Some conservatives—Ted Cruz, most notably—worry that Jimmy Kimmel’s potential removal from late-night broadcast television (Disney has indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! but not yet fired him) sets a dangerous precedent: If Democrats regain power, Cruz and others warn, they will use the same tactic against conservative figures.
This warning calls to mind the words of Christopher Hitchens, who, speaking at the University of Toronto’s Hart House Debating Club, said, “Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else, you are—in potentia—making a rod for your own back.” I have often appealed to Hitchens’ warning. But I also realize that it doesn’t matter how tolerant conservatives and liberals are of the excesses of the left. When progressives have power, they come after their enemies no holds barred. Out of power, they resort to guerrilla warfare.
Cruz’s concern rests—and perpetuates—a misunderstanding. As I explained in yesterday’s essay (Progressives Flipping Like Flags on a Pole: The Cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel and the Real Threat to Free Speech), the FCC never pressured Disney to act but rather reasserted the purview of the agency. Disney anticipated the cultural climate and political winds and made a decision. The company has always exercised its own judgment regarding employees. (Recall Gina Carano’s removal from The Mandalorian after she compared being a Republican today to being a Jew during the Holocaust, or ABC canceling Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect for a remark about the September 11 terrorist attacks.)
Misunderstanding aside, the Texas Senator appears to believe that showing tolerance toward opponents’ speech—I shall in a moment come to who that opponent is—will inspire progressives to respond in kind. That expectation is naïve. On what grounds should conservatives and liberals expect grace from a movement and a power that treats offensive speech as justification for censorship, deplatforming, termination, or—in more extreme rhetoric and action—eradication?
No matter what stance the FCC takes—whether invoking its “public interest” mandate or ignoring it, as it often does—progressives will continue canceling, deplatforming, and targeting conservatives. It’s what progressives do. We don’t have to speculate. We already have years of experience with their tactics. There is no goodwill to be found on that side. That’s because the two sides in this struggle represent irreconcilable standpoints on liberty and justice. One side (comprised of conservatives and liberals) believes in dialogue. The other side is authoritarian.
Conservatives assume that the free speech tenet of liberalism is a universal value, that rational people accept the guardrails of constructive dialogue—principles enshrined at the birth of the Republic—voiced in the first article of the US Bill of Rights—and upheld as civic ideals and enforced by legal protections ever since. The woke progressive stance, by contrast, is illiberal. It embraces a militant conception of speech as violence. For many on that side, even silence is violence.
From this perspective, offensive or “harmful” speech is not an idea to counter through dialogue but an act inflicting real damage, thus demanding resistance. The “marketplace of ideas,” long central to liberal thought, is rejected. Certain expressions—especially those labeled “dehumanizing,” “hateful,” or “oppressive”—are treated as instruments of domination that reinforce “systemic injustice.” Speech, in this framework, is never neutral but always entangled in power (this nihilistic expression owes a lot to the Fench postmodernist epistemic, but it is ultimately a popular reflection of corporate power). To tolerate harmful discourse is to perpetuate harm. Words are like sticks and stones for the woke progressive: they injure. Even silence wounds.
The moral justification for this stance ostensibly rests on a supposed ethic of harm prevention and self-defense. If words create fear or reinforce oppression, suppressing or punishing them becomes framed not as censorship but as justice (see The Noisy and Destructive Children of Herbert Marcuse; also, We’ve Been Here Before: Student Radicalism and Their Apologists). From this vantage point, harassment, intimidation, or even violence against offensive speech is rationalized as protective action. That the claims of harm may be exaggerated—or imagined—is irrelevant. The core assumption is that all disagreement is harmful, oppressive, and intolerable. The result: their side is so right that the other side must either submit or suffer reputational, material, and even physical consequences.
Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, in a 1968 postscript to his 1965 essay calling for the suppression of the free speech rights of conservatives, writes, “I suggested in ‘Repressive Tolerance’ the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressed. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character.” Angela Davis’ mentor called on the left to “fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination.”
This is not a rational position. It’s irrational, and irrationalism legitimizes violence under the guise of collective and righteous self-defense—without any purchase in morality. In a word, it’s authoritarianism. Authoritarians necessarily oppose liberalism because it threatens their assertions by opening challenges to them; irrationalism is rationalism’s antithesis. There is no synthesis to be found in this dialectic; the former is the negation of the latter—the consequences are destructive. The individual who rejects dialogue as inadequate or complicit in “injustice,” as defined by the “oppressor-victim ideology” (critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, whatever) inevitably embraces action—often violent action—as the only path to “justice.”
Harassment, intimidation, and coercion are rebranded as morally necessary, framed as defenses of dignity, equality, and “safety.” Safety in this perverse worldview is secured by making the conditions of others unsafe. Dialogue itself is judged dangerous, since it allegedly sustains the harms it fails to eradicate. Disagreeable opinions must therefore be destroyed by force. Justice is flipped on its head and recast as “social justice.” In this formulation, freedom becomes slavery—to adopt the Orwellian slogan from Nineteen Eighty-Four.
From this formulation follows a profoundly detrimental consequence: truth becomes a casualty of social justice. When truth contradicts the narrative of the righteous victim, it is recast as hateful and oppressive. Victimhood falsely confers an epistemic privilege that, if accepted, renders universal standards of reason impossible. Compromise cannot occur in a framework where concession is a priori treated as complicity in oppression. Dialogue is betrayal, negotiation is surrender, and violence for one side only becomes virtue.
This illiberal posture mirrors traits of a narcissistic personality. Narcissists exhibit grandiosity, hypersensitivity to criticism, fragile self-concepts masked by aggression, and an inability to recognize other perspectives as legitimate. Narcissists interpret disagreement not as an honest difference but as personal attacks or betrayals. Both the social justice warrior and the narcissist claim superiority while adopting a victim identity that demands special protections, skirting paradox, and freeing them from moral constraints against harming others. For both, dialogue is not truth-seeking but domination. Any challenge to the ego invites deflection, hostility, and aggression. The result is a worldview where compromise is impossible, criticism intolerable, and coercion recast as justified.
Recall Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote about insanity in his 1886 Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future: “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” The progressive left embodies Nietzsche’s observation—collective madness appears throughout human societies and history, and our present society and history are in the grip of a collective madness. That madness is woke progressivism.
Given these irreconcilable standpoints, neither conservative nor liberal should expect reciprocity from the left if they bend over backwards to tolerate progressives’ behavior. On the contrary, those compelled to forge this coalition should expect the worst. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is not a one-off. His murder punctuates the moment we’re enduring.
Does this mean conservatives and liberals should mirror the irrationalism of the left? No. It’s not in the constitution of our respective sides (which have more in common than not). We do what we have always done: use government, law, and policy to preserve the Republic and its constitutional foundations. What we don’t do is deceive ourselves into believing that inaction will pacify the left. We act where we can, and this requires holding corporations accountable to the public interest.
This is where Cruz misses the mark. The Republican Senator fails to acknowledge that the corporations that use the public airwaves agree, when given an FCC license, to serve the common good of the nation, not push an ideological or one-sided party standpoint. A Media Research Center (MRC) analysis of Trump’s second term, focusing on ABC/CBS/NBC evening newscasts, found that greater that ninety percent of coverage was negative, despite Trump’s popularity in the polls. Other studies find the same thing. We must hold corporate power to the standard of fairness if we permit them to reach into our living rooms night after night. Those who abuse the American System of free enterprise must face accountability for their actions. Cruz has identified the wrong mob.
Corporations are not people, after all, however much Supreme Court judges have leaned on the presumption that a past Court decision established as much. There is no such precedent. The phrase “corporations are people” can be traced to the 1886 case Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Co. But the actual opinion did not rule that corporations have Constitutional rights. The confusion stems from the court reporter’s headnote, which stated that the Court did not wish to hear argument on whether the “Equal Protection Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment (written to address the badges of slavery—overturning Dred Scott v Sandford by guaranteeing birthright citizenship to black Americans) applied to corporations, since “we are all of the opinion that it does.” Headnotes, however, are not law—they are summaries and not binding precedent. Over time, courts and lawyers treated the reporter’s statement as if it reflected the Court’s holding. Thus, myth has determined law and collective fate.
There is nothing in the foundational law that prevents governments from restricting corporate behavior, and what is in the law that prevents this is invalid from a constitutional perspective. Indeed, the principle that corporations fall under the rule of law is a necessary condition for a free society. In the age of absolutism, the sovereign’s authority was rooted in the natural law legitimized by its divine character. Corporations were material enterprises subject to that entity naturally entitled to express, interpret, and enforce that law. The sovereign’s power went by the Latin Quo Warranto—“by what authority?”—meaning that corporations are answerable to the sovereign.
America’s hard-fought independence from the British monarchy did not cede this authority to corporations, but rather transferred that authority from the sovereign in personal form (the king) to the sovereign in the corpus of the People (no kings). The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution establish that the American People are the sovereign, and corporations answer to the People through their elected representatives in a republican system that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed (I am here effectively quoting the founding documents). (I have written about this in several essays: Richard Grossman on Corporate Law and Lore; Progressivism Hasn’t Been Betrayed—It’s Been Installed; The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint.)
Tolerating progressive excesses in the service of corporate power compromises our values and hurts Americans. And that is what progressivism is—an expression of corporate governance and extralegal excess. When the government acts to advance the illegitimate regime of the corporate state, it is acting against the national interests. During and after the 2020 election, when the Biden administration and allied agencies repeatedly communicated with social media companies about what they deemed disinformation or foreign influence operations, flagging posts it considered “problematic,” including COVID-19 and vaccine content, pressuring firms to downrank or remove such material, it was advancing the interests of powerful corporations over the interests of the People the Republic was established to protect and defend.
Never forget what progressives did to you in 2020. During the Presidential election, social media companies suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, influenced by warnings from federal agencies and former intelligence officers about the machinations of foreign disinformation—a claim that those persons and entities knew was false. Executives later claimed that they were not directly ordered to do so by government officials, but their moderation policies clearly indicated external pressure. Why did they suppress the laptop story? Because they were determined to install Biden as President. Why Biden? Because the Democratic Party represents the interests of transnational corporate power. The suppression of the laptop story had its intended effect. Polling indicates that had the public known about the contents of the laptop, enough of them would have changed their vote to affect the outcome of the 2020 election.
The corporate state must be the target of conservatives and liberals concerned with preserving the American Republic. Inside Twitter (before it was acquired by Elon Musk) and other platforms, decision-makers with prior government and intelligence ties shaped the community standards that censored American citizens on platforms that were designed to provide the common man the means to express his opinion. Crucially, the censorship regime of social media reflected (it still does) not only institutional pressure but also a broader progressive outlook—one that prioritized combating misinformation, protecting public health messaging, and safeguarding election integrity, at the cost of restricting legitimate speech, for the purposes of perpetuating the corporate state.
The progressive panic over Jimmy Kimmel is a propaganda campaign manufactured to confuse Americans about the role of government in bringing corporations to heel for the sake of public interest. Progressives appeal to free speech (when convenient) to obscure their function as agents in entrenching and expanding corporate power—big media companies, the culture industry, and the administrative state.
The contest over speech in America is thus not merely a clash of policy preferences; it’s a deeper battle between two incompatible worldviews—and irreconcilable governmental frames. One side seeks to preserve a liberal order grounded in constitutional principle, open dialogue, and reason governed by republican virtue; the other redefines disagreement as harm, dissent as violence, and suppression as justice to establish a totalitarian corporate state. The latter works from a double standard, where their speech is portrayed as virtuous and actions justified, while like responses from the other side in defense of liberty are denied to them. It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the fight of our lives. We’re winning, but that’s when the left becomes most dangerous.
Conservatives and liberals who expect reciprocal tolerance misjudge the nature of this divide. The left’s illiberal posture, amplified through corporate actors, cultural and media institutions, and captured government agencies—indeed advancing those elite interests—has already demonstrated its willingness to curtail speech in pursuit of ideological goals. Kirk is not the only casualty of leftwing aggression, but rather an extreme and increasingly common manifestation of it. To respond with passivity to this existential threat to the Republic is to invite further erosion of liberty and our capacity to defend our nation. To be blunt, passivity in the face of extremism is suicidal empathy. You may feel sorry for the narcissist, but you don’t allow him to manipulate and mistreat you (to be sure, some do, but that indicates a mental illness in itself).
So what am I recommending? I have indicated the path forward above: bring corporations to heel using government and law. In recommending this, I want to stress that taking this path must not imitate progressive authoritarianism, but rather defend and reaffirm the principles of free expression, institutional accountability, and the rule of law. Only by holding corporations, cultural gatekeepers, and policymakers to the standards of a free republic can conservatives and liberals protect the American system from those who would dismantle it under the guise of justice. That is not suppression of speech but the liberation of speech from corporate power and street-level violence.
Ted Cruz fears that if progressives regain power, they will weaponize institutions to punish conservatives; that by tolerating this climate, conservatives will have ceded the very principle needed to defend themselves. But dialogue presumes two parties willing to engage the dialectic in good faith. Experience shows a consistent pattern: the left has little interest in mutual exchange or maintaining the rational guardrails that foster civil dialogue. There is no reservoir of goodwill to be found there, because progressives, on one side, and conservatives and liberals on the other, hold incommensurable positions on liberty and justice. Of course, one side is right, and the Constitution provides the means for making good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence. But Republicans need to assert that power.
We need to clearly identify the mob. It is not the government and its law. It is the corporation and its foot soldiers. There is a clear choice before us: either we have a free market capitalist system under the rule of law that works for the public interest, or a corporate sovereign that exists in a state of nature pursuing the narrow interests of rich and powerful elites. The former arrangement requires a constitutional republic established by men who recognize that our rights are derived from nature and not from man—and that government derives its just power from We the People. The latter is, in a word, fascism.
The role of propagandists is to manufacture the illusion of consensus between incommensurable standpoints when the resolution portends the negation of the other. The woke left rejects what binds us together. As I have argued in this essay, the thesis and the antithesis in this dialectic cannot result in a synthesis. I would remind people that this is not the first time in our nation’s history that we have been here.
freedom and reason 