U.S. President Donald Trump hosts a Rose Garden Club lunch at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 21, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

During former President Joe Biden's four years in the White House, "Real Time" host Bill Maher and "The View's" Sunny Hostin had some major disagreements on "wokeness" and "cancel culture."

Maher, who is a scathing critic of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement but also has an intense disdain for "political correctness," attacked "wokeness" and "cancel culture" as detrimental to the left and a departure from traditional liberalism. But Hostin objected to Maher using the word "woke," which originated in the African-American community, in a negative way and argued that "cancel culture" was really "consequence culture."

Following the fatal shooting of Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, many MAGA Republicans argued that retaliation against people who criticized Kirk wasn't "cancel culture," but rather, "consequence culture" — the same term liberal Hostin had used during the Biden years.

Quite a few Trump critics, both Democrats and right-wing Never Trump conservatives, are accusing Republicans of hypocritically promoting the type of "cancel culture" they accused liberals and progressives of. But The New Republic's Liza Featherstone, in an article published on October 24, stresses that the Trump Administration's assault on free speech is much worse than the "cancel culture" that came from the left in the past.

"The New York Times reported that in seeking to punish offensive speech, Republicans were 'trying to rebrand a practice they once maligned,'" Featherstone explains. "Former President Barack Obama made a similar comparison after Jimmy Kimmel was suspended amid the Trump Administration's threats to retaliate against media outlets. 'After years of complaining about cancel culture,' Obama wrote on X, 'the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level.'"

Featherstone continues, "Obama is right that the Trump Administration's attacks are 'new and dangerous,' but where he’s wrong — perhaps in a clumsy attempt to be evenhanded — is that they don't even belong in the same conversation as 'cancel culture.' This is organized state repression, veering crassly and thuggishly into a reign of terror."

Featherstone describes "cancel culture" of the past as "the prosecutorial and puritanical style of liberalism that became popular on the internet during the second half of the Obama Administration and intensified during Trump's first term."

"It was a bad vibe," Featherstone recalls. "Discursive mistakes — insensitive jokes, ill-conceived tweets — could attract a mob of internet denunciation. The term could be overused, at times seeming to imply that people were out of line in criticizing celebrities and other powerful people for abusive behavior. But at its worst, cancel culture undermined solidarities, encouraged the bullying of some vulnerable people, and drove others to the right. Even worse, some of its targets lost their livelihoods."

Featherstone continues, "As misguided as 'cancel culture' was, though, that’s not what Trump and his minions are up to today…. 'Cancel culture' never involved the machinery of the federal government, yet Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is banning journalists from the Pentagon who won't agree to government-imposed restrictions on their reporting, and has deemed these new rules — rejected by every legitimate news outlet — necessary to regulate a 'very disruptive' press. Speaking of the Pentagon, Hegseth is also presiding over McCarthyite investigations within the agency to root out employees who aren't fans of Charlie Kirk. Then there is the misuse of law enforcement powers to punish anti-Trump public figures."

Featherstone emphasizes that while "it's not outlandish to suggest that aspects of left 'cancel culture' contributed to what we're seeing today," Trump's war on the First Amendment is considerably more dangerous.

"Conservatives are now using the liberal term 'consequence culture' to argue that irresponsible speech should have dire consequences for offenders' lives," Featherstone warns. "But to equate Trump’s current repression with 'cancel culture' is to trivialize it. While cancel culture was intolerant and unpleasant, Trump's policies are making complaints about it seem quaint."

Read Liza Featherstone's full article for The New Republic at this link.