“It’s the idea that the illiberalism that has swallowed the progressive left — what we often refer to as wokeness — has come for the right,” The Free Press’s Bari Weiss explained in the introduction to a podcast on the subject. And while conservatives are split over whether this is a positive development or a negative one, they all seem to agree on one point: The right learned its vengeance politics from the left. “Turnabout is fair play,” the conservative activist Christopher Rufo posted on X. Right-wing cancel culture was simply “an effective, strategic tit-for-tat.”

That argument rests on a flawed premise: that the right had been devoted to open debate and restrained government power, only reluctantly abandoning these principles to counter left-wing illiberalism. But the right did not learn cancel culture from the left; the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. It took decades for its free-speech faction to develop, and even then, it has only ever been a minority part of the coalition.

The conservative movement that arose at the start of the Cold War readily married government power and private efforts to crack down on its political opponents. Take the case of Counterattack, the newsletter of an anti-communist organization with the anodyne name of American Business Consultants. Funded by the textile millionaire Alfred Kohlberg, Counterattack began publishing in 1947 with hiring managers in mind, regularly publishing the names of people it believed had communist sympathies.

In 1950, Counterattack published a lengthy pamphlet called “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.” The cover featured an outstretched red hand cradling a microphone; the interior contained 151 names of people and a list of their suspected connections to communism. Though pitched as a list of “Red Fascists and their sympathizers,” “Red Channels” targeted people for their involvement with unions, civil liberties groups and Black civil rights activism. Philip Loeb, who lost his role as one of the stars of the TV series “The Goldbergs” because his name appeared in the pamphlet, was included for supporting groups like the Committee to End Jim Crow in Baseball and the Stop Censorship Committee.