Brownstone Institute
Conservatives Cancel the Cancellers
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The irony is thick, given that some of those doing the cancelling are known for their prior staunch efforts to protect free speech, raising questions about whether some wish to protect free speech in principle or just the speech they agree with.
Calls for deportation of a comedy band over a failed joke and efforts to get ordinary working-class people sacked for saying terrible things out loud…
These are the kinds of actions one might expect from a progressive woke cancel culture mob, but in the wake of the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, it’s conservatives who have led the charge to cancel their political enemies over speech.
The irony is thick, given that some of those doing the cancelling are known for their prior staunch efforts to protect free speech, raising questions about whether some wish to protect free speech in principle or just the speech they agree with.
Assassination Joke Misfire
In Australia, a storm in teacup developed this week after a tasteless joke seeded clouds of discontent within conservative ‘freedom’ circles.
If you haven’t heard, Kyle Gass, of comedy band Tenacious D, quipped “Don’t miss Trump next time” as a 64th birthday wish while on stage in Sydney on Sunday night. It was in very poor taste, though the audience hooted and laughed.
Being that the duo is famous for taking irreverent silliness all the way to 11 on the dial, with antics like running on the beach in boxers and unitard in their cover of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game,’ and their peak silly song ‘Tribute’, you might expect a collective eye roll in response to Gass’s misstep.
But these are woke cancel culture times, defined by the dogged, humourless commitment to interpreting jokes as serious statements of intent, and the hysterical belief that words are tantamount to violence.
Gass’s bandmate Jack Black issued a formal apology and announced the cancellation of the band’s Australian tour. Gass soon apologised himself and has reportedly been dropped by his agency.
But that was not enough for upset Trump supporters Down Under, who enthusiastically called for Tenacious D’s deportation from the country.
“Tenacious D should be immediately removed from the country after wishing for the assassination of Donald Trump at their Sydney concert,” said Senator Ralph Babet of the United Australia Party in a statement, viewed over four million times on X.
“This was not a joke, he was deadly serious when he wished for the death of the President…Anything less than deportation is an endorsement of the shooting and attempted assassination of Donald J Trump, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th President of the United States,” he said.
Senator Babet reasoned that as Australia had wrongly deported Novak Djokovic in 2022 over his anti-Covid vaccination views, we should now also deport Tenacious D.
“Australia wrongly locked up Novak Djokovic and deported him because he allegedly undermined public trust in vaccination. Allowing Tenacious D to remain in Australia after calling for the death of a President is unthinkable, and it affirms the weakness of our current Prime Minister,” Senator Babet said.
Commenters praised Senator Babet for his “leadership.”
Left-wing news site Crikey was quick to point out the apparent double standard:
This is the same senator who in April refused to take down graphic footage of the attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel from his X account because: “Without free speech our nation will fall.” Late last year the senator sent Communications Minister Michelle Rowland 152 “postcard-style” submissions regarding the draft Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill “on behalf of members of the public”, like the following:
Simon Collins of the West Australian similarly called out the hypocrisy of “blowhards” calling for Tenacious D’s cancellation and deportation, people who at the same time “proclaim to be advocates for free speech.” That said, Collins failed to mention the central role he allegedly played in getting Perth comedian Corey White’s run of shows cancelled at the 2021 Fringe Festival over an offensive joke.
Raising the hypocrisy stakes even higher, conservative influencer Chaya Raichick used her ‘Libs of TikTok’ platform (with over 3.2 million followers on X) to doxx minimum-wage workers and get them fired for wishing the Trump shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had aimed better.
Raichick boasted on her Substack,
In fact, because of Libs of TikTok, TEN DERANGED LEFTISTS have already been FIRED from their jobs because we showed the world that they support murdering President Trump.
It is uncertain how many of these ten were public figures, but at least some of those fired are reported to be ordinary working-class Americans, including Home Depot worker Darcy Waldron Pinckney, who ill-advisedly posted to Facebook, “To [sic] bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!”
This effort has been enthusiastically supported by Riachick’s followers. “We got another one!” posted one commenter under a post doxxing a New Jersey Education Association employee for expressing her disappointment on social media that the shooter missed.
Yet, Raichick and her supporters previously complained loudly when Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz doxxed her, with Raichick calling Lorenz’s actions “abhorrent.”
Protected Speech Vs. Incitement to Violence
In the US and Australia, as in most Western liberal democracies, free speech is protected. The US has robust speech protections under the First Amendment, while Australia has the less robust implied freedom of political communication.
However, where speech causes, or is likely to cause harm, governments put legal limitations on speech rights. While the proliferation of hate speech and online harm bills is a testament to the ballooning definition of harm in Western academia and policymaking, incitement of physical violence is a foundational interpretation of the limit to free speech.
In both Australia and the US, speech that incites someone to commit a crime of violence is against the law, and in the US it is a felony to threaten the life of a president.
But not all statements expressing a wish for harm are a ‘true threat.’ In a 1971 interview with Flash Magazine, Groucho Marx quipped, “I think the only hope this country has is Nixon’s assassination,” but he was not arrested.
In contrast, David Hilliard of the Black Panther Party was charged in 1969 – and then acquitted in 1971 – for stating publicly before a crowd that President Nixon was “responsible for all the attacks on the Black Panther Party nationally,” adding “We will kill Richard Nixon.”
Asked to explain the different treatment of the two cases despite the similar rhetoric used by Marx and Hilliard, US Attorney James L. Browning, Jr. responded,
It is one thing to say that “I (or we) will kill Richard Nixon” when you are the leader of an organization which advocates killing people and overthrowing the Government; it is quite another to utter the words which are attributed to Mr. Marx, an alleged comedian. It was the opinion of both myself and the United States Attorney in Los Angeles (where Marx’s words were alleged to have been uttered) that the latter utterance did not constitute a “true” threat.
In other words, context matters.
Bad jokes or incitement?
Conservatives going after people wishing that the Trump assassination attempt had been successful, whether joking or otherwise, claim that their comments are “call[s] to political violence,” to use Senator Babet’s phrase.
But jokes like Gass’s birthday wish wouldn’t meet the legal threshold for incitement to violence, says James Allan, Professor of Law at the University of Queensland.
“A reasonable person would have to understand it as actually trying to incite violence,” Professor Allan told me. “I think he was just being a virtue-signalling leftie. I don’t think he actually intended to counsel violence, and I suspect most people wouldn’t take it that way.”
Dr Reuben Kirkham of the Free Speech Union of Australia (FSU) agrees that Gass’s joke would not qualify as incitement under the law in New South Wales, where Gass said the bad thing.
“Outside of incitement provisions focussed on specific protected characteristics, the person must intend that the offence be committed. A joke at a comedy event is unlikely to meet this standard, let alone to the ‘reasonable doubt’ standard,” Dr Kirkham said, echoing Professor Allan. “It might be in poor taste, but taste is thankfully not something that the law polices,” he added.
But Tony Nikolic, Director of Sydney law firm Ashley, Francina, Leonard & Associates told me he believes that Gass’s comment was “clear-cut incitement and should be called out.”
“Free expression is a cornerstone of democracy. However, rhetoric that crosses into inciting violence or hatred can have dangerous consequences,” Nikolic said. “We have laws to address that in Australia and they should have been used to indict the offender.”
Conservative Game Theory
Professor Allan said that while he doesn’t think prosecution or deportation is appropriate in Gass’s case, there are social consequences for saying “idiotic things” from a public platform.
“I definitely wouldn’t support [Gass]. His agent has dropped him. People don’t have to associate with people who say idiotic things. If he came out with a grovelling apology…I’d be inclined to say, OK, fine.”
Nevertheless, he warned that cancel culture writ large is not a good strategy for anyone who truly values protecting free speech.
“The problem is you go down the cancel culture route and you become as bad as the other side,” Professor Allan said. “I understand that there’s a certain sort of game theory element, that if they do it to us, we need to do it back to them, and in some areas I agree with that.
“But with speech, it is better not to play the cancel game. The other side reveals how they actually think. We want to know that. We should fight against our views being cancelled and fight hard, but not make the error of cancelling theirs. The more they talk, the more people can see the insipid, doctrinaire foundations to their views.”
Others disagree.
In an article called ‘In Defense of Cancel Culture’ in the American Spectator this week, Nate Hochman argued that the right should adopt a new, much more aggressive strategy in dealing with its political opponents: mutually assured destruction (MAD).
Hochman’s thesis is essentially that the left has debased the political discourse to such a degree that playing nice and principled is a losing game. Instead, he counsels “a short-term escalation to force a long-term de-escalation.”
This means punishing progressives for their bad behaviour in the same way that they have done to conservatives until they understand, “at a visceral level, the penalties for the system that they themselves constructed.” He reminds readers that roughly half of Democrats wanted to fine and imprison unvaccinated Americans in 2022 (in the US, Covid vaccination is a highly partisan issue).
Once progressives feel that the negatives of the cancel culture they’ve fostered outweigh the positives, said Hochman, “then, and only then, will the incentives truly change.”
Commentators in the blogosphere and on social media have offered similarly revanchist takes.
“No one wants to live a world characterized by (metaphorical) nuclear exchanges, but nuclear exchanges, once they become part of the universe of discourse, and [sic] held off only by deterrence, not decency,” wrote author Devon Erikson on X.
Pseudonymous Substacker John Carter catalogued a selection of such nuclear exchanges, including this “short list of how “Turn the other cheek” absolutely didn’t moderate the Left.”
“The left has been absolutely ruthless and relentless in its pursuit of total monolithic discursive purity,” he inveighed, suggesting that so long as conservatives are surgical in their use of political violence to achieve their goal – “ending leftist violence” – all will be well. “We can be magnanimous after victory.”
Doxxing Ordinary People Puts Harm in ‘Digital Granite’
Free speech purists will find the MAD strategy a hard pill to swallow – especially those who have paid a price to take a principled stand against cancel culture.
Former corporate journalist Alison Bevege is one of these people.
In 2020, during the first year of the Covid pandemic, Bevege was asked to work on an article on ‘Bunnings Karen,’ after footage circulated online of an unmasked woman arguing with Bunnings staff over her refusal to wear a mask inside.
But then, “it wasn’t enough just to kind of shame Bunnings Karen – they wanted me to find out her name, to try to find her on social media. And I didn’t want to do that,” Bevege told me, explaining that there should be a distinction between how we dole out social consequences to public figures and how we deal with private citizens. She left the Daily Mail soon after.
“You know, cancel culture has two components. One component is the shaming of the act, where you might share the video of some stupid thing that someone did, and everyone can laugh at it. I don’t really have a problem with that. That’s part of how we reinforce social norms,” said Bevege.
“But it’s the second part of cancel culture that I don’t like. And that is when you try to make that person really suffer by, for example, trying to get them to lose their job or trying to make it stick to them forever in a permanent way, like trying to damage someone with it.”
Bevege, who now publishes on her own Substack, Letters From Australia, and drives buses, gave the example of a prospective employer googling the name of a person who’s been shamed online.
“When you have a member of the public, you don’t know if that person’s had a bad day, if they’re mentally ill, if they’ve just lost their parents, if they’re drunk or on drugs. But when you name someone online it’s in digital granite. It’s there forever, and can really affect their lives.”
This is where Bevege draws the line. In MAD game theory though, this is the acceptable cost of “ending leftist violence,” if the victim is a Home Depot worker wishing for a successful presidential assassination.
Deportation Should Not Be Used for Censorship of Debate
In the case of public figures like Gass doing dumb things on stage, Bevege said people should by all means “rip the shit out of him…and don’t go to a show,” but that deportation would be “ridiculous.”
“I like Senator Babet because he’s really stood up for the vaccine injured. But we’ve got to stop deporting and banning people for speech,” said Bevege, recalling the time polarising UK personality Katie Hopkins was deported from Australia for joking online about planning to breach Covid quarantine rules and for describing the lockdown as a “hoax.”
Nikolic and Dr Kirkham also raised concerns over migration laws being used as a tool for censorship. Nikolic has been a vocal critic of the conservative Australian Government’s deportation of star tennis player Novak Djokovic in January 2022 for his anti-Covid vaccination views. And, Dr Kirkham pointed to the delay of Irish women’s rights and gender critical activist Graham Linehan’s visa application earlier this year while Australian authorities conducted a “character assessment,” despite Linehan having no criminal record.
“Freedom of speech exists for the views that you don’t like, and you have to tolerate those views,” said Bevege.
Unfortunately, an increasing number of conservatives seem to be running short of tolerance.
Republished from the author’s Substack
From the Brownstone Institute
By 
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.
In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.
You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.
An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?
The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.
People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.
This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.
A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.
This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.
“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.
“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.
At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.
Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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