I spent twenty-five years inside cable television. Bravo, Oxygen, Universal Kids, LOGO, VH1, Sci-Fi, Viacom Brand, R/GA’s broadcast division. I sat through a lot of internal conversations about what we could put on the air, what advertisers would tolerate, what affiliates would carry, what regulators might object to, and what the actual audience would respond to. The free-speech conversation in America has, since I left the business, mostly been conducted by people who have never had to balance any of that. I want to write about it from inside that experience, because I think the public version has the wrong end of the issue.
The standard “cancel culture” story goes like this: progressive activists, mostly on social media, mostly young, mostly on college campuses, are silencing dissenting voices, ruining careers over single bad jokes, and creating a climate of fear in which nobody can say what they really think anymore. The people telling this story tend to be wealthy and famous and to be telling it from extremely large platforms. The story is not entirely wrong. It is also not the most interesting or important version of the silencing happening in this country right now.
what’s actually happening to who
Let me start with the easy empirical part. A 2020 analysis looked at 40 high-profile “cancellation” cases. Of those 40, about 15 faced no measurable career impact. About 12 took a temporary hit and recovered within a year. About 8 took significant but not career-ending consequences. Five lost major opportunities or employment in lasting ways. Most of the people who claim to be canceled are still working. Many are working at a higher level than before, often because the controversy itself increased their profile.
J.K. Rowling, Dave Chappelle, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh, Bari Weiss. Every name on that list, often invoked as an example of cancel culture, has a larger audience now than five years ago. Several have had nine-figure media deals signed during the period in which they claimed to be silenced. That doesn’t mean the criticism of them was always proportionate or fair. It does mean the word “canceled” doesn’t accurately describe what happened to them.
The people who do actually lose their jobs in these episodes are usually not famous. They’re hourly workers caught on video doing something indefensible, schoolteachers caught crossing a line in a classroom, mid-career professionals whose employers got nervous about a tweet. The downside risk is real for them. It’s mostly not real for the people who make the most noise about it.
I will say, because I think it matters, that some of the actual mob behavior on social media in the 2019–2021 stretch was ugly. People I respected got piled on for things that didn’t warrant it. Some companies fired employees in panicked overcorrections that didn’t survive a calm reading of what had actually happened. A lot of corporate diversity initiatives launched in mid-2020 were performative, badly designed, and condescending to the very groups they claimed to serve. I watched several of them up close. The instinct to overcorrect was real, and the result wasn’t always good. People I know across the political spectrum got more careful about what they said in mixed company, and not always for healthy reasons. Anyone pretending none of that happened is being dishonest.
But I want to put that next to a different list, because I think the contrast is where the actual story is.
what’s actually happening to who, part 2
In 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis used the power of the state to strip Disney of its self-governing tax status — a status it had held since 1967 — explicitly because Disney had publicly criticized the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. DeSantis was open about the motive: “If Disney wants to pick a fight, they chose the wrong guy.” That is a state government punishing a corporation for protected speech.
In October 2024, Donald Trump sued CBS for $10 billion (later amended to $20 billion) over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Most First Amendment lawyers considered the suit meritless. On July 1, 2025, Paramount, CBS’s parent company, settled for $16 million paid to Trump’s future presidential library, including his legal fees. In December 2024, ABC News settled a Trump defamation suit for $16 million also paid to his future library, in a case many media lawyers considered defensible. In January 2025, Meta settled a Trump suit for $25 million over the post-January 6 suspension of his Facebook account. By the end of 2025, media organizations had paid Trump roughly $56 million in settlements over lawsuits widely considered weak on the merits but expensive to fight.
Brendan Carr, Trump’s appointed FCC chair, has opened at least eight investigations of media companies including NPR, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, and local stations. Targets have included how networks edited interviews, how they covered ICE raids, and how they conduct their diversity programs. In September 2025, after Trump publicly demanded Disney and ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about the late-night host’s reaction to the Charlie Kirk shooting, ABC suspended Kimmel for several days. Carr had made public remarks about the network days earlier. ABC has since formally accused the FCC of creating “a chilling effect on First Amendment-protected free speech” through a regulatory action focused on The View. Carr has also reportedly moved to open early review of Disney’s eight ABC station licenses, which the network is fighting.
Trump has filed additional lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal (over the Epstein “birthday book” story), the BBC (over a documentary), The Des Moines Register, and the Pulitzer Prize Board. As of early 2026, professional journalists and media organizations have filed at least 13 lawsuits against the Trump administration over press freedom violations.
I can keep going. In May 2025, EO 14290 ended federal funding for NPR and PBS, on the explicit basis that they had editorial perspectives the administration disagreed with. State legislatures have continued passing laws restricting how teachers can discuss race, gender, and American history; teachers in several states have been fired or disciplined under those laws. School library book bans set records every year from 2021 through 2024, concentrated overwhelmingly on books by or about Black, Latino, and LGBTQ authors. In 2023 Tennessee Republicans expelled two Democratic state legislators for protesting gun violence on the House floor.
That second list is not Twitter mobs. It is governments, federal and state, using the tools of state power — regulatory agencies, lawsuits, funding decisions, criminal threats — to punish speech they don’t like and to constrain what teachers, librarians, journalists, and corporations can say. Whatever you think of any individual item on the list, the cumulative pattern is not symmetrical to “Twitter activists were rude to a comedian.”
the word “woke”
“Woke” started in Black American vernacular in the early 20th century, popularized in the civil rights era, meaning alert to racial injustice. It got broader currency around 2014 with Black Lives Matter as a synonym for being aware of structural racism. Conservatives picked it up as a pejorative around 2019 or 2020, and it has since lost any consistent meaning.
You can see how loose the term has gotten when its users are asked to define it. In a 2022 deposition, the general counsel for Ron DeSantis was asked to define “woke” in the context of Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act.” His answer, under oath: “The belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” By that definition, the abolitionists were woke. The suffragists were woke. The labor movement was woke. The civil rights movement was woke. So is anyone who thinks any current American institution could be improved.
That’s not a useful policy term. It’s a content-free pejorative whose function is to mark a speaker as opposed to whatever the speaker thinks is going on. Once you notice that “woke” is being used to describe everything from gender-neutral M&Ms to military service members of color to AP history curriculum to corporate Pride marketing to acknowledgment that slavery happened, the word is doing very little work other than tribal signaling.
I’m not interested in fighting about the word. I’m interested in the substantive questions underneath it, and I think they’re worth having actual conversations about. Whether a particular DEI program is well designed. Whether a particular library book is age-appropriate. Whether a particular protester crossed a line. These are real conversations adults can have. The label doesn’t help us have them.
The piece of this that nobody seems to want to say out loud is that everyone is in favor of consequences for speech when the consequences fall on the other side, and everyone is opposed to them when the consequences fall on theirs. In 2003 the Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by country radio after Natalie Maines criticized George W. Bush from a London stage; their career took a decade to recover. In 2016 Colin Kaepernick was effectively pushed out of the NFL by ownership for kneeling during the anthem. After 9/11, anything French was renamed “freedom” in the congressional cafeteria and people poured French wine down drains, mostly approvingly. None of those was a Twitter mob. All of those were organized social and economic pressure to punish speech, and most of the people who orchestrated them are now talking about cancel culture as if it’s a left-wing invention.
The principle worth holding onto, I think, isn’t about which side gets to do it. It’s about scale and power. Twenty people on Twitter being mean to a celebrity is different from a state legislature banning books. A boycott of a beer is different from the FCC opening an investigation into a network’s editorial decisions. A college disinviting a speaker is different from a president filing a $20 billion lawsuit against a news organization. Both ends of the political spectrum produce some of the small version. Only one end is currently producing most of the large version, because only one end currently controls the levers of state power.
I’m a free-speech absolutist, more or less. I want comedians to be able to make jokes I find tasteless. I want professors to be able to teach material that makes their students uncomfortable. I want corporations to be able to make Pride logos or not make Pride logos. I want news organizations to make editorial choices without worrying about which sitting president will sue them. I want teachers and librarians to be able to do their actual jobs without consulting attorneys. I want activists on the left to be able to organize boycotts and activists on the right to be able to organize boycotts. Most of all I don’t want the government using its regulatory and legal power to pick winners in any of that.
That last part is the part the current “cancel culture” discourse is built to make us not notice. The state is, right now, the most aggressive actor in this fight. Pretending otherwise requires looking past a lot.
Even that's Odd 
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