This may be the most important moment to defend free speech since the internet emerged as the modern-day printing press.

Cancel culture was supposed to be a left-wing affliction. For years conservatives and old-school liberals like me railed against the authoritarian instincts of progressive elites who treated words as violence and dissent as hate speech.

In 2014, during the debate over section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, I authored a defence of then attorney-general George Brandis’s unremarkable proposition that ‘people have a right to be bigots’. The point, of course, was not that bigotry is fine but that the state has no business policing mere offence. I drew support from a 2012 oration by former NSW Chief Justice Jim Spigelman, who invoked Professor Jeremy Waldron to remind us that protecting feelings against offence is not an appropriate objective for the law. Spigelman put it crisply: there is no right not to be offended.

Back then the new censoriousness seemed confined to the woke left. Stories that didn’t fit the narrative were cut, employees lost jobs for ‘wrong think’ and in Australia complaints were weaponised through section 18C. Who could forget the Israel Folau saga in 2019? More recently the eSafety Commissioner has overreached to take down online material – Muslim violence footage in one case, a merely offensive tweet in the Billboard Chris case. In Britain it is worse: a comedian questioned at Heathrow for nothing more than bawdy online anti-transgender humour is just the latest of thousands of police warnings and arrests for so called ‘harmful’ speech.

But now, in the United States – the home of the First Amendment – we have a new breed of cancel conservatives. Who’d have thought it could never happen there, so deep runs the cultural reverence for free speech on that side of politics in the land of the free?  The tragic and shocking assassination of Charlie Kirk has exposed their own authoritarianism, the very thing they have  long decried.

Fraser Myers of Spiked noted that Kirk was ‘gunned down while doing what he had done for more than a decade: arguing, debating, talking in public’ – the ‘grim capstone’ to years of hysteria masquerading as compassion and ‘social justice’. Yet the aftermath has produced an equally dark irony: the people who once held the free-speech line are now borrowing the woke playbook to punish their enemies.

Myers details a cascade of conservative cancellations. Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to ‘target’ anyone guilty of ‘hate speech’ against Kirk’s memory –apparently forgetting that, as Kirk himself wrote, ‘hate speech does not exist legally in America… and all of it is protected by the First Amendment’. The Pentagon pledged to ‘track’ federal employees who mocked or celebrated his death. The State Department began revoking visas for foreigners whose posts crossed an ever-shifting line. Vice President J.D. Vance urged employers to identify and discipline anyone ‘celebrating Charlie’s murder’.

The scalps are mounting. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended after falsely linking the suspect to the Maga movement, following a thinly veiled threat from the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). A Michigan print-shop worker who declined to produce a poster for a Kirk vigil lost her job and now faces possible prosecution from Bondi’s now apparently weaponised Justice Department. Donald Trump then suggests that if Bondi doesn’t do more to prosecute his enemies, she might be the next scalp.

Thank God there is some pushback. Senator Ted Cruz warned that calls to use the FCC or the Federal Licensing Authority to pull the licences of television stations critical of Kirk were ‘dangerous, profoundly unconstitutional and indistinguishable from the authoritarian tactics we have spent years condemning’.

The Wall Street Journal has been equally blunt. First, an editorial reminded readers of the Barnette case in 1943, where Justice Jackson wrote that ‘no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion’. Then the paper warned that ‘regulatory power in the hands of a wilful President can too easily become a weapon against political opponents, including the media’. But then: ‘Maybe now our progressive friends understand why these columns oppose government control of business and fought liberal cancel culture.’  In a final jab it observed that ‘for a decade or more, the voters who backed Mr Trump watched and listened as the coastal elites of media and entertainment showed their contempt for Middle American values. Those coastal grandees shouldn’t be surprised now if the public isn’t as outraged as they are by the FCC’s abuse of its power against opponents’.

Conservatives and liberals have not spent years arguing for elementary freedoms – long abandoned by the left when it suits them – only to see them trashed by the new cancel conservatives. Remember, we are supposed to be the people who conserve and preserve the best of Western civilisation’s traditions. If conservatives start breaking the rules in retaliation, no true conservative can join that bandwagon.

This betrayal is not mere hypocrisy; it is philosophical suicide. A conservative who abandons a commitment to free speech for a political victory has already lost. You cannot preserve Western civilisation by copying the tactics of those who wish to dismantle it. The moment you decide that silencing the other side is justified because ‘they started it’, you legitimise every law, every firebomb and every bullet aimed at political speech. You ratify the despicable lawfare deployed by the Democratic administrative state against Donald Trump. You sanctify the campus shout-downs and social-media purges we have spent a decade resisting. The moral high ground literally falls out from under your feet.

Yes, it is hard to win debates against a cacophony of values-laden faux expert ‘consensus’; and yes, it is hard to stand by principle when the other side plays so dirty. But as US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in Whitney v. California a century ago: ‘the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence’. Anything less is not conservative; it is cowardice. It is not making anything great again; instead it trashes everything.

Charlie Kirk’s legacy is to show how debates can be won and won well.