Greg Lukianoff is a free speech advocate, first-amendment attorney, president of FIRE - Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind and a new book The Canceling of the American Mind. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:

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OUTLINE:

Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

(00:00) - Introduction

(10:49) - Cancel culture & freedom of speech

(25:21) - Left-wing vs right-wing cancel culture

(34:06) - Religion

(36:46) - College rankings by freedom of speech

(42:54) - Deplatforming

(57:29) - Whataboutism

(1:02:32) - Steelmanning

(1:10:08) - How the left argues

(1:20:48) - Diversity, equity, and inclusion

(1:32:39) - Why colleges lean left

(1:40:17) - How the right argues

(1:44:52) - Hate speech

(1:53:39) - Platforming

(2:03:10) - Social media

(2:24:17) - Depression

(2:35:48) - Hope

The following is a conversation with Greg Lukianoff, free speech advocate, first amendment attorney, president and CEO of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and he's the author of Unleashing Liberty, co-author with Jonathan Haidt of Coddling of the American Mind, and co-author with Ricky Schlott of a new book coming out in October, that you should definitely pre-order now, called The Cancelling of the American Mind, which is a definitive accounting of the history, present and future of cancel culture, a term used and overused in public discourse, but rarely studied and understood with the depth and rigor that Greg and Ricky do in this book and in part in this conversation.

Freedom of speech is important, especially on college campuses, the very place that should serve as the battleground of ideas, including weird and controversial ones that should encourage bold risk-taking, not conformity.

And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor, check them out in the description, it's the best way to support this podcast.

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And now, dear friends, here's Greg Lukianoff.

Now, you've said that you don't like the term as it's been quote dragged through the mud and abused endlessly by a whole host of controversial figures.

uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns, starting around 2014 to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, etc.

For speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment.

I say would be protected because we're talking about circumstances in which it isn't necessarily where the First Amendment applies.

What I mean is like as an analog to say things you couldn't lose your job as a public employee for.

And also the climate of fear that's resulted from that phenomenon, the fact that you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion.

And it wasn't subtle that there was an uptick in this, particularly on campus around

John Ronson wrote a book called So You've Been Publicly Shamed.

It came out in 2015, already documenting this phenomena.

I wrote a book called Freedom from Speech in

But it really was in 2017 when you started seeing this be directed at professors.

And when it comes to the number of professors that we've seen be targeted and lose their jobs, I've been doing this for 22 years and I've seen nothing like it.

So there's so many things I wanna ask you here.

1 actually, just look at the organization of FIRE.

Can you explain what the organization is because it's interconnected to this whole fight and the rise of cancel culture and the fight for freedom of speech since 2014 and before?

So FIRE was founded in 1999 by Harvey Silverglate.

He's the person who actually found me out in my very happy life out in San Francisco but knew I was looking for a First Amendment job.

I had gone to law school specifically to do First Amendment and he found me, which was pretty cool.

His protege, Kathleen Sullivan, was the dean of Stanford Law School and this remains the best compliment I ever got in my life is that she recommended me to Harvey.

Since that's the whole reason why I went to law school, I was excited to be a part of this new organization.

The other co-founder of FIRE is Alan Charles Kors.

He is 1 of the leading experts in the world on the Enlightenment and particularly about Voltaire.

And if any of your listeners do like The Great Courses, he has a lecture on Blaise Pascal.

And Blaise, of course, is famous for the Pascal's Wager.

And I left it just so moved and impressed and with a depth of understanding of how important this person was.

That's interesting, you mentioned to me offline connected to this that there is, at least it runs in parallel, or there's a connection between the love of science and the love of the freedom of speech.

Can you maybe elaborate where that connection is?

for those of us who are really, you know, who've devoted our lives to freedom of speech, 1 thing that we are into, whether we know it or not, is epistemology, you know, the study and philosophy of knowledge.

You know, freedom of speech has lots of moral and philosophical dimensions, but from a pragmatic standpoint, it is necessary because we're creatures of incredibly limited knowledge.

I always love the fact that Yuval Harari refers to the Enlightenment as the discovery of ignorance because that's exactly what it was.

It was suddenly being like, wow, hold on a second.

All this incredibly interesting folk wisdom we got, which by the way, can be surprisingly reliable here and there, when you start testing a lot of it, is nonsense and it doesn't hold up.

Even our ideas about the way things fall, you know, as Galileo established, like even our intuitions, they're just wrong.

So a lot of the early history of freedom of speech, it was happening at the same time as sort of the scientific revolution.

So a lot of the early debates about freedom of speech were tied in.

So certainly Galileo, you know, I always point out like Kepler was probably like the even more radical idea that there weren't even perfect spheres.

But at the same time, largely because of the invention of the printing press, you also had all these political developments.

And I always talk about Jan Hus, you know, from the—a famous Czech hero who was burned at the stake, and I think in

But he was basically Luther before the printing press.

Before Luther could get his word out, he didn't stand a chance and that was exactly what Jan Hus was.

But a century later, thanks to the printing press, everyone could know what Luther thought, and boy, did they.

But it led to, of course, this completely crazy, hyper-disrupted period in European history.

Well, You mentioned, to jump around a little bit, the First Amendment.

First of all, what is the First Amendment and what is the connection to you between the First Amendment, the freedom of speech, and cancel culture?

So I'm a First Amendment lawyer, as I mentioned, and that's what I, it's my passion, that's what I studied, and I think American First Amendment law is incredibly interesting.

In 1 sentence, the First Amendment is trying to get rid of basically all the reasons why humankind had been killing

each other for its entire existence, that we weren't going to fight anymore over opinion.

We weren't going to fight anymore over opinion.

We weren't going to fight anymore over religion, that you have the right to approach your government for redress of grievances, that you have the freedom to associate, that all of these things in 1 sentence were like, nope, the government will no longer interfere with your right to have these fundamental human rights.

And so 1 thing that makes FIRE a little different from other organizations is however, we're not just a First Amendment organization.

And so, But at the same time, a lot of what I think free speech is can be well explained with reference to a lot of First Amendment law, partially because in American history, some of our smartest people have been thinking about what the parameters of freedom of speech are in relationship to the First Amendment and a lot of those principles they transfer very well just as Pragmatic ideas so like the biggest sin in terms of censorship Is called viewpoint discrimination That essentially you allow freedom of speech except for that opinion.

Now it's – and it's found to be kind of more defensible and I think this makes sense that if you set up a forum and like we're only going to talk about economics to exclude people who want to talk about a different topic.

But it's considered rightfully a bigger deal if you've set up a forum for economics.

But we're not going to let people talk about that kind of economics or have that opinion on economics, most particularly.

So a lot of the principles from First Amendment law actually make a lot of philosophical sense as good principles for when, like what is protected and unprotected speech, what should get you in trouble, how you actually analyze it, which is why we actually try in our definition of cancel culture to work in some of the First Amendment norms just in the definition so we don't have to bog down on them as well.

You're saying so many interesting things but if you can linger on the viewpoint discrimination, is there any gray area of discussion there like what is and isn't economics for the example you gave?

Is there, I mean, is it a science, or is it an art to draw lines of what is and isn't allowed?

Yeah, you know, if you're saying that something is or is not economics, well, you can say everything's economics, and therefore, I wanna talk about poetry.

There'd be some line drawing exercise in there.

But let's say at once you decide to open up it to poetry even, it's a big difference between saying, okay, now we're open to poetry but you can't say Dante was bad.

That's a forbidden opinion now officially in this otherwise open forum.

That would immediately at an intuitive level strike people as a bigger problem than just saying that poetry isn't economics.

Yeah, I mean that intuitive level that you speak to, I hope that all of us have that kind of basic intuition when the line is crossed.

It's the same thing for like pornography, right?

I think there's the same level of intuition that should be applied across the board here.

And it's when that intuition becomes deformed by whatever forces of society, that's when it starts to feel like censorship.

Yeah, I mean, people find it a different thing.

You know, if someone loses their job simply for their political opinion, even if that employer has every right in the world to fire you, I think Americans should still be like, well, it's true.

They have every right in the world and I'm not making a legal case that maybe you shouldn't fire someone for their political opinion, But think that through.

Like what society do we wanna, what kind of society do we wanna live in?

And it's been funny watching, you know, and I point this out, yes, I will defend businesses' First Amendment rights of association to be able to have the legal right to decide, you know, who works for them.

But from a moral or philosophical matter, if you think through the implications of if every business in America becomes an expressive association in addition to being a profit-maximizing organization, that would be a disaster for democracy because you would end up in a situation where people would actually be saying to themselves, I don't think I can actually say what I really think and still believe I can keep my job.

I felt like we were headed because a lot of the initial response to people getting canceled was very simply, you know, oh, but they have the right to get rid of this person.

And that's the beginning and end of the discussion.

I thought that wasn't actually a very serious way of that if you care about both the First Amendment and freedom of speech of thinking

So to you just to clarify, the First Amendment is kind of a legal embodiment of the ideal of freedom of speech and a freedom of speech- That's

It's very specific, it applied to government.

Now freedom of speech is the application of the principle to like everything including like kind of the high-level philosophical ideal of what it- of the value of people being able to speak their mind.

It's an older, bolder, more expansive idea.

And I talk about countries that have good free speech law but not necessarily great free speech culture.

I talk about how when we sometimes make this distinction between free speech law and free speech culture, we're thinking in a very cloudy kind of way.

What I mean by that is that law is generally, particularly in a common law country, it's the reflection of norms.

Those judges are people too and in a lot of cases, common law is supposed to actually take our intuitive ideas of fairness and place them into the law.

If you actually have a culture that doesn't appreciate free speech from a philosophical standpoint, it's not going to be able to protect free speech for the long haul even in the law because eventually – that's 1 of the reasons why I worry so much about some of these terrible cases coming out of law schools because I fear that even though, sure, American First Amendment law is very strongly protective of First Amendment, for now, it's not going to stay that way if you have generations of law students graduating who actually think there's nothing – there's no higher goal than shouting down you're an opponent.

Yeah, so that's why so much of your focus, or a large fraction of your focus, is on the higher education or education period, is because education is the foundation of culture.

you have the free speech movement on Berkeley.

And in 65, you have repressive tolerance by Herbert Marcuse, which was a declaration of, by the way, we on the left, we shouldn't, we should have free speech, but we should have free speech for us.

I mean I went back and reread Repressive Tolerance and how clear it is.

I forgot—I had forgotten that it really is kind of like—and these so-called conservatives and right-wingers, we need to repress them because they're regressive thinkers.

It really doesn't come out to anything more sophisticated than the very old idea that our people are good.

We should not have—we have to retrain society." Of course, like it ends up being another—he was also a fan of Mao, so it's not surprising that he—of course the system would have to rely on some kind of totalitarian system.

But that was a laughable position, you know, say 30, 40 years ago.

The idea that essentially, you know, free speech for me, not for thee, as the great, you know, free speech champion, Nat Hentoff, used to say, was something that you were supposed to be embarrassed by.

But I saw this when I was in law school in 97.

I saw this when I was interning at the ACLU in

that there was a slow motion train wreck coming, that essentially there was these bad ideas from campus that had been taking on more and more steam of basically no free speech for my opponent were actually becoming more and more accepted as – and partially because academia was becoming less and less viewpoint diverse.

I think that as my co-author Jonathan Haidt points out, that when you have low viewpoint diversity, people start thinking in a very kind of tribal way.

If you don't have the respected dissenters, You don't have the people that you can point to that are like, hey, this is a smart person.

This is a smart, reasonable, decent person that I disagree with.

So I guess not everyone thinks alike on this issue.

You start getting much more kind of like only bad people, only heretics, only blasphemers, only right-wingers, you know, can actually think in this way.

Every time you say something I always have a million thoughts and million questions that pop up, but since you mentioned there's a kind of drift as you write about in the book and you mentioned now there's a drift towards the left in academia, which will also maybe draw a distinction here between the left and the right and the cancel culture as you present in your book, is not necessarily associated with any 1 political viewpoint, that there's mechanisms on both sides that result in cancellation and censorship in violation of freedom of speech.

want to be really clear about is the book takes on both right and left cancel culture.

They're different in a lot of ways, and definitely cancel culture from the left is more important in academia where the left dominates.

We talk a lot about cancel culture coming from legislatures.

We talk a lot about cancel culture on campus as well because Even though most of the attempts that come from on campus to get people canceled are still from the left, there are a lot of attacks that come from the right, that come from attempts by different organizations and sometimes when there are stories in Fox News, you know, like they'll go after professors.

About one-third of the attempts to get professors punished that are successful actually do come from the right.

We talk about attempts to get books banned in the book.

We talk about suing the Florida legislature.

Ron DeSantis had something called the Stop Woke Act, which we told everyone this is laughably unconstitutional.

They tried to ban particular topics in higher ed.

They didn't listen to us and they brought it—they passed it and we sued and we won.

Now they're trying again with something that's equally as unconstitutional and we will sue again and we will win.

This is presumably trying to limit certain topics from being taught in school?

You know, it came out of the sort of attempt to get at critical race theory, So it's topics related to race, gender, etc.

I don't remember exactly how they tried to cabinet to CRT.

But when you actually – the law is really well established that you can't tell higher education what they're allowed to teach without violating the First Amendment.

And when this got in front of a judge, he was exactly as skeptical of it as we thought he'd be.

So if you're against that kind of teaching, the right way to fight it is by making the case that it's not a good idea as part of the curriculum as opposed to banning it from the curriculum.

Just the state doesn't have the power to simply say to ban what professors in higher education teach.

Now it gets a little more complicated when you talk about K-12 because the state has a role in deciding what public K-12 teaches because they're your kids.

It's taxpayer funded and generally the legislature is involved.

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#397 – Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech