The political mood feels like 9/11 again

Cancel culture comes around. And everybody is on their worst behavior.

Everett Collection

Next Monday, September 29th, I’ll be doing a live show at the Comedy Cellar in New York with Galen Druke and Clare Malone, my former FiveThirtyEight colleagues. Despite the venue, none of us will be doing stand-up; instead, we’re hoping to replicate the vibe of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I’m reliably informed that there are a small number of tickets left, which you can purchase here. It would be great to meet some Silver Bulletin readers there! UPDATE: We quickly sold through the remaining inventory! Thanks for your support, and we hope to do another one of these sometime soon.

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In 2002, ABC canceled Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect amid pressure from advertisers and the Bush White House. The show had been embroiled in months of controversy after Maher had implied that the September 11 terrorists had been brave to fly planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, whereas “we have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.” Maher eventually found a new home on HBO, a subscription network free of advertiser pressure, while ABC replaced Politically Incorrect with a more traditional, less political late-night show: Jimmy Kimmel Live.

I wasn’t covering politics after the September 11 attacks, instead toiling as a management consultant in my first job out of college. Nevertheless, 9/11 was a formative political experience for everyone of my generation, marking a transition into a darker timeline for the United States after the triumph of winning the Cold War. The political climate was as conservative as any I experienced in my lifetime (or at least since my faint political memories of the 1980s¹). I remember the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System, which never fell below the yellow (“elevated”) category. I remember George W. Bush having an incredibly high approval rating and 77 senators voting for the Iraq War. And I remember the cancellations: it wasn’t just Maher, but also the Dixie Chicks and Phil Donahue², among others.

After Bush won re-election in 2004 — though by a closer margin than you might have expected — Karl Rove bragged of a “permanent Republican majority”. Rove was wrong, obviously. Democrats had a strong midterm in 2006, and then Barack Obama won in a landslide in 2008.

But now the memories of that election feel nearly as distant as 9/11. From the moment I heard about Charlie Kirk’s murder, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach about the long-term ramifications for the political climate in the United States. The reaction more than a week later hasn’t been reassuring.

An inventory of bad and short-sighted behavior

I’ve never written that much about “cancel culture”. As a relatively non-hypocritical Free Speech Bro, I dislike it, of course. I think progressive types who deny its existence have usually never been on the cancellable side of an argument, instead relying heavily on partisan cues and carefully calibrating which way the wind is blowing before formulating their political positions. But few topics over the years have received more saturated coverage, so I’m not sure I have much value to add.

Here’s one perhaps novel observation, though. I’ve detected that liberals who came of age politically during the post-9/11 years — so roughly people in their 40s now — tended to be more wary about progressive cancel culture when it reached its apex in approximately 2020. In part, that may be because they remember when it was conservatives who were doing the canceling after 9/11. What goes around in politics tends to come around.

On Wednesday, ABC suspended Kimmel indefinitely after remarks he made about the assassination of Kirk. If, like me, you were hoping to keep your distance and let the situation calm down after that terrifying event, that’s been hard to do. Perhaps not even the assassination attempts against Donald Trump last year lingered in the conversation for quite so long³ (obviously, a big part of that is that Trump survived while Kirk did not). And I think it’s worth articulating why I feel so frustrated. There’s plenty of blame to go around, so let’s take stock. This list isn’t in any particular order, though I find the first item and the last one more worrying than the others.

Trump and the FCC. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, whom Trump had once lauded as a “warrior for free speech”, instead engaged in mob-like threats against ABC. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on a podcast on Wednesday. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

This is government coercion, plain and simple. I’m not one of those people who goes around calling everything that Trump does “authoritarian”, but these are the tactics of authoritarian governments. And the White House understands its leverage. Although ABC might not have any immediate business pending before federal regulators in the way that CBS did as it was cancelling Stephen Colbert’s show, some of its major affiliates do. Two of those affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, announced that they’d be pulling Kimmel from the air before ABC suspended him.

The cowardly executives at ABC and other news organizations. I worked at ESPN and then ABC News from 2014 through 2023, both part of the Walt Disney Company, after selling them the FiveThirtyEight brand. We never particularly faced any editorial interference during my tenure there — the problems with the relationship were more on the business side — although I gather that the relationship between ABC and FiveThirtyEight got weirder after I left. Mostly, I came away with the impression that the lead decision-makers at the network were always playing catch-up, a half-step behind political and media trends.

To be fair, other networks and major media outlets have acted similarly. MSNBC, for instance, fired Matthew Dowd after he made insensitive remarks about Kirk, and the Washington Post fired Karen Attiah after a slight misquote of Kirk and other comments on social media that frankly seemed pretty anodyne. I overlapped with Dowd at ABC and don’t have a high impression of him, if we’re being honest. He tends to be wrong a lot, from cheerleading for the Iraq War as the chief strategist of the Bush-Cheney campaign to, in his reinvention as a Democrat, perpetually spinning the polls in a favorable direction for the home team. He’s precisely the sort of person I was talking about earlier, someone who seeks out back-patting social affirmation from whichever tribe is currently in power. And yet, I don’t think he should have been fired for off-the-cuff remarks in a developing news situation; live TV can be tough even for veterans of the format like Dowd.

And I’m not sure what these network executives think the endgame is, exactly. Their audiences are old as hell, their products aren’t positively differentiated, and they won’t attract or retain talent if they behave so subserviently in the face of pressure. To see the downside case, they can look to the Washington Post, which still does important reporting but has entered what increasingly looks like a downward spiral under Jeff Bezos’s leadership, hemorrhaging subscribers and journalistic talent. During the first Trump term, the Post received roughly half the Google search traffic of the New York Times; it was clearly the second-most-important news outlet in the country, even competing on a level footing with the Times on domestic politics. Now, it has only about one-tenth as much search traffic.

Conservative cancel culture vultures. Hypocrites. What more is there to say? It’s not so surprising if you lived through the Bush years, though.

OK fine, I will say something else. Much of what you see on the right is undoubtedly driven by a desire for revenge against the left's excesses. I can even sympathize, to a degree: the political environment of 2020, the peak period of progressive cancel culture, was legitimately crazy. It can be easy to forget how minor some of the transgressions were that led to efforts to ostracize people or worse. And revenge almost always trumps all other political and emotional incentives. If there’s some truth you feel like you’re not allowed to speak to, that can build up a reservoir of resentment that can fuel grievance for years.

What’s maybe different about Trumpism, though, is that there’s almost nothing high-minded about it, no attempt to appeal to people’s better angels. In fact, that’s part of what attracts people to it. The charge that the other side are self-serving hypocrites is usually easy to prove through both valid and exaggerated examples. Without a guilty conscience, you might as well do whatever you can to consolidate power when you have it. One further tactical advantage is that there's not much time wasted in concocting elaborate rationalizations, so Trumpism moves quickly.

Progressive cancel culture vultures. What did y’all think cancellation meant? Did you not realize the very tools and techniques you championed could be turned against you? Do you even have the object permanence of a goldfish?

Some years ago on Twitter, I questioned the tactics of progressive groups that were encouraging an advertiser boycott of Tucker Carlson’s show. I don’t care for Carlson at all. Still, it seemed likely to me that these strategies would eventually be turned against the left, as they had been in the past, while also discouraging corporations from placing ads against politically adjacent content of any kind, producing an equilibrium where there was less money flowing into the already-difficult economics of political news and commentary.

Boy, that did not go over well on Twitter. So this is the point in the essay when I’m trying and failing to come up with a less annoying phrase than “I told you so”.

Progressives can have a home-court advantage when it comes to some types of cancellations — for instance, banishment of certain viewpoints in the center-left media or from academia or even from tech companies — because the rank-and-file staffers at these organizations tend to be liberals. But the publishers, founders, and CEOs — the people writing the checks — are often not so liberal at all, and they've been happy to have an excuse to flex their muscle.

Jimmy Kimmel and the progressive epistemic bubble. The remark that got Kimmel in trouble was this: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” This is not merely “insensitive”, in which case I wouldn’t have Kimmel on this list. Rather, from the best evidence available, the implication that “the kid who murdered Charlie Kirk” is MAGA is false. You would call it “misinformation” if that term weren’t usually deployed so one-sidedly (the overwhelming majority of misinformation researchers are on the left) by progressives to things that conservatives say rather than the other way around.

Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, appeared to confess to the murder in Discord chats. While Robinson’s motivations seem somewhat confused, as is often the case with assassins, and while we should approach any reporting on this topic with caution, the notion that Robinson was some sort of “Groyper” who killed Kirk because Kirk was too liberal appears to be wrong. “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” Robinson wrote to his roommate, whom Utah governor Spencer Cox described as “a romantic partner, a male transitioning to female.” (I mention that just because high levels of trans acceptance typically isn't a MAGA trait.) Kimmel has reportedly been obstinate in refusing to correct the record.

So where was Kimmel getting this from? Well, maybe from Bluesky. Or (gulp) maybe from Substack. As Gabe Fleisher pointed out, Heather Cox Richardson, the author of the #1 U.S. politics newsletter Letters from an American, wrote this weekend that Robinson “appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.” Richardson presented no evidence for this; it’s wishful thinking at best. But really, it's just a falsehood; like Fleisher, I’ll be polite and not use the term “lie” just because I don’t know what’s in Richardson’s head.⁴

I’m not looking to pick a fight with Richardson (I know some of you subscribe to her) or Kimmel. But the progressive epistemic bubble is getting really bad. Maybe not worse than the MAGA bubble — but bad, and progressives often rationalize bad behavior by saying whatever the other side is doing is worse. This has already had serious consequences, such as denialism about Joe Biden’s deteriorating condition last year, which they blamed on unfair media coverage. Kimmel is a relatively mainstream figure, so if this sort of misinformation about Robinson is making its way to him — and in scripted remarks, not off-the-cuff comments like Dowd’s — that suggests the bubble is expanding, slowly devouring the reality-based community, and that formerly rational commentators have trouble escaping it once they’re past the event horizon.

Unlike in 2001, these tactics aren’t popular

Given Bush’s high approval rating, conservatives could at least claim the presence of a sort of moral supermajority behind their cancellation attempts of the early 2000s. Trump can’t credibly do the same. I don’t suppose I have a major problem with, say, most NFL teams honoring Kirk given the degree of corporate advocacy for progressive causes in recent years. But in taking a more aggressive posture by (successfully) threatening ABC and its affiliates for Kimmel’s misinformed but clearly political speech, Trump has overstepped whatever mandate he had.

In the short term, that may mean Trump relies especially heavily on coercion rather than persuasion. In the long term, there's almost certain to be a backlash eventually. While I wouldn't predict the timing, I'm concerned about the form: that a future President Newsom or AOC will seek revenge rather than de-escalation, that executive power will be wielded callously, that the left will emulate the right's worst characteristics, and that those of us who know what liberalism actually is will be sidelined or opt out of the game.

1. My earliest politics-adjacent memory was watching Walter Mondale win fewer electoral votes (initially just 3 for D.C.) than my age at the time (6), though his home state of Minnesota was also eventually called for him.

2. MSNBC, then not quite so progressive, blamed the latter on poor ratings rather than Donahue’s anti-war views.

3. Google search data somewhat backs me up. Google searches for “assassination” were initially higher after the first attempt on Trump’s life than after Kirk’s murder, but search volume also declined more quickly for Trump.

4. Though I’d note that Richardson hasn’t yet taken the opportunity to walk back her claim.