Rumors of a “vibe shift” have reverberated throughout the political sphere as commentators attempt to explain why the second Trump administration feels different. The “Great Awokening” of the 2010s and early 2020s, when the political left was culturally (if not always politically) dominant, appears to be winding down.

For years, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has been documenting cases of campus figures who are targeted for constitutionally protected speech. Using data from FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire and Students Under Fire databases, I charted recent trends in cancellation attempts to understand whether and how things have changed on college campuses.

First, although FIRE’s data suggest that attacks on scholarship peaked sharply in 2021 and decreased through 2024, attacks on students appear to have remained relatively high throughout that period. Documented attacks on scholarship surged again this year, and it’s only August.

But the absolute numbers obscure a fascinating hand-off occurring between the political left and right that started around 2020: since then, documented attacks from the left have plummeted, while those from the right have trended upwards – especially since 2023.

The share of politically motivated incidents coming from the right (versus the left) has increased steadily since 2020 for both scholars and students. Even in 2021, at the height of what many consider to be a period of primarily left-wing cancel culture, 50% of documented incidents targeting scholars came from the political right. In 2020, 80% of documented incidents targeting students came from the left. In 2025, 83% have come from the right.

This backlash has been building for a while, with right-wing attacks on scholars increasing in tandem with left-wing attacks from 2018 to 2021. By 2021, alleged incidents coming from the right (of which FIRE logged 100) numbered almost as many as those coming from the left in 2020 (when FIRE logged a total of 111).

Finally, it’s interesting to note that the surge in right-motivated incidents isn’t simply driven by a single topic - at least for scholars. Right-wing views on COVID, gender, institutional policy (such as DEI), policing, and race all elicited spikes in attempted censorship from the left between 2018 and 2020, each of which was followed by a rightwing backlash against left-wing views. The exceptions are Israel-Palestine and political views (e.g., being critical of Donald Trump), where the political right led the charge and the left followed suit only later.

As Nate Tenhundfeld reported last year in Free the Inquiry, attacks targeting scholars from the left and the right tended to have different sources. Left-wing attacks tended to come from students and other scholars, while right-wing attacks tended to come from administrators and outside actors, including conservative activist groups (such as Turning Point USA) and politicians.

That is certainly true of this year’s spike in race-related attacks on scholarship, 113 of which involved books on DEI-related topics that were removed from the library of the U.S. Naval Academy at the direction of the Defense Secretary’s office (and later reinstated following an investigation by the Pentagon). It was largely true in my analysis of the FIRE student data as well: since 2023, the two main drivers behind right-wing attacks targeting students have been administrators (involved in 48% of attacks) and politicians (involved in 22%).

Political and cultural shifts are likely at play here. With the 2023 SCOTUS decision on race-based admissions, the passage of anti-DEI legislation in several states, and renewed national attention toward antisemitism (now a conservative-coded issue), a re-energized political right has started to go tit-for-tat with the left on campus.

The apparent decline of campus cancellations from the political left isn’t necessarily an indication that the left has realized the damages of censorship. FIRE’s data simply indicate that attacks on scholars and students no longer appear to be a strategy of progressive activism the way they were in the last decade.

It also does not mean that the blue wave of the Great Awokening caused the red tide we are now witnessing. Social phenomena are multiply determined, and much more data would be needed to draw an arrow between these two.

But it seems safe enough to speculate that the red tide we’re seeing now could be partly a reaction to an overall culture in which the shaming of conservative perspectives on campuses was normalized. This is certainly consistent with the rhetoric of the political right, where a sense of grievance has been plain for years – from CPAC’s 2021 theme, “America Uncanceled,” to UATX’s series of “forbidden courses.” And, lest we forget, cycles of censorship have characterized human history for centuries. It’s human nature to want to silence ideas we find harmful, but it’s a tendency with dangerous downstream effects that concern us deeply at HxA.

Seen in this light, the present conservative backlash is not surprising – but it is concerning, not because we favor one viewpoint over another, but because we recognize that censorship – bad in itself – also breeds resentment, directly undermining the conditions that lead to productive dialogue across difference. When the vibes shift again, and the left finds itself in a position to retaliate, hopefully we will have learned why we need to find another solution. Find our approach here.