The MAGA Hall Monitors

This week, after years of railing against “cancel culture,” conservatives began confronting the limits of their own “free speech” absolutism.

Led by Ben Shapiro, top conservative figures have denounced Tucker Carlson for interviewing Nick Fuentes. Shapiro was particularly searing in his criticism, calling the former Fox News host “an intellectual coward, a dishonest interlocutor,” and blaming him for Nazism “being normalized within the mainstream Republican party.” He devoted an entire 40-minute episode of his show to counter what he called Carlson’s “normalizing Nazism,” adding: “It is not cancellation to draw moral lines between viewpoints. In fact, we used to call that one of the key aspects of conservatism.”

At the Heritage Foundation, support for Carlson’s decision to platform Fuentes from its president Kevin Roberts led to fury and resignations among the prominent conservative think tank’s ranks, prompting an extraordinary apology from Roberts and an offer to resign. "You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone,” Roberts told Heritage staffers in a leaked video, “while also being clear you’re not endorsing everything they’ve said, you’re not endorsing softball interviews, you’re not endorsing putting people on shows, and I should’ve made that clear."

For years, figures like Shapiro, Kelly, Fox News hosts and countless other MAGA Media figures have mocked the idea that dangerous voices should be denied a platform. They called such arguments censorship and attacked it as denying “free speech.” They labeled critics “hall monitors” and accused journalists and tech companies of suppressing speech in the name of political correctness.

MAGA Media figures have platformed and defended baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen, spread conspiracy theories about vaccines and lockdowns, amplified “great replacement” rhetoric about immigrants, and cast doubt on who was behind the January 6 insurrection. On X, Rumble, and YouTube, these narratives have flourished among the MAGA faithful, algorithmically boosted under the guise of defending “free speech.”

Those who challenged that argument were dismissed as “speech police” and attacked for trying to “cancel” ideas.

Now those same figures are drawing their own lines and acknowledging what they once mocked: that not everyone deserves a microphone and mainstream platform to pervert the public’s thinking. They are suddenly behaving like the “hall monitors” they used to deride. Their argument that all voices deserve a platform, and the public should be free to make up its own mind, has finally been confronted with the reality of what it truly enables.

And the questions they’re now asking are the same ones journalists, authorities, and public health officials have grappled with for years. Should YouTube recommend radicalizing videos through its algorithm? Should Rumble and X stop boosting Fuentes’ hateful content? Is it really “censorship” to decide that not every voice deserves a massive platform?

It’s taken this long and something as grotesque as Carlson normalizing a Nazi sympathizer for the right to realize what many have been saying all along: that elevating dangerous hatred and lies comes with real consequences. In Shapiro’s own words, it isn’t “cancellation” to draw moral lines between viewpoints.

For perhaps the first time, right-wing media figures are acknowledging that there is a line. It just took them a white supremacist interview to find it. And after years of deriding the “hall monitors,” they’re now trying on the uniform themselves.