The conservative establishment’s attempts to cancel those with “unacceptable opinions” creates hardened dissidents who adopt ever-more transgressive political views.

 One of the “permanent things” in Post-World War II conservatism is cancellation. From the John Birch Society to Joseph Sobran and John Derbyshire, every few years, the forces of institutional conservatism decide that it is time to purge an individual or ideology from its ranks. In November, those calls reached a new peak in response to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’s refusal to disavow either man.

The frantic effort to anathematize Carlson has a distinctly familiar quality. The charges directed at Carlson are framed as objections to his alleged anti-Semitism, with critics citing his podcast episode with Nick Fuentes as evidence that he harbors hostility towards Jews. But this attempt to collapse Carlson into Fuentes exemplifies the pattern seen in earlier purges, in which accusations of anti-Semitism serve as a pretext rather than a substantiated judgment. Carlson has his share of flaws—notably, his penchant for eccentric conspiratorial speculation. But to any honest observer, who Carlson’s accusers largely aren’t, he has shown no animus toward Jews. What renders him radioactive to the conservative establishment is not hostility toward Jews but his willingness to criticize Israel and neoconservative foreign policy more broadly.

Distinguishing this attempted expulsion from earlier purges is the source and character of the anxiety driving it. In the past, dissidents were cast out not just to preserve the movement’s credibility with the mainstream press but to maintain anti-Communist adherence during the Cold War. The current effort, by contrast, arises from a more immediate and internal concern: the recognition that the rising generation of conservatives is especially receptive to the noninterventionist worldview articulated by Carlson and, more radically, by Fuentes. The fear is not just external disapproval but now of internal succession; namely, that the figures most influential with young conservatives are shaping a political imagination the old guard cannot control. Hence, the intensity with which veteran conservatives now move to quarantine Carlson and anyone who refuses to denounce him.

The response of Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro is the clearest expression of this anxiety. At one point, Ben Shapiro was the biggest name among conservative youth. His takedowns of college leftists and his catchphrase, “facts don’t care about your feelings,” captured the young conservative mind, disproving to them the liberal myth that all conservatives are stupid and ignorant. But today, very few of those raised on Shapiro’s content take him seriously. To those who have drifted out of his orbit in search of more authentic right-wing politics, Shapiro is a remnant of the conservative establishment, which has yet to adjust to the era of Trump.

Shapiro is surely aware that much of his audience has moved on. More importantly, he is aware that part of the reason they have moved on is his ironclad defense of Israel, which is hemorrhaging support with young conservatives. Thus, Shapiro immediately reacted to the Fuentes interview by canceling a tentatively planned appearance with Tucker Carlson, calling him “the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America.” This quick, coordinated denunciation by Shapiro, Mark Levin, and others stems from Shapiro’s observation that anti-Semitism and other forms of radicalism are spreading among conservative youth.

In my own experience, this rise of extreme anti-Semitism on the right, as almost a visceral reaction against people like Shapiro and Levin, is very real, very alarming, and requires addressing. For instance, as an active member of Northwestern University’s conservative student body, I have heard and pushed back against a variety of these ideas circulating online, such as theories that the Titanic’s sinking was a Jewish plot to establish the Federal Reserve; that IQ tests are doctored by Jews; and that pornography was a Jewish invention intended to undermine American culture. 

On the other hand, I part company with Shapiro, Levin, and those attacking Tucker and Kevin Roberts. I disagree strongly with their belief that trying to cancel Tucker Carlson, or even Nick Fuentes, is the proper response to the rising tide of radicalization and dubious conspiratorial thinking. Using cancellation to cure this problem both underestimates the power the internet has had in democratizing commentary and misdiagnoses the root causes of radicalization. 

The mainstream theory of radicalization, or what I call the liberal theory of radicalization, posits that the open circulation of radical ideas is the principal driver of their adoption, making their suppression the proper means of preventing their spread. This is best observed in the liberal instinct to create a hate speech exception to the First Amendment, which would, in their view, prevent atrocities like mass shootings.

There was a time before the internet when this theory was plausible and operational, when your average conservative adult’s political diet arrived by mail from National Review, and tracking down an alternative opinion in something like H. L. Mencken’s The American Mercury required concerted effort. Then, it was plausible to “gatekeep,” to control the organs of opinion-making and limit the public’s contact with content deemed “toxic” by the mainstream. But today, just following a few influential accounts on X is enough to inundate your feed with a constant stream of content about Jews, blacks, immigration, and globalism, delivered with an invective that would have made mid-20th-century cranks blush. Such rhetoric is no longer tucked away in obscure newsletters; it is ambient, algorithmically amplified, and trivially easy to find for even the mildly curious.

In the current environment, “cancellation” no longer functions as a serious constraint on what people can hear or think. It functions solely as performance art: a way for prominent conservatives to signal to media gatekeepers and liberals that they know who the unacceptable people are. The aftermath of L’Affaire Fuentes illustrates this point. CNN quickly booked Ben Shapiro on Jake Tapper’s show, where he declared that Tucker Carlson was “morphing… into a conspiracist” who “ideologically launders anti-Semitism” and “Anti-Americanism.” Shapiro’s condemnation did not limit anyone’s access to Tucker, or even edgier content. If anything, he advertised where to look. No network president, no foundation head, no think tank fellow can meaningfully police this decentralized pipeline. Pretending otherwise is self-flattery, and it leaves the real dynamics of radicalization untouched.

What cancellation does accomplish is something else: it brands people as outcasts, and it confirms for a watching audience that the conservative establishment’s would-be gatekeepers would rather punish, silence, and censor certain voices rather than refute their arguments. In this way, the conservative establishment unintentionally works in tandem with liberal institutions.

What cancellation does accomplish is something else: it brands people as outcasts, and it confirms for a watching audience that the conservative establishment’s would-be gatekeepers would rather punish, silence, and censor certain voices rather than refute their arguments. In this way, the conservative establishment unintentionally works in tandem with liberal institutions.

From childhood, young conservatives, especially young white men, are told by liberals that they are the problem. Their country is uniquely wicked; their ancestors are uniquely cruel; their sex and skin are structural advantages that discredit any merit, any hardship, or complaint. Through school, popular entertainment, and in workplace settings controlled by corporate human resources departments, they absorb the following lessons: You are less than; your complaints are secondary; your skills are dispensable.

Simultaneously, these young conservatives encounter, through daily life, the news, and social media, examples of dysfunction, racial hostility, and violence that are inconsistent with the totalizing, contemptuous narratives progressives direct against them. This dissonance between prevailing social orthodoxy and day-to-day observations leads white adolescents to start asking sincere but provocative questions. Namely, how does racism explain the fact that black men are far more likely than white men to commit homicide, or to reject marriage to the mothers of their children? In today’s discourse, these candid observations and reality-based questions, however harsh, are not treated as legitimate inquiry, but instead as a confession of wrongthink, punishable by permanent exile to the margins.

But it isn’t only liberals who marginalize young conservatives. The institutions that claim to represent us do it, too. In fact, it was likely his rejection by the mainstream right that turned Nick Fuentes into the person he is today. As Fuentes explained to Tucker Carlson, he began his political life holding views well within the bounds of movement conservatism—and was a fan of Mark Levin, in particular. His trajectory shifted after Trump articulated a populist, America First platform, but the decisive rupture came later. It wasn’t Trump who turned Fuentes into a racial tribalist and Jew-obsessed ideologue. It was Shapiro’s backlash to a tweet in which Fuentes, then an undergraduate at Boston University, remarked, “I’ve never seen anything on the Daily Wire that is actually critical of Israel.” That narrow and plausibly good-faith criticism was recast by Shapiro as anti-Semitism, a reaction that marked the real turning point in Fuentes’s trajectory, pushing him further toward the fringe.

The speed and certainty of Shapiro’s anti-Semitism accusation also mirrors the dynamic surrounding the denunciations of Carlson: charges of anti-Semitism are deployed not as sober assessments of actual animus, but as instruments for enforcing party discipline and reaffirming neoconservative authority. In both cases, the label functions less as a factual judgment than as a familiar mechanism by which gatekeepers brand dissenters as beyond the pale. 

Whether or not one believes Fuentes’ self-account of his radicalization, the story he shared is familiar. That cancellation leads to radicalization stems from the fact that our political identities are shaped by finding communities where our views and speech can be voiced. When a young conservative touches a taboo topic and encounters condemnation rather than engagement, he is stripped of the moral infrastructure to process his questions constructively. Having been rejected from the conservative mainstream, he begins looking for a new home: one that advertises itself as more “honest,” more “based,” and more willing “to say what others won’t.” 

Yet entry into many of these circles can backfire and fail to result in liberation. Within dissident communities that harbor or tolerate discussions outside the painfully narrow “Overton Window” established by the left and the conservative mainstream, acquiring social capital is contingent on conforming to increasingly radical and bizarre positions. Credentials as a dissident are conditional on being increasingly more transgressive. Members compete to demonstrate their ideological commitment to right-wing ideas through ever more careless and unhinged statements. This dynamic turns those who have rational, realistic, but contrarian instincts into full believers in crude, delusional, and fact-free conspiracies and ideologies.

A similar process was observed with Joseph Sobran, who was widely regarded as one of National Review’s most talented thinkers and writers. The essay that ended Sobran’s career within mainstream conservatism, titled “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” was written by his own boss, William F. Buckley Jr. In it, Buckley levied somewhat opaque and meandering accusations of anti-Semitism against Sobran, who was fired a little while later. After his firing from National Review, Sobran adopted Holocaust deniers and revisionists as his new allies, appearing as a speaker at a conference hosted by the Institute for Historical Review. As Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote in his obituary for Sobran for Sobran in The American Conservative, if Buckley’s accusation of anti-Semitism “wasn’t true at the time it was written, it turned into prophecy.” 

This process of radicalization through marginalization is also supported by sociological research. A paper by Gordon Danning in the Nevada Law Journal Forum draws on existing empirical data about the grievances of some far-right commentators and their marginalization by elites, concluding that censoring the opinions of these disaffected groups increases radicalism and political violence. Danning explains this finding by citing the work of social psychologists, who found that the repression and ostracism of these groups strengthen their in-group identity.

While the research Danning references focuses specifically on censorship, marginalization, and political violence, it is very likely that the same dynamics occur in more decentralized forms of censorship, such as cancellation and social exclusion. The underlying mechanism whereby exclusion deepens grievance, hardens identity, and pushes disaffected individuals toward communities that valorize their rejection does not depend on this radicalization turning into violence. In contemporary political culture, cancellation often operates like censorship: it signals moral expulsion, heightens an individual or group’s defensiveness, and rewards transgressing norms as “truthsaying.” 

Only by taking this relationship between marginalization and radicalization into account will we arrive at potential solutions. Conservative political thought, with its emphasis on human fallibility, the need for belonging, and the limits of top-down social engineering, is well-placed to offer a more accurate account of radicalization today. A conservative theory of radicalization holds that questionable far-right ideas take root and proliferate not primarily through their circulation, but when they are denounced, suppressed, or met with exclusion rather than direct engagement or refutation. 

With this definition, the cure for disoriented, young conservatives searching for meaning and lingering on the fringes becomes clear: patient argument and good faith debate.

While strenuous disagreement may never win over the hearts or minds of hardened ideologues like Nick Fuentes, there are countless people for whom this strategy could well yield positive results. One practical example of this approach can be seen in Charlie Kirk’s work as a campus activist. At numerous events, he was confronted by young men who denounced him for platforming gay speakers or claimed that “Jewish ventriloquists” were “pulling his strings.” Rather than dismissing or shaming them, Kirk engaged directly, firmly, and patiently. He understood that ridicule and exclusion only confirmed the narrative of persecution. Listening even to the hostile insults of accusers did not mean Kirk was legitimizing their beliefs, far from it; it meant he was denying them the satisfaction of martyrdom. His approach proved successful, making his organization, Turning Point USA, the largest of its kind in the whole nation. 

If conservatives wish to arrest the spread of alienated unreason and hostility rather than fuel it, they must abandon the liberal theory of radicalization and embrace the one informed by our principles. We will instead have to practice the harder discipline of persuasion: meeting bad arguments with better ones, with charity instead of shaming, and with clarity designed to dispel confusion. This path is slower, less gratifying, and offers no instant absolution in the eyes of liberal institutions. But it is the only path that treats the disoriented as salvageable, deprives the fringe of its martyrs, and gives the next generation an option they currently lack. If the conservative establishment refuses to walk that path, however arduous, it should stop pretending to be surprised by the monsters it creates.