Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech | Lex Fridman Podcast #397

If the goal is the project of human knowledge, which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think. And what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know. So every time you're actually saying you can't say that, you're actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think, you're causing what Timur Koran, who's on our board of advisors, calls preference falsification. You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world. Which, by the way, in a lot of cases, because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think that people are more prejudiced than they might be. And actually, one very real practical way it makes things worse is when you censor people, it doesn't change their opinion, it just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble. So it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with, and group polarization takes off.

The following is a conversation with Greg Lukianoff, free speech advocate, First Amendment attorney, president and CEO of 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 Canceling of the American Mind, which is a definitive accounting of 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. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Greg Lukianov. Let's start with the big question, what is cancel culture? Now, you've said that you don't like the term as it's been dragged through the mud and abused endlessly by a whole host of controversial figures. Nevertheless, we have the term. What is it?

Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns starting around 2014, to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, et cetera, for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment. And I say would be protected because we're talking about circumstances in which it isn't necessarily where the First Amendment applies. But what I mean is 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 phenomena. 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 2014, Jon Ronson wrote a book called so youo've Been Publicly Shamed that came out in 2015, already documenting this phenomena. I wrote a book called Freedom from speech in 2014, 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 want to ask you here, but one 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 is a famous civil liberties attorney. He's been on the show. 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'd 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. And since that's the whole reason why I went to law school, I was excited to be part of this new organization. The other co founder of FIRE is Alan Charles Coors. He's just an absolute genius. He is one 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 at least it runs in parallel or there's a connection between the love of science and the love of the freedom of speech.

Yes.

Can you maybe elaborate where that connection is?

Sure. I think that for those of us who are really, you know, have devoted our lives to freedom of speech, one 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. We are incredibly self deceiving. 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. And 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 Kepler was probably 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 from a famous Czech hero who was burned at the stake and I think in 1419. 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?

Sure. So I'm a First Amendment lawyer, as I mentioned, and that's what I, that's my passion, that's what I studied. And I think American First Amendment law is incredibly interesting. In one 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 any more over opinion, we weren't going to fight any more over religion, that you have the right to approach your government for redressive grievances, that you have the freedom to associate that all of these things in one sentence. We're like, nope, the government will no longer interfere with your right to have these fundamental human rights. And so one Thing that makes fire a little different from other organizations is, however, we're not just a First Amendment organization. We are a free speech organization. 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, 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 sen. Sense as good principles for 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?

Yeah.

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 want to 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, you know, Dante was bad, like, 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.

You know, when you see it, 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 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 want to. What kind of society do we want to 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 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. And that's where I was worried. I felt like we were headed because a lot of the initial response to people getting canceled was very simply, oh, but they have the right to get rid of this person. And that's the beginning and end of the discussion. And I thought that was a dodge. I thought that wasn't actually a very serious way that if you care about both the First Amendment and freedom of speech, of thinking it through.

So to you, just to clarify, the First Amendment is kind of a legal embodiment of the ideal of freedom of speech. And then freedom of speech has applied to government, and it's very specific applied to government. And freedom of speech is the application of the principle to everything, including kind of the high level philosophical ideal of the value of people being able to speak their mind.

Yeah, it's an older, bolder, more expansive idea. And you can have a situation and I talk about countries that have good free speech law, but not necessarily great free speech culture. And 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. And what I mean by that is that law is generally, particularly in a common law country, it's the reflection of norms. 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, you know, into the law. So 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 one 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.

Yeah, you have this history 64, 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 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 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, they get free speech, they should keep it other side bad, we should not have, and we have to retrain society and of course it ends up being another. He was also a fan of Mao. So it's not surprising that of course the system would have to rely on some kind of totalitarian system. But that was a laughable position, say 30, 40 years ago. The idea that essentially free speech for me, now for thee, as the great 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 99, 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. 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. And if you don't have the respected dissenters, you don't have the people that you can point to that 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, you know, 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, we should also maybe draw a distinction here between the left and the right. And the cancel culture, as you present in your book, sure. Is not necessarily associated with any one political viewpoint, that there's mechanisms on both sides that result in cancellation and censorship in violation of freedom of speech.

So one thing I 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. But 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, they'll go after professors. And about one third of the attempts to get professors punished that are successful actually do come from the right. And we talk about attempts to get books banned. In the book, I 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. And we're like, no, this is a joke. This will be laughed out of court. And they didn't listen to us, and 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.

Can you elaborate on the Stop Woke Act? So this is presumably trying to limit certain topics from being taught in school.

Yeah, basically woke topics, it came out of the sort of attempt to get at critical race theory. So it's topics related to race, gender, et cetera. 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. I think he called this dystopian. And it wasn't a close call.

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. Banning it from the curriculum.

Yeah. 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 K12 because the state has a role in deciding what public K12 teaches because they're your kids, it's taxpayer funded and generally the legislature is involved. There is democratic oversight of that process.

So for K12, is there also a lean towards the left in terms of the administration that manages the curriculum?

Yeah, there definitely is in K12. My kids go to public school. I have a 5 and a 7 year old and they have lovely teachers. But we have run into a lot of problems with education schools that fire and a lot of the graduates of education school end up being the administrators who clamp down on free speech in higher education. And so I've been trying to think of positive ways to take on some of the problems that I see in K12. I thought that the attempt to just dictate you won't teach the following 10 books or 20 books or 200 books was the wrong way to do it. Now when it comes to deciding what books are in the curriculum, again, that's something a legislature actually can have some say in. And that's pretty uncontroversial in terms of the law. But when it comes to how you fight it, I had something that, since I'm kind of stuck with a formula I called empowering of the American mind, I gave principles that were inconsistent with the sort of group think and heavy emphasis on identity politics that some of the critics are rightfully complaining about in K12 and that is actually in canceling of the American mind. But I have a more detailed explanation of it that I'm going to be putting up on my blog. The eternally radical idea.

Is it possible to legally. This is a silly question. Perhaps create an extra protection for certain kinds of literature, 1984 or something to remain in the curriculum I mean, it's already. It's all protected, I guess. Yeah, I guess to protect against administrators from fiddling too much with the curriculum, like stabilizing the curriculum. I don't know what the machinery of the K 12 public school in K.

Through 12, you know, state legislatures, you know, they're part of that. They're part of that. And they can say, like, you should teach the following books right now. Of course, people are always a little bit worried that if you. If they were to recommend, you know, teach. Teach the Declaration of Independence, you know, that it will end up being. Well, they're going to teach the Declaration of Independence was just to protect slavery, which it wasn't.

Yeah. So teaching a particular topic matters, which textbooks you choose, which perspective you take. All that kind of stuff like religion starts to creep into the whole question of like, how, you know, is the Bible are you allowed to teach into. Incorporate that into education?

Yeah, I mean, I'm. I'm an atheist with an intense interest in religion. I actually read the entire Bible this year just because I do stuff like that. And I never actually had read it from beginning to end. Then I read the Quran because, you know, and I'm going to try to do the Book of Mormon, but, you know.

Well, I started. You're so fascinating. Do you recommend doing that?

I think you should just to know, because it's such a touchstone in the way people talk about things. It can get pretty tedious. But I even made myself read through all of the very specific instructions on how tall the different parts of the temple need to be and how long the garbs need to be and what shape they need to be. And those go on a lot. Surprisingly big chunk of Exodus. I thought that was more like in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But then you get to books like Job, you know, wow. I mean, Job is such a read. And no way Job originally had that ending. Like Job is basically. It starts out as this perverse bet between God and Satan about whether or not they can actually make a good man renounce God. And initially they can't. It's all going very predictably. And then they finally really torture Job and he turns into the best. Why is God cruel? How could God possibly exist? How could a kind God do these things? And he beats. He turns into like the best lawyer in the entire world. And he defeats everyone. All the people who come to argue with him, he argues the pants off of them. And then suddenly at the end, God shows up and he's like, well, you know, I am everywhere. And it's a very confusing answer. He gives an answer kind of like, I am there when lionesses give birth, and I am there. And by the way, there's this giant monster leviathan, and it's very big and it's very scary. And I have to manage the universe. And I'm kind of like, God, are you saying that you're very busy? Is that essentially your argument to Job? And you don't mention the whole. You don't mention the whole. Kind of like that. I have a bet that's why I was torturing you. That doesn't come up. And then at the end, God decides, Like, Job's like, oh, no, you're totally right. I was totally wrong. Sorry. And God says, I'm gonna punish those people who tried to argue with you and didn't win. So he gets rid of the. I don't know exactly what he does to them. I don't remember. And then he gives Job all his money back, and it makes him super prosperous. And I'm like, no way. That was the original ending of that book. Because this was clearly a beloved novel that they were like. But it can't have that ending.

Okay? So.

Yeah. So it's a long way of saying I actually think it's worthwhile. Some of it was. You're always kind of surprised when you end up in the part. Like, there are parts of it that will sneak up on you. Kind of like Isaiah's A Trip, Ecclesiastes, Depeche Mode.

And you said you also. The Qurans.

Yeah. Which was fascinating.

So what is there? It'd be interesting to ask, is there a tension between the study of religious texts or the following of religion and just believing in God and following the various aspects of religion.

With freedom of speech in the First Amendment, we have something that we call the religion clause. And I've never liked calling it just that because it's two brilliant things right next to each other. The state may not establish an official religion, but it cannot interfere with your right to practice your religion. That's beautiful. Two things at the same time, and I think they're both exactly right. And I think sometimes the right gets very excited of the free exercise clause, and the left gets very excited about establishment. And I like the fact that we have both of them together. Now, how does this relate to freedom of speech and how does it relate to the curriculum like we were talking about? I actually think it would be great if public schools could teach the Bible, like, in the sense of, like, read it as a historical document. But back when I was at the aclu, every time I saw people trying this, it always turned into them actually advocating for a Catholic or a Protestant or some orthodox, even kind of like read on religion. So if you actually make it into something advocating for a particular view on religion, then it crosses into the establishment clause side. So Americans haven't figured out a way to actually teach it. So it's probably better that you learn outside of a public school class.

Do you think it's possible to teach religion from world religions kind of course. Without disrespecting the religions?

I think the answer is it depends on from whose perspective.

Well, like the practitioner say you're like an orthodox follower of a particular religion. Is it possible to not piss you off in teaching like all the major religions of the world?

For some people, the bottom line is you have to teach it as true. And with that, under those conditions, then the answer is no. You can't teach without offending of someone. At least.

Can't you say these people believe it's true? Can you reform it? So you have to walk on eggshells, essentially.

You can try really hard and you will still make some people angry, but serious people will be like, oh no, you actually tried to be fair to the beliefs here. And I try to be respectful as much as I can about a lot of this. I still find myself much more drawn to both Buddhism and stoicism though.

Where do I go? Okay, one interesting thing to get back to college campuses is fire keeps the college free speech rankings at rankings.thefire.org I'm.

Very proud of them.

I highly recommend, because forget even just the ranking, you get to learn a lot about the universities from this entirely different perspective than people are used to when they go to pick whatever university they want to go to. You just gives another perspective on the whole thing. And it gives quotes from people that are students there and so on like about their experiences. And it gives different. Maybe you could speak to the various measures here before we talk about who's in the top five and who's in the bottom five. What are the different parameters that contribute to the evaluation?

So people have been asking me since day one to do a ranking of schools according to freedom of speech. And even though we had the best database in existence of campus speech COD policies that universities have that violate first Amendment or first amendment norms, we also have the best database of. We call the disinvitation database, but it's actually the. It's better named the deplatforming Database, which is what we're going to call it.

And these are all cases where somebody was invited as a speaker to campus and they were disinvited.

Disinvited or deplatforming also includes shouting down.

So they showed up and they couldn't really speak.

Yeah, exactly. And so having that. What we really needed in order to have some serious social science, to really make a serious argument about what the ranking was, was to be able to one, get a better sense of how many professors were actually getting punished during this time. And then the biggest missing element was to be able to ask students directly what the environment was like on that campus for freedom of speech. Are you comfortable disagreeing with each other? Are you comfortable disagreeing with your, with your professors? Do you think violence is acceptable in response to a speaker? Do you think shouting, do you think shouting down is okay? Do you think blocking people's access to a speaker is okay? And once we were able to get all those elements together, we first did a test run, I think in 2019, about 50. And we've been doing it for four years now, always trying to make the methodology more and more precise to better reflect the actual environment at particular schools. And this year the number one school was Michigan Technological University, which was a nice surprise. The number two school was actually Auburn University, which was nice to see in the top 10. The most well known prestigious school is actually UVA, which did really well this year. University of Chicago was not happy that they weren't number one, but University Teacher of Chicago was 13. And they had been number one or in the top three for years prior to that. Really.

So can you explain. It's almost surprising. Is it because of the really strong economics departments and things like this, or.

Why they had a case involving a student they wouldn't recognize a chapter of Turning Point usa And they made a very classic argument, and classic in the bad way that we hear campuses across the country, oh, we have a campus Republicans, so we don't need this additional conservative group. And we're like, no, I'm sorry. We've seen dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of attempts to get this one particular conservative student group de recognized or not recognized. And so we told them, listen, we told them at fire that we consider this serious and they wouldn't recognize the group. So that's a point down in our ranking. And it was enough to knock them from. They probably would have been number two in the rankings, but now they're 13 out of 248. They're still one of the Best schools in the country. I have no problem saying that the school that did not do so well at a negative 10.69. Negative 10.69, and we rounded up to zero was Harvard. And Harvard has been not very happy with that result.

The only school to receive the abysmal ranking.

Yeah. And there are a couple people.

Oh, Harvard.

Oh, Harvard. And there are a couple people who have actually been really, I think, making a mistake by getting very Harvard sounding, by being like, I've had statisticians look at this and they think your methodology is a joke. And pointing out, and this case wasn't that important and that scholar wasn't that scholar. One of the arguments against one of the scholars that we counted against them for punishing was that that wasn't a very famous or influential scholar. And I'm kind of like, so your argument seems to be snobbery. Like essentially that you're not understanding our methodology, for one thing, and then you're saying that actually that scholar wasn't important enough to count. And by the way, Harvard. By the way, Harvard, if we.

The Harvard campus.

Yeah. Even if we took all of your arguments as true, even if we decided to get rid of those two professors, you would still be in negative numbers. You would still be dead last. You would still be after Georgetown and Penn. And neither of those schools are good for freedom of speech.

I should say the bottom five is of Pennsylvania, like you said, Penn, the University of South Carolina, Georgetown University, and Fordham University.

All very well earned. They have so many bad cases at all of those schools.

What's the best way to find yourself in the bottom five if you're a university? What's the fastest way to that negative, to that zero.

A lot of de platforming. When we looked at the bottom five, 81% of attempts to get speakers de platformed were successful at the bottom five. There were a couple schools, I think Penn included, where every single attempt, every time a student objected, a student group objected to that speaker coming, they canceled this speech. And I think Georgetown was 100% success rate. I think Penn had 100% success rate. I think Harvard did stand up for a couple, but mostly people got deplatformed there as well.

So how do you push back on deplatforming? Who would do it? Is it. Is it other students? Is it faculty? Is it the administration? What's the dynamics of pushing back?

Basically?

Because I imagine some of it is culture. But imagine every university has a bunch of students who will protest basically every speaker, and it's a question of how you respond to that protest?

Well, here's the dirty little secret about the big change in 2014. And fire and me and height have been very clear that the big change that we saw on campus was that for most of my career, students were great on freedom of speech. They were the best constituency for free speech, absolutely unambiguously, until about 2013, 2014. And it was only in 2014 where we had these very, sometimes only a handful of them, though, working together to make, to create some of these problems. And this was exactly what happened at Stanford when Kyle Duncan, a 5th Circuit judge, tried to speak at my alma mater and a fifth of the class showed up to shout him down. It was a real showing of what was going on that 10 minutes into the shout down of a 5th Circuit judge. And I keep on emphasizing that because I'm a constitutional lawyer, 5th Circuit judges are big deals. They're one level below the Supreme Court. About a fifth of the school shows up to shout him down. After 10 minutes of shouting him down, an administrator, a DEI administrator, gets up with a prepared speech that she's written. That's a seven minute long speech where she talks about free speech. Maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And we were at this law school where people could learn to challenge these norms. So it's clear that there was coordination among some of these administrators. And from talking to students there, they were in meetings, extensive meetings for a long time. They show up, do a shout down, then they take an additional seven minutes to lecture the speaker on free speech, not the juice of free speech not being worth the squeeze. And then for the rest of it, it's just constant heckling after she leaves. This is clearly. And something very similar happened a number of times at Yale, where it was very clearly administrators were helping along with a lot of these disruptions. So I think every time there is a shout down at a university, the investigation should be first and foremost, did administrators help create this problem? Did they do anything to stop it? Because I think a lot of what's really going on here is the hyper bureaucratization of universities with a lot more ideological people who think of their primary job as basically policing speech. More or less, they're encouraging students. Sorry, they're encouraging students who have opinions. They like to do shout downs. And that's why they really need to investigate this. And it is at Stanford, the administrator who gave the prepared remarks about the juice not being worth the squeeze, she has not been invited back to Stanford, but she's one of the only examples I can think of when these things happen a lot where an administrator clearly facilitated something that was a shout down or deplatforming or resulted in a professor getting fired or resulted in a student getting expelled, where the administrators has got off scot free or probably in some cases even gotten a promotion.

And so a small number of administrators, maybe even a single administrator, could participate in the encouraging and the organization and thereby empower the whole process.

And that's something I've seen throughout my entire career. And the only thing is kind of hard to catch this sort of in the act, so to speak. And that's one of the reasons why it's helpful for people to know about this, you know, because there was this amazing case, this was at University of Washington. And we actually featured this in a documentary made in 2015 that came out in 2015, 2016 called Can We Take a Joke? And this was when we started noticing something was changing on campus. We also heard that comedians were saying that they couldn't use their good humor anymore. This was right around the time that Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock said that they didn't want to play on campuses because they couldn't be funny. But we featured a case of a comedian who wanted to do a musical called the Passion of the Making fun of the Passion of the Christ with the stated goal of offending everyone, every group equally. It was very much a South park mission. And it's an unusual case because we actually got documentation of administrators buying tickets for angry students and holding an event where they trained them to jump up in the middle of it and shout I'm offended. They bought them tickets, they sent them to this thing with the goal of shouting it down. Now, unsurprisingly, when you send an angry group of students to shut down a play, it's not going to end at just I'm offended. And it got heated. There were death threats being thrown. And then the Pullman Washington police told Chris Lee, the guy who made the play, that they wouldn't actually protect him. Now, it's not every day you're going to have that kind of hard evidence of actually seeing the administrators be so, so brazen that they recorded the fact that they bought them tickets and sent them. But I think a lot of that stuff is going on and I think it's a good excuse to cut down on one of the big problems in higher education today, which is hyper bureaucratization.

In your experience, is there a distinction between administrators and faculty in terms of perpetrators of these kinds of things? So if we Got rid of all like Harvey's talked about, getting rid of a large percentage of the administration. Does that that help fix the problem, or is the faculty also. Small percent of the faculty also part of the encouraging in the organization of these kind of cancel models.

Yeah. And that's something that has been profoundly disappointing, is that when you look at the huge uptick in attempts to get professors fired that we've seen over the last 10 years, and actually over the last 22 years, as far back as our records go, at first they're overwhelmingly led by administrators. Attempts to get professors punished. And that was most. I'd say that was my career up until 2013, was fighting back at administrative excesses. Then you start having the problem in 2014 of students trying to get people canceled. And that really accelerated in 2017. So one thing that makes it easier to document are the petitions to get professors fired or punished and how disproportionately those actually do come from students. But another big uptick has been fellow professors demanding that their fellow professors get punished.

And that, to me, makes me really sad.

It's kind of shameful. You shouldn't be proud of signing the petition to get your fellow professor. And what's even more shameful is that we get. This has almost become a cliche within fire when someone is facing one of these cancellation campaigns. As a professor, I would get letters from some of my friends saying, I am so sorry this has happened to you. And these were the same people who publicly signed the petition to get them fired.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Integrity. Integrity is an important thing in this world. And I think some of it. I'm so surprised people don't stand up more for this because there's so much hunger for it. And if you have the guts as a faculty or an administrator to really stand, stand up with eloquence, with rigor, with integrity. I feel like it's impossible for anyone to do anything because there's such a hunger. It's so refreshing.

Yeah.

I think everybody agrees that freedom of speech is a good thing.

Oh, I don't. I don't.

Well, okay. Sorry, sorry. I don't agree, the majority of people, even at the universities, that there's a hunger, but it's almost like this kind of nervousness around it because there's a small number of loud voices that are doing the shouting. So, I mean, again, that's where great leadership comes in. And so, you know, presidents of universities should probably be making clear declarations of like, this is not. This is a place, or we value the freedom of expression.

And this was all throughout my career, a president, a university president who puts their foot down early and says, nope, we are not entertaining firing this professor. We are not expelling this student. It ends the issue often very fast, although sometimes, and this is where you can really tell the administrative involvement. Students will do things like take over the president's office, and then that takeover will be catered by the university. People will point this out sometimes as being kind of like, oh, it was clearly like my friend Sam Abrams when they tried to get him fired at Sarah Lawrence College. And that was one of the times that it was used as kind of like, oh, this was hostile to the university because the students took over the president's office. And I'm like, no, they let them take over the president's office. And I don't know if that was one of the cases in which the takeover was catered, but if there was ever sort of like a sign that's kind of like, yes, this isn't. This is actually really quite friendly.

Well, in some sense, like, protesting and having really strong opinions, even like ridiculous, crazy, wild opinions is a good thing.

It's just.

It shouldn't lead to actual firing or deplatforming of people. Like, it's good to protest. It's just not good to. For the university to support that and take action based on it.

And this is one of one of those, like, tensions in First Amendment that actually, I think, has a pretty easy release. Essentially, you absolutely have the right to devote your life to ending freedom of speech and ridiculing it as a concept. And there are people who really can come off as very contemptible about even the philosophy of freedom of speech. And we will defend your right to do that. We will also disagree with you. And if you try to get a professor fired, we will be on the other side of that. Now, I think you had Randy Kennedy, who I really. I love him. I think he's a great guy. But he criticized us for our deplatforming database as saying, this is saying that students can't protest speakers. I'm like, okay, that's silly. Fire, as an organization, has defended the right to protest all the time. We are constantly defending the rights of protesters. Not believing that the protesters have the right to say this would basically, that would be punishing the speakers. We're not calling for punishing the protesters, but what we are saying is you can't let the protesters win if they're demanding someone be fired for their freedom of speech.

So the line there is between protesters protesting and the university taking action based on the protests.

Yeah, exactly. And of course shout downs. That's just mob censorship. And that's something where the university. The way that, the way you deal with that tension and First Amendment law is essentially kind of like the one positive duty that the government has. The first, the negative duty, the thing that it's not allowed to do is censor you. But its positive duty is that if I want to say awful things, or for that matter, great things that aren't popular in a public park, you can't let the crowd just shout me down. You can't allow what's called a heckler's veto.

That's so interesting because I feel like that comes into play on social media somehow. There's this whole discussion about censorship and freedom of speech. But to me the carrot question is almost more interesting once the freedom of speech is established is how do you incentivize high quality debate and disagreement?

I'm thinking a lot about that. And that's one of the things we talk about in counseling of the American mind is arguing towards truth. Truth. And that cancel culture is cruel, it's merciless, it's anti intellectual. But it also will never get you anywhere in your truth. And you are going to waste so much time destroying your opponents in something that can actually never get you to truth. Through the process, of course, of you never actually get directly at truth. You just chip away at falsity.

Yeah, but everybody having a megaphone on the Internet with anonymity, it seems like it's better than censorship. But it feels like there's incentives on top of that you can construct to incentivize better discourse, to incentivize somebody who puts a huge amount of effort to make even the most ridiculous arguments, but basically ones that don't include any of the things you highlight. In terms of all the rhetorical tricks to shut down conversations, just make really good arguments for whatever. It doesn't matter if it's communism for fascism, whatever the heck you want to say, but do it with skill, with historical context, with Steel manning the other side. All those kind of elements.

We try to make three major points in the book. One is just simply cancel culture is real, it's a historic era and it's on a historic scale. Scale. The second one is you should think of cancel culture as part of a rhetorical, as a larger lazy rhetorical approach to what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments. And we mean that in two senses, without having winning arguments. Or while actually having won arguments. And we talk about all the different, what we call rhetorical fortresses that both the left and the right have that prevent you from that allow you to just dismiss the person or dodge the argument without actually ever getting to the substance of the argument. Third part is just how do we fix it? But the rhetorical fortress stuff is actually something I'm very passionate about because it interferes with our ability to get at truth and it wastes time. And frankly, since cancel culture is part of that rhetorical tactic, it can also ruin lives.

It would actually be really fun to talk about this particular aspect of the book. And I highly recommend. If you're listening to this, go pre order the book now. When does it come out?

October 17th.

Okay. The canceling of the American Mind. Okay. So in. In the book, you also have a list of cheap rhetorical tactics that both the left and the right use. And then you have a list of tactics that the left uses and the right uses. So there's the rhetorical, the perfect rhetorical fortress that the left uses and the efficient rhetorical fortress that the right uses.

Yeah.

First one is whatabotism. Yeah. Maybe we can go through a few of them that capture your heart in this particular moment as we talk about it. And if. If you can describe examples of it or if there's aspects of it that you see there especially effective. Effective. So whatabadism is defending against criticism of your side by bringing up the other side's alleged wrongdoing.

I want to make little cards of these, of all of these tactics and start using them on X all the time. They are so commonly deployed. And what about ism? I put first for a reason.

You know, it'd be an interesting idea to actually integrate that into Twitter slash X where people, you know, instead of clicking heart, they can click which of the. Which of the rhetorical tactics this is. And then because, you know, there's actually community notes, I don't know if you've seen on X there, you people can contribute notes. And it's quite fascinating. It's. It works really, really well. But to give it a little more structure. Yeah, that's a really interesting method.

Yeah, I actually, when I was thinking about ways that X could be used to argue towards truth, I wouldn't want to have it so that, you know, everybody would be bound to that. But I think that I imagine almost being like a stream within X that was truth focused that agrees to some additional rules on how they would argue.

Man, I would love that where, like, there's in terms of streams that intersect and can be separated. The shit talking one where people just enjoy talking shit.

Okay, go for it, man.

And then there's like true truth. And then to me, there, like, then there's humor, then there's like good vibes. Like, you know, I'm not like somebody who absolutely needs good vibes all the time, but sometimes it's nice to have. It's nice to just log in and not have to see like the drama, the fighting, the bickering, the, the cancellations, the moms, all of this. It's good to just see. That's why I go to Reddit are awe or like one of the cute animals ones where there's cute puppies and kittens and it's like, I just want.

To see Ryan Reynolds singing with Will Ferrell.

I mean, like, sometimes it's all you.

I need that in my heart.

Yeah. Not all the time, just a little bit. And right back to the. The battle for truth. Okay, so what about ism?

What about ism? Yeah, that's everywhere when you look at it, when you look at Twitter, when you look at social media in general. And the first, what we call the obstacle course is basically time tested old fashioned argumentative dodges that everybody uses. And what about ism is just bringing up something like someone makes an argument like Biden is corrupt and then someone says, well, Trump was worse. And that's not an illegitimate argument to make back. But it seems to happen every time someone makes an assertion. Someone just points out some other thing that was going on. And it can get increasingly attenuated from what you're actually trying to argue, argue. And you see this all the time on social media. And it's kind of. I was a big fan of Jon Stewart's Daily show, but an awful lot of what the humor was and what the tactic was for arguing was this thing over here. It's like, oh, I'm making this argument about this important problem. Oh, actually there's this other problem over here that I'm more concerned about. Let's pick on the right here. So January 6th, you know, watching everybody arguing about chop, you know, like the occupied part of Seattle or the occupied part of Portland, and basically trying to like, oh, you're bringing up the riot on January 6th. And by the way, I live on Capitol Hill, so believe me, I was very aware of like how scary and bad it was. You know, like, my dad grew up in Yugoslavia and that was a night where we all ate dinner in the basement because I'm like, oh, when the shit goes down, eat in the basement. Basement. It was genuinely scary. And people would try to deflect from January 6, being serious by actually making the argument that, oh, well, there are crazy, horrible things happening all over the country. Riots that came from some of the social justice protests. And of course, the answer is you can be concerned about both of these things and find them both problems. But if I'm arguing about chop, someone bringing up January 6th isn't super relevant to it. Or if I'm arguing about January 6th, someone bringing up the riots in 2020 isn't that helpful?

We took a long, dark journey from whataboutism. And related to that is Straw Manning and Steel Manning. So misrepresenting the perspective of the opposing perspective. And this is something also, I guess it's very prevalent, and it's difficult to do the reverse of that, which is Steel Manning. It requires empath, it requires eloquence, it requires understanding, actually doing the research and understanding the alternative perspective.

My wonderful employee Angel Anduardo, has something that he calls Star Manning. And I find myself doing this a lot. It's nice to have two immigrant parents because I remember being in San Francisco in the weird kind of ACLU Burning man kind of cohort, and having a friend there who was an artist who would talk about hating Kansas. And that was his metaphor for middle America is what he meant by it. But he was kind of proud of the fact that he hated Kansas. And I'm like, you gotta understand, I still see all of you a little bit as foreigners and think about, like, change the name of Kansas to Croatia. You know, change the name of Kansas to. That's what it sounds like to me. And the Star Manning idea, which I like, is the idea of being like, so you're saying that you really hate your dominant religious minority, and that's when you start actually detaching yourself a little bit from it. How typical. America is exceptional in a number of ways, but some of our dynamics are incredibly typical. It's one of the reasons why when people start reading Thomas Sowell, for example, they start getting hooked. Because one of the things he does is he does comparative analysis of countries problems and points out that some of these things that we think are just unique to the United states exist in 75% of the rest of the countries in the world. For instance, Fukuyama's, the book that I'm reading right now, Origins of the Political Order, actually does this wonderful job of pointing out how we're not special in a variety of ways this is actually something that's very much on my mind. And Fukuyama, of course, it's a great book. It's stilted a little bit in its writing because his term for one of the things he's concerned about what destroys societies is repatrimonialization, which is the reversion to societies in which you favor your family and friends. And I actually think a lot of what I'm seeing in the United States, it makes me worried that we might be going through a little bit of a process of repatrimonialization. And I think that's one of the reasons why people are so angry. I think having an. Well, I think the prospect that we very nearly seemed to have an election that was going to be Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton. It's like, are we a dynastic country now? Is that what's kind of happening? But also it's one of the reasons why people are getting so angry about legacy admissions, about how much certain families seem to be able to keep their people in the upper classes of the United States perpetually. And believe me, I was poor when I was a kid and I got to go to one of the fancy. I got to go to Stanford.

And.

I got to see how people, they treat you differently in a way that's almost insulting. Basically, suddenly, to a certain kind of person, I was a legitimate person. And I look at how much America relies on Harvard, on Yale to produce its. I'm going to use a very Marxist sounding term, ruling class. And that's one of the reasons why you have to be particularly worried about what goes on at these elite colleges. And these elite colleges, with the exception of University of Chicago and uva, do really badly regarding freedom of speech. And that has all sorts of problems. It doesn't bode well for the future of the protection of freedom of speech for the rest of the society.

So can you also empathize there with the folks who voted for Donald Trump? Because as precisely that, as a resistance to this kind of momentum of the ruling class, this royalty that passes on the rule from generation to generation, I.

Try really hard to empathize with, to a degree, everybody and try to really see where they're coming from, from. And the anger on the right. I get it. I mean, I feel like the book, so Coddling the American Mind was a book that could be sort of a crowd pleaser to a degree, partially because we really meant what we said in the subtitle, that these are good intentions and bad ideas that are hurting people. And if you understand it and read the book, you can say it's like, okay, this isn't anybody being malicious. This is people trying to protect their kids. They're just doing it in a way that actually can actually lead to greater anxiety, depression, and strangely, eventually pose a threat to freedom of speech. But in this one we can't be quite me and my. Oh, I haven't even mentioned my brilliant co author, Ricky Schlott, a 23 year old genius. She's amazing. I started working with her when she was 20, who's my co author on this book. So when I'm saying we, I'm talking about me and Ricky.

She's a libertarian. Libertarian journalist and a journalist. Yeah. Brilliant mind.

Yeah. But we can't actually write this in a way that's too kind because cancelers aren't kind. There's a cruelty and a mercilessness about it. I mean, I started getting really depressed this past year when I was writing it and I didn't even want to tell my staff why I was getting so anxious and depressed. It's partially because I'm talking about people who will, in some of the cases we're talking about, go to your house, target your kids. So that's a long winded way of saying I kind of can get. What sort of drives the right nuts to a degree in this. I feel like they're constantly feeling like they're being gaslit. Elite education is really insulting to the working class. Part of the ideology that is dominant right now kind of treats almost 70% of the American public. We developed this a little bit in the perfect rhetorical fortress. Like they're to some way illegitimate and not worthy of respect or compassion.

Yeah, the general elitism that radiates self fueling elitism that radiates from the people that go to these institutions.

And what's funny is the elitism has been repackaged as a kind of. It masquerades as kind of infinite compassion, that essentially it's based in a sort of.