American Liberals Need a Reparations Plan

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way!” That’s what liberal and leftist Americans are feeling following the reaction to their own hateful behavior in response to Charlie Kirk’s brutal killing. Having grown used to holding the power over conservative Americans, they are now shocked to find that the “deplorables” whom they so disdain are fighting back. After years of punching down, they’re now receiving some uppercuts themselves in the form of accountability for their hateful conduct.

A piece of advice to the liberal side of the aisle: If they’d like things to get back to a semblance of normal, they ought to consider their own behavior over the last decade. Then, instead of the unworkable “reparations” plans they have mulled over for the descendants of American slaves, they ought to come up with a reparations plan for the Americans they have hurt over the last decade.

While the left is now dubiously accusing the right of engaging in “cancel culture,” it is in fact liberals who created and trafficked in cancel culture for years. The right is simply holding people accountable for openly celebrating murder. Liberals, meanwhile, have used actual cancel culture to target anyone who disagrees with them politically.

They started doing it in 2013 when they got a rodeo clown banned for life from the Missouri State Fair for the heinous crime of wearing an Obama mask. It was also liberals who got a Mexican American truck driver fired for supposedly displaying a “white power” sign when he was merely cracking his knuckles. They kept going over the last decade, propagating a culture of fear where anyone could face societal ostracization and have his career destroyed for real or imagined crimes against progressive orthodoxy.

Liberals were, furthermore, the ones leading the charge in Big Tech, banning and “shadow-banning” important conservative accounts on social media. Oftentimes, conservatives were canceled for telling the truth about important stories that might have an impact on electoral politics, such as the infamous Hunter Biden laptop in 2020. They worked to shut down the free speech platform Parler soon after that. And they kicked Donald Trump off the major social media platforms. During the Biden years, the White House and many agencies within the government worked to censor social media speech about COVID-19 and criticism of the government.

During COVID, it was liberals who supported restrictions that shut down large numbers of small businesses and gave us absurd stories such as paddleboarders and hikers arrested for being in parks. They cheered when Minnesota Governor Tim Walz instituted a state snitch line for lockdown violators and they also used it to rat out their neighbors.  

And, despite 2020 liberal rhetoric about never being able to trust a vaccine developed under Donald Trump’s presidency, they immediately turned about-face when the COVID vaccines were rolled out under Joe Biden’s administration—and demanded that everyone take it or be fired. Nurses, cops, soldiers, sailors, and all sorts of workers were punished or fired for not buckling under.

That liberals were behind this was clear. A Rasmussen poll in 2022 showed that 59 percent of Democrats favored confining the unvaccinated to their homes except for emergencies, and 48 percent believed that the government should be able to imprison those who questioned COVID vaccine efficacy.  

We could add a lot more to this list from just the last decade or two. We could start with the Obama IRS abusing its power to target conservative groups during the Tea Party movement. Or the deeply unfair Title IX guidelines issued by the Obama Education Department that effectively denied due process to college students accused of sexual misconduct. Or the Biden-era attempts to make the Army less “extremist” that were really cover for making the military intolerant of Christian belief and hostile toward conservatives.

As liberals now cry foul over some people losing their jobs for promoting political violence, they have a lot to make reparations for. Given that they have access to enough resources to allow Kamala Harris to blow through over a billion dollars on a campaign that was going nowhere, surely they can certainly figure out some way of giving cash to those whose jobs they took, businesses they crushed, and good names they tarnished. Then, maybe, they can talk about the harms of “cancel culture” with some credibility.

Some might object that reparations for cancel culture victims is just as unworkable as the plans for reparations for slave descendants. But we do have a model for a reparations plan like the one this writer is proposing.

During World War II, 120,000 Japanese-Americans were interned because the U.S. government thought they might be at risk of betraying their country. Initially, the Evacuation Claims Act of 1948 provided some relief to those who were wrongly interned, but it was limited to property losses for which individuals had to have documentation—something many had lost during their internment. Eventually, however, through the Civil Liberties Act signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1988, 82,219 individuals received reparations checks of $20,000 per person.

$20,000 would be a nice symbolic number for those who lost jobs or businesses—even if it wouldn’t be enough to cover all the losses many endured. The great thing about a cancel culture reparations plan is that it wouldn’t have to be exclusively given to people who were on the right. After all, since they had driven out almost all right-leaning people from institutions such as media and the academy, many of the people they harassed ended up being hapless centrists or moderate liberals. If Democrats were smart about directing the money, they might be able to win back a bit of goodwill, and maybe some of the voters who defected, from the people they alienated in their own party.

It is highly unlikely that we will ever see any sort of compensation or even contrition from liberals toward the people whose lives they destroyed. Accordingly, it is unreasonable to expect conservatives to feel much sympathy for leftists who have suddenly discovered that they can indeed face consequences for their words and actions.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.