I’m just going to leave this gift link for you if you have the stomach. An excerpt.
The Christian mayor:
“Do not miss the weight of this moment,” he wrote to his 1,700 followers, in the first days after Kirk’s death. “We need men and women of faith, courage, and action who will take the fight to the enemy — lawfully, openly, fearlessly.
“We can’t bring out the stocks. We can’t tar and feather them. But we can do the next best thing. Expose them. Call their bosses. Make them famous. Get them fired. And make sure to take screenshots.
“This is war. And this is how we fight back.”
[…]
“There must be economic consequences for this cancerous vitriol,” Arnold wrote to his followers on Facebook, a few days after Kirk’s death. “Share, share, share.”
“All of the sudden I am really enjoying cancel culture.”
“Shame is not revenge. Shunning is not cruelty. These are the thorns God places on the path to drive men back to the way of truth.”
The bisexual firefighter:
“I will not be guilted into feeling sorry,” Meyers wrote back, but by then her post was beginning to generate a steady number of replies, and even if she didn’t regret her message, she didn’t want to deal with any more blowback or harassment. Forty-seven minutes after posting, she went back onto Facebook and cleared it off her page.
“Fine. I deleted it,” she told a friend. “It’s done.”
[…]
But by the time Meyers got back to the firehouse, friends were sending her screenshots of her post as it spread all over the internet. It had been shared by a local hunting guide, reposted by an old Tea Party group and amplified by a right-wing comedian with hundreds of thousands of followers. When Meyers sat down for her lunch break, she searched for her name online and saw thousands of posts totaling millions of views.
“I know where she works,” one poster wrote, sharing a photo of Meyers and a link to the Canyon Lake Fire Department.
“Revoke her license,” another person responded. “She cannot be trusted to have life in her hands.”
“Getting ‘fired’ won’t even be enough punishment.”
“Hopefully God takes away someone she adores. Hopefully he makes her choke.”
“Find out what she drives and her home address.”
[…]
She left the firehouse to drive home, but one of her colleagues said she could stay at his house. He was a conservative who thought Meyers’s post was horrific, but he hid her car behind his house and offered her a bedroom for the next few days. He insisted on following her everywhere for protection, including back to the chief’s office for another disciplinary meeting, where she was fired for “unacceptable conduct.”
She packed her belongings at the firehouse and noticed a message on her phone. It was from a number in New York, and a voice she didn’t recognize. “What a shitty little green house and a red Jeep,” the caller said, and she wondered if he was watching her.
She packed a suitcase of clothes, loaded her dog into the car and stopped at her mother’s house. Her mother mistook her distress for regret, but Meyers said she wasn’t sorry for what she’d written. If anything, she was angrier, but she also needed to find someplace that felt safe in a country increasingly on edge. She didn’t know where she was going yet — just that she needed to leave.
“Everything is collapsing,” she said.
The mayor:
He saw a story online about the firefighter in Comal County who’d just been terminated and shared it on his page. “I am thinking all of these people that have rendered themselves unemployable like this should probably go ahead and self deport,” he wrote. “We don’t want them here anyway.”
They want them (us) to leave the country. If I were younger I would certainly be thinking about it. I lived overseas for a good part of my life and could easily do it again. But I figure I should stay and do what I can since I don’t have all that much time left compared to the youngs.
And for anyone who thinks this is all a sad consequence of liberal cancel culture coming back to bite us in the ass, think again. This piece by historian Nicole Hemmer is worth reading to remind us of who really invented this nonsense. (The right has never really believed in free speech so this is nothing new.)
“It’s the idea that the illiberalism that has swallowed the progressive left — what we often refer to as wokeness — has come for the right,” The Free Press’s Bari Weiss explained in the introduction to a podcast on the subject. And while conservatives are split over whether this is a positive development or a negative one, they all seem to agree on one point: The right learned its vengeance politics from the left. “Turnabout is fair play,” the conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted on X. Right-wing cancel culture was simply “an effective, strategic tit-for-tat.”
That argument rests on a flawed premise: that the right had been devoted to open debate and restrained government power, only reluctantly abandoning these principles to counter left-wing illiberalism. But the right did not learn cancel culture from the left; the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. It took decades for its free-speech faction to develop, and even then, it has only ever been a minority part of the coalition.
She ties it to the conservative movement starting back in the bad old days of the HUAC and McCarthy. But that mayor who went on the jihad against anyone who said something rude about Charlie Kirk is a very Big Christian and I think we can trace our “censorious right” all the way back to the puritans in New England. For some reason these people have a very hard time remembering what Jesus was actually all about.
I don’t think we know how many lives have been disrupted or destroyed by this self-righteous bullshit over Kirk but I suspect the number will surprise us. It was mass hysteria and it exposed a whole lot of people as exactly the archetypes we all learned about in The Crucible. in high school.
Americans in 2025 believed they had the right to speak their opinion, whatever it was. But that’s never been true and more often than not it’s conservative mob mentality that’s brought the hammer down. Today they have the full backing of the federal government.