishing for the death of a presidential candidate. We are not comparing apples to apples in terms of the perceived offenses of either camp. But one of the most important principles attached to a true commitment to freedom of speech is that it must protect peoples’ right to say even things we think are abominable. And either we believe in cancel culture or we don’t.

I was arguing with someone about this on X, which is almost always an exercise in futility except for in its ability to illuminate to me the way that people think and reason, and this person actually said to me, “Kaeley, if we don’t punish our enemies, they will keep getting away with this crap.”

“Punish our enemies.” I mean, what on earth does that even mean? My mind immediately conjured the antihero from the Marvel comic strip—the one I’m constantly seeing in my husband’s firearm magazines. And it always makes me roll my eyes a little to wonder just how many maladjusted Americans are ordering weapons as part of some sort of dysfunctional fantasy of larping as the chosen instrument of wrath. Is it my job to punish my enemy? Or is it my job to love my enemy? And what does loving my enemy look like?

Certainly I can oppose horrendous ideas without terrorizing people into compliance, right? I can fight for ethical legislation. And on a personal level, I can use my own platform to invite people to respectfully challenge harmful or abusive ideas. I do this all the time where people like Doug Wilson are concerned because they’re actively creating victims with the power they possess.

Powerful people who are actively inflicting injuries on the innocent should absolutely be challenged. Similarly, if I see teachers who are bragging about their indoctrination efforts that will ultimately leave some of their students rendered permanently sterile, I think it’s more than reasonable to call the school and try to stop the harm from happening. Loving my enemy doesn’t have to look like rolling over, dying, or singing Kumbaya while the world burns. We can say things are wrong. And how these people responded to the assassination attempt was wrong. It wasn’t good.

But there’s a world of difference between challenging bad ideas in positions of power and siccing literally millions of hostile keyboard warriors on little old ladies who work at Home Depot to punish them for their thought crimes. On the other end of this trauma, I guarantee the recipients of it are only going to increase in their resentment, the abuse they’ve now fielded a stunningly powerful piece of evidence to support their confirmation bias.

We don’t change the world or solve these types of problems by scaring people into compliance. We do it by showing them a better way. I’m generally of the belief that one truly civil discussion is about a hundred times more powerful than a thousand abusive comments when it comes to challenging peoples’ thinking. I don’t want people like the Home Depot lady to refrain from making hateful comments because she’s terrified; I want her to refrain from making them because she’s realized that hate doesn’t win.

I would really love to believe that my party is above the cancel culture we’re constantly condemning. I hope, in the future, we will be more thoughtful about the way we engage those who oppose us.

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