2025 was the year of the Great Cancellation Gaslighting, and there were perpetrators on both sides of the aisle.
When we wanted the monsters who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk fired from their jobs, the Left tried to tell us we were embracing "cancel culture." See, they said, it was exactly the same as when they fired or suspended people for unobjectionable behavior: using the wrong pronouns, commissioning an op-ed expressing a position backed by most Americans, or posting an edgy joke that "every girl is bi."
On the Right, politicians, institutional leaders, and media personalities rose to tell us that, actually, we can’t cancel anybody because "cancellation" is the province of the Left.
"I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes has said, but canceling him is not the answer, either," Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said in a loopy video posted to X in October. He elaborated: "I and Heritage don’t engage in canceling people. Because when you cancel people, especially in the age of social media, if in fact you do that because you want their audiences to get smaller, you make their audiences bigger." Cancel us, Kevin!
Into this void of stupidity stepped a brave old dinosaur armed with a single piece of hard-earned wisdom: We conservatives, "we do cancel!"
At a town hall meeting of Heritage Foundation employees, senior research fellow Robert Rector harkened back to the origins of the conservative movement and its founder, William F. Buckley Jr. "I hope you know who he was," Rector said. (Don’t count on it, buddy.) Rector reminded his colleagues—or told them for the first time—of Buckley’s belief in the necessity of putting "boundaries around this movement."
"And the boundaries that he set forth, William Buckley, in the early 1960s, were twofold. You have to expunge all anti-Semitism, all of it. But that’s just part of it … the other is, you have to expel the lunatics, OK? The lunatics who think that Eisenhower was a communist, OK? And we have them back now, OK? They are both here—back—just the way they were in 1959. And we have to go back and set the general parameters.
"You say, ‘Oh, we don’t cancel.’ We do cancel! Did we cancel David Duke? Yes! You don’t even know who David Duke was, probably, most of you. Did we cancel the John Birch Society? Yes! Because if they are in your movement, you look like clowns."
Rector’s Heritage Foundation biography says he is a "leading authority" on poverty, welfare programs, and immigration in America. He’s also a leading exponent of good old fashioned common sense. For his courage and moral clarity, he is also a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year.