Cancel Culture vs. McCarthyism: the data is in

Cancel Culture is happening on a historic scale, Part 5

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In our book, “The Canceling of the American Mind” (which is now out in paperback!), my co-author

Rikki Schlott

and I make the argument that Cancel Culture is occurring on the scale of many of the worst “mass censorship” events in U.S. history. This series expands on that research from the Sedition Act of 1798 to 9/11.

Part 1 of this series used the response to speech after 9/11 to predict the campus climate after the October 7 attacks on Israel. Part 2 explored the Sedition Act of 1798 to illustrate that the number of victims isn’t enough to gauge the severity of a censorship crisis. Part 3 delved into why the American Victorian era is the best analogue to modern Cancel Culture. Part 4 discussed the first Red Scare and the Palmer Raids after World War I, and compared it to the level of arrests in the U.K. for offensive internet speech.

The fourth installment was published a little over a year ago, and I decided to wait until now to release the fifth and final part for two main reasons:

First, because it would coincide with the release of “Canceling” in paperback, which just so happens to be today, April 29! Among other updates and additions, this new version contains a brand new epilogue. Importantly, it also includes commentary on FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings, which is always useful for keeping up with the chaos we’re all experiencing on campus.

And the second reason I wanted to wait until now is so that the numbers would be in. See, one of the most controversial claims we made in “Canceling” is that in some ways, Cancel Culture was worse than the second Red Scare, otherwise known as McCarthyism, on college campuses. Now, we should be very clear, here: We are not claiming that Cancel Culture was worse overall. For example, during the Second Red Scare, there was also the Lavender Scare, where many federal workers were victims of a purge targeting gay men and lesbians. The rationale was that it would be easy to blackmail closeted gay men and women, and therefore they were vulnerable to Soviet espionage. This resulted in many loyal gay Americans having their lives and careers ruined. (FIRE Senior Fellow

James Kirchick

writes about some of them in his excellent book “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,” which brings its stories to life for fellow Washingtonians by adding the details to familiar locations.)

However, when it comes to college campuses in particular, Cancel Culture is unlike anything that has happened in our history. And now that we’ve got numbers tracking 11 years of Cancel Culture (2014-2024), we can more accurately compare them to the 11 years of McCarthyism (1947-1957).

The ongoing threats to academic freedom and campus free speech being generated by the current administration can make it easy to forget about Cancel Culture. We shouldn’t. If we want to come out of this moment with something that isn’t another overreaction, we need to remember how we got here.

But first, a thought experiment to establish the proper context:

The threats faced during McCarthyism were real, and the fear was rational

Imagine that it’s 1941. War breaks out between the U.S. and Japan, but there’s no war in Europe. We use atomic bombs to win in 1945; big celebrations and history unfolds otherwise as it did in our timeline.

Then, four years later… Germany goes to war in Europe. And it has atomic bombs. After it steamrolls Europe, we find out it got those plans from American and British spies who were working for Germany. We (quite logically) freak out and look for spies. But then… four years after that? In 1953? Germany goes to war with Russia using the H-Bombs we had just developed. And guess where they got them?

Sounds pretty terrifying, right? The thing is, the scenario I’ve outlined is essentially what happened during the Cold War: Russia got the atomic bomb in 1949 and the hydrogen bomb in 1953, using secrets stolen from our (and allied) military programs. And I dare say that if you had been alive during those years, you would have been terrified to realize that the Soviets had obtained not only the atomic bomb, but also the hydrogen bomb, far faster than they would have thanks to the help of disloyal Americans and Brits.

My point is, I suspect that if you had been around in the late 40s and early 50s, when McCarthyism took place, you would have seen the Soviet Union gaining the power to essentially destroy the world thanks in no small part to British and American spies. And you would have been freaked out the way so many at the time were.

First Amendment advocates can sometimes do a very poor job putting themselves in the shoes and mindsets of those involved in the early mass censorship events of American history. Too often, we paint those periods as times of completely irrational terror born of pure paranoia. The result of this characterization is a line of argument that starts with the correct assertion that censorship is almost never justified, but ends with intellectually lazy conclusions — namely, that all those times when America tamped down on free speech were due to hysteria or malice, and there were no legitimate or understandable concerns motivating the people involved.

By failing to appreciate that, we end up looking at the age of Cancel Culture and somehow arguing that the stakes are real or even more serious, despite the fact that there was no existential threat from 2014 to 2024. Sure, we had a pandemic that freaked us out a lot, and led to a spike in reasons to cancel people, but Cancel Culture was well underway long before that.

If we want to accurately analyze the behavior of those that came before us, and if we want to avoid repeating their mistakes, we have to understand not just what those mistakes were but also how and why they were made. It’s easy to look down upon the censorial reactions of people whose daily lives, concerns, and fears we don’t take the time to understand. But the best modern free speech champions will do their best to take these considerations as seriously as possible. This way, they can understand contemporary threats like Cancel Culture in light of real historical contexts and avoid making shoddy comparisons.

And now onto decidedly unshoddy comparisons.

Comparing McCarthyism on campus to Cancel Culture on campus by the numbers

Just to refresh your memory,

Rikki Schlott

and I define “Cancel Culture” as the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or would be — protected by First Amendment standards, and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.

The best way to compare McCarthyism to Cancel Culture on campus is by finding a source of data that was gathered at the same time McCarthyism was going on, in order to compare it to the data we have today. And thankfully there was a massive 1955 study by Paul Lazarsfeld that covered the number of professors dismissed during McCarthyism. According to that data, approximately 100 professors were targeted and 62 were fired during this period, either for being communists or members of the Communist Party.

Now, compare that figure to the number of professors who have been fired on campus since the beginning of the Age of Cancel Culture in 2014. In the last decade, FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire database has logged almost 1,300 campaigns to get scholars punished for their First Amendment-protected speech. Nearly two-thirds of those campaigns succeeded, leading to censorship, suspensions, demotions, resignations, and even mandatory administrative training (remember: this is disciplinary training in response to protected speech). But to compare things more directly: From 2014-2024 more than 200 scholars ended up being fired or forced out of their positions for their thoughts and opinions.

That's more than triple the contemporaneous estimate of the number of communist professors fired, and more than double the estimate of professors fired overall, during McCarthyism.

In 2024, FIRE published the results of the largest faculty free speech survey ever conducted. The study asked 6,269 faculty members at 55 major colleges and universities a variety of questions regarding their comfort expressing themselves on campus. The result? We found that self-censorship on U.S. campuses is currently four times worse than it was at the height of the McCarthy era.

That’s no exaggeration. As my FIRE colleagues

Nate Honeycutt

and

David Josef Volodzko

reported:

We found that self-censorship on U.S. campuses is currently four times worse than it was at the height of the McCarthy era. Today, 35% of faculty say they have toned down their written work for fear of causing controversy. In a major survey conducted in 1954, the height of McCarthyism, by the sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens, only 9% of social scientists said the same.

In fact, the problem is so bad that some academics were afraid even to respond to our already anonymous survey for fear of retaliation. Some asked us by email, or in their free response replies, to keep certain details they shared private. Some asked us to direct all correspondence to a private personal email. Others reached out beforehand just to confirm the results would truly be anonymous. Still others simply refused to speak at all.

It gets worse, too. Fourteen percent of faculty reported suffering discipline or threats of discipline for either their teaching, research, academic talks, or other off-campus speech. Twenty-seven percent feel unable to speak freely for fear of how students, administrators, or other faculty would respond. Forty percent worry about damaging their reputations because someone misunderstands something they have said or done, and 23% worry about losing their jobs because of it.

Then there’s all the deplatforming. FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database defines this as an attempt to prevent some form of expression from occurring, including efforts to disinvite speakers from campus speeches or commencement ceremonies, cancel performances of concerts, plays, or the screenings of movies, or to have controversial artwork removed from public display. An attempt to disrupt a speech or performance that is in progress is also considered a deplatforming attempt, whether it succeeds or fails.

As of April 28, 2025 FIRE has recorded a total of 1,702 deplatforming attempts on college and university campuses from 1998 to the present. Roughly two-thirds of all attempts we’ve recorded occurred since 2014, when Cancel Culture began.

And as FIRE’s Chief Research Advisor

Sean Stevens

outlined late last year, 2024 was the worst year on record for deplatforming attempts according to FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database. Also, as I pointed out for Fox News back in December, this surpasses 2023, which up until November 20, 2024 was the worst year on record with a total of 156 deplatforming attempts (FIRE has recorded another 13 attempts in 2023 since that interview, so the total for that year is now 169). 2024 would close out with a record total of 172.

In the first four months of 2025, we’ve already got 51 — a pace of 153 for the year, which is down slightly from 2024’s record total.

And of course, professors aren’t the only ones who have been feeling the effects of Cancel Culture. As my FIRE colleague

Adam Goldstein

and I detailed in a piece for Fox News in 2023, 1 in 10 students surveyed for FIRE report that they've been either threatened with punishment and investigation or actually have been punished or investigated for their speech. Extrapolated out to the entire population on campus across the country, that amounts to more than one million students nationwide.

Keep in mind that all of this is happening in an environment that is already overwhelmingly politically and ideologically homogeneous. As I’ve written before, it’s amazing that the Cancellers on campus keep finding witches to burn, given the circumstances.

Another thing to keep in mind is a point that comes from David Rabban’s book, “Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right.” In it, Rabban points out that one of the arguments against communist professors during McCarthyism was that many of them were viewed as ideologues. They were far too deferential to Soviet and Marxist doctrine, and therefore unable to be independent thinkers or good professors. Throughout his book, Rabban shows that this presumption was sometimes overcome by professors who demonstrated independence — for example, by disagreeing with Stalin’s policies.

It’s crazy to consider that, in contrast, one of the oddities of Cancel Culture is that it is an internal movement arguing that professors are not doctrinaire enough. Given that orthodoxy is the enemy of knowledge creation and academic freedom, this is an argument that deserves to be taken more seriously.

Cancel Culture is historically unique, unprecedented, and still with us

The purpose of this series has been to highlight just how strange and unprecedented the Age of Cancel Culture is in our history. As I mentioned in the very first installment, Cancel Culture wasn’t spurred on by a large war, a national security threat, or even a debate about pornography or obscenity — which are the usual reasons, historically, why mass censorship events have occurred.

What’s more, Cancel Culture is unique in that it has arisen after academic freedom was officially acknowledged as falling under the purview of the First Amendment, way back in 1957. Also, during McCarthyism, it actually hadn’t been established that firing professors for their political beliefs violated the Constitution. Now, it is 100% clear.

So how do we undo the damage caused by Cancel Culture, which silences people and punishes opposing views? Here's a bold idea: we can't fight Cancel Culture by using the same tactics through the government. As Rikki and I explain in “Canceling” (out in paperback today!), higher education has serious issues, but that doesn't mean the government should overstep its authority or ignore due process to fix them. Misusing power to attack those we disagree with is exactly what led to this problem in the first place.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

In case you missed it in the Weekend Free Speech Update: I joined

Saagar Enjeti

and Emily Jashinsky on Breaking Points to discuss Harvard’s lawsuit against the Trump administration, and how imposing viewpoint diversity by government fiat is a cure worse than the disease.