"Cancel Culture."
It’s a term that’s become a regular part of the American vocabulary, and it comes in all shapes and forms in our society.
Sometimes it comes from the backlash of Hollywood elites, like when Candace Cameron Bure said her projects with Great American Family television network would focus on traditional family programming.
Other times we’ve seen it handed down from community organizations and boards, like the school board that moved to consider renaming schools named after Dr. Ben Carson simply because he’s a conservative.
But more frequently, it comes in everyday interactions and experiences, targeted toward those who do not embrace — or simply refuse to succumb — to the pressures of the left’s liberal ideology.
Now the left is pouring gasoline on this cultural fire of exiling your political opponents by using the levers of government to identify, target, and cancel conservatives — and they are doing it under the banners of "transparency" and "good government."
We saw this with the passage of Arizona’s Prop 211 that forces nonprofit organizations participating in policy discussions to expose the names and home addresses of their supporters.
Prop 211 is a progressive dream and part of a national effort led by Democrats to bully citizens and nonprofits into keeping silent about their radical agenda.
That effort includes legislation in Congress like last year’s H.R. 1 and the DISCLOSE Act, a bill which has repeatedly failed to pass over the past dozen years.
However, after years of failure at the federal level and in other states, Prop 211 passed in Arizona because voters were misled by the initiative’s liberal backers and swamped by misinformation from the mainstream media.
Claiming this measure would bring transparency to government and shed light on "dark money," proponents of Prop 211 had one goal in mind: expose and cancel businesses and individual Americans who support conservative nonprofits.
The repercussions will be far reaching.
In an effort to avoid being targeted for cancellation, many nonprofit groups will remain silent on public policy matters and many Arizonans will stop donating to nonprofits.
With self-censorship and tighter budgets comes a reduced voice, further entrenching the power of the mainstream media and liberal elected officials while silencing the voices of everyday Arizonans.
Nonprofit organizations need to be able to openly speak on policy matters to both hold public officials accountable and advocate for their members — and do so without fear of retribution to their organization, their members, and supporters.
And while the passage of Prop 211 is a setback in Arizona, it has also set the stage for more dangerous ballot measures to appear across the country.
Look no further than Oregon, where progressives have already filed paperwork to place a similar measure on the ballot in 2024.
If there is any good news, it is that our constitutional rights stand in their way.
Prop 211’s proponents are already defending themselves in court after two conservative groups challenged the law as a violation of their members’ rights to privacy and free speech under the Arizona Constitution.
The law is vulnerable under the federal Constitution as well.
The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that Americans have a First Amendment right to support social causes privately, including just last year when the Court affirmed this principle in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta.
And why did the justices do so?
So government officials and regulators could not trample on and silence organizations they oppose by exposing their supporters to political threats, harassment, or worse.
The judiciary must step in again.
This is not about conservative or liberal advocacy — after all, many liberal nonprofits including the ACLU supported the Supreme Court’s pro-privacy ruling.
This is not about Republicans or Democrats.
This is about protecting privacy and free speech, which is enshrined in our Constitution for all Americans regardless of affiliation.
Americans of all stripes, particularly conservatives who believe in actual good government, must not fall prey to the false transparency and "dark money" rhetoric of these proposals and instead see these measures for what they are: an attack on conservatives’ ability to form and join organizations that advocate for their beliefs.
Otherwise, prepare to be cancelled and our nation irrevocably changed.
Rick Santorum is a Newsmax contributor. He served as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007.
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