As MAGA America clamps down on free speech, and protesters are arrested in Britain, our columnist Neil Mackay says cancel culture is back where it belongs: on the right.

If every artist was once an amateur, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, then the left is still playing with finger-paints, while the right has finished the Sistine Chapel.

In the post-war era, it was the right that first perfected the form. The 1970s and 1980s were typified by ‘ban this filth’ headlines from an hysterical rightwing press, and the frothing demonisation of opponents by Mary Whitehouse and the so-called ‘Moral Majority’.

Film, TV, books, theatre, music – you name it, they were cancelling it. Then a shift came. Around the turn of the century, the left unwisely hopped on board the cancellation train, using the arrival of social media as an accelerator.

For a while, the right was in retreat. If you were seen to overstep on issues like race or sexuality, you faced a tidal wave of online rage.

That’s over now, though. Cancel culture is back where it started: in the arms of the right. Donald Trump is the king of cancellation, the Shakespeare of silencing. He’s flattening free speech in America like a MAGA steamroller.

The British government seems to be tagging along behind, arresting anyone who protests in ways that displease the rich and powerful.

The key difference between leftwing cancel culture and the new wave of rightwing........

© Herald Scotland