"Bad people sometimes make correct arguments, and good people often make wrong ones. There's kind of no relationship between these two.”
It’s a logical fallacy to say a person’s arguments are all bad simply because they are a bad person, but that’s precisely how cancel culture is destroying productive debate, says Greg Lukianoff.
He’s the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author, with Rikki Schlott, of “The Canceling of the American Mind.”
“One in six professors say they've even been threatened with investigation or actually investigated,” Mr. Lukianoff says, according to a FIRE survey.
Watch the clip:
In this episode, Mr. Lukianoff breaks down the nature of poorly formed arguments, how they became a dominant form of public discourse, and how to restore meaningful discussion and free speech.
*Big thanks to our sponsor Patriot Gold Group! Check them out here: http://www.patriotgoldgroup.com/p/epoch

🔴 WATCH the full episode (1h 9 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1118GregLukianoff
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Greg Lukianoff, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Greg Lukianoff: I'm thrilled to be here.
Mr. Jekielek: We're living in a society where people are asking whether we should even continue with this idea of free speech. I have the right person to talk about this with. This is obviously a big question, but how did we get here?
Mr. Lukianoff: The first thing I always explain about freedom of speech, and it's the reason why my Substack is named, “The Eternally Radical Idea,” is the normal situation in human history is that the censors win. In every generation, people rise up to oppose freedom of speech, and they're usually the winners. It's actually historically strange to have an extended period in which free speech is even appreciated, let alone actually practiced.
I was pretty lucky to grow up in the '80s and '90s at a time when free speech law in the United States was improving practically every year. Free speech culture was definitely something that was almost taken for granted as being part of the society, and it was particularly one of the main things that liberals believed in. I'm still a Democrat to this day. But growing up, being on the Left meant being pro-freedom of speech, and I've been horrified to watch that change.
You need work, teaching, discipline, ideals, and philosophy to maintain freedom of speech. If you don't have that, then censorship gravity takes over, pulling us down, and reverting towards the norm, which is that people in power get to decide what is acceptable and unacceptable speech. Unfortunately, we have been drifting in that direction for some time. But I don't want to pretend it's merely just a natural process, and there's nobody who's actually pushing this along.
In my book, Canceling of the American Mind, written with Rikki Schlott, we call this the anti-free speech movement, which actually began just one year after the free speech movement on college campuses. In 1965, Herbert Marcuse, the famous guru of the Left, still mistakenly adored by some people, wrote an article called, “Repressive Tolerance,” making an argument that was presented as if it was somehow sophisticated. But it was saying nothing more sophisticated than if you want to have a truly free and equal society, then you have to silence the bad guys.
In his opinion, the bad guys are the so-called Right, the so-called conservatives, and the regressive-Right, which he thinks is everyone else. The good guys, being the people who mostly agree with Marcuse, and the people on the Left should have free speech. But in order to be truly free, we need some kind of dictatorial government with vast and sweeping powers to punish the people who are regressive in the name of some abstract ideal. Honestly, this is not just a terrible idea, but a really ancient idea that essentially we should let the philosopher kings be in charge of freedom of speech. Nobody else should have it.
Mr. Jekielek: When the pandemic hit, the philosopher kings took over very quickly.
Mr. Lukianoff: Yes. We have a whole chapter on Covid and cancel culture. One of the points we make is how much authority did to undermine credibility itself, and how much cancel culture played a role in that. We give the example of Jennifer Sey, who was an executive at Levi Jeans. Famously, she's also an advocate for educating kids, and particularly disadvantaged kids. I believe she has two biracial children of her own.
In response to the lockdowns, when she said, "This is going to be a disaster for children and especially for disadvantaged kids," she was essentially forced out of Levi's. There was this huge uproar about it, saying that this was offensive and this was racist somehow, and that this was something that she really had to apologize for. They fairly quickly offered her a severance, which she refused to take because she wanted to keep talking about her case.
Now, freedom of speech doesn't just attach to when you are correct on something. The fact is, in order to get to good ideas, you need to bounce every idea off the wall. We need to be able to do 20 bad ideas in a minute in order to get to better ideas. But it is especially galling when it turns out she was dead right on. Now practically every expert says, "Yes, of course, that was profoundly harmful to children, especially disadvantaged ones. The learning losses are colossal." She was canceled for an opinion that actually turned out to be right.
Now, people aren't stupid. They watch this happening, and it really undermines their faith in expertise. We give multiple examples of how, during Covid, the authorities did themselves no favors by acting with an unwarranted level of certainty, instead of just leveling with the public and saying, "There are things we know. There are things we don't know. This is what we think at the moment. We could possibly be wrong." They thought that they had to clamp down with an iron fist or else everything would go crazy. But that's not the way democratic free societies are supposed to think about this.
I always give the example of the lab leak theory. In March 2020, people started talking about the fact that there is a novel respiratory virus lab in Wuhan, and maybe this could have actually been a lab leak. Some people even speculated that maybe it's a bioweapon that got out. The immediate response was, “No, that's absolutely false. We know that's false. That's not true. We know it came from a wet market.” This was also the response of some of my very highly educated friends.
Again, people aren't stupid. They're watching this and thinking, "Okay, I know a couple things here. I know that I don't know if it's a lab leak. But I also know that you don't know it's a lab leak, but you're acting as if this is written in the sky." Was there some secret super investigation of Wuhan, which the entire world was let in to see? Because unless that happened, which of course it didn't, they don't know this.
It was one of those things where working without epistemic humility in the knowledge that they have, experts really shot themselves in the foot. It's one of the reasons why, as we demonstrate in the book, faith in experts and faith in institutions has plummeted partially because of big mistakes that they made and a lot of the intellectual arrogance on their part.
Mr. Jekielek: I love that term that you use in the book, epistemic humility, which was not a thing at the time. Let me just comment very briefly and this is very relevant to, The Canceling of the American Mind. There was a letter, “Proximal Origins,” published in Nature magazine. Essentially, the letter was an argument by prominent scientists saying, "There is no way that it's a lab leak. It's clearly natural." I knew enough to know that this was just preposterous. Most self-respecting biologists probably thought the same, but for some reason they didn't say anything. I even called a friend of mine who had been a vaccinologist back in the day and asked, "Did you see this?" He said, "Yes, I wrote to them, but I got no response." What are your thoughts?
Mr. Lukianoff: Pretending that you are certain about something has advantages. Then people actually think they are decidedly smarter than other people.
Mr. Jekielek: But here's the thing, if you're an academic, Nature magazine is the pinnacle of biology-related publishing.
Mr. Lukianoff: We saw this coming for a long time. I've been defending free speech on campus for 22 years, and I sometimes get credit for being able to predict things before they happen. I started working on the book, Coddling of the American Mind, with Jon Haidt in 2014. With these same habits that are threatening campus freedom of speech and academic freedom, which are expressed in semi-medicalized language with lots of cognitive distortions, lots of catastrophizing, and what cognitive behavioral therapy tells you not to do, we were saying that this will be a disaster for academic freedom, for free speech, and for the mental health of young people.
It turned out not only were we right, it was terrifyingly more serious than even Jon and I thought it would be. We thought we would see a little scholarly dip in young people's mental health, but instead, it was plummeting. I do get frustrated because I've been warning about the problem on campus for such a long time, and it was getting clearly so much worse from 2017 on. 2020 and 2021 were the two worst years that I know of for academic freedom and free speech on campus since the law was decided on in 1973, and probably even before that.
Looking at the best historical models we have, there have been more people fired from 2014, which we have seen as the start of cancel culture, to this past July. It's twice the number of the standard estimate of people fired during McCarthyism. One in six professors say they've even been threatened with investigation or actually investigated for their academic freedom. Nine percent of students, basically one in ten, are saying that they have been investigated for their speech. There's no meaningful comparison to that.
They didn't investigate students for their speech at all up until probably the '80s, as best as we can tell. I do sometimes feel like I'm screaming in the void. Then later, people will say, "Yes, he might have been right about some of this stuff." No, it's really coming. You can see it as it works up, and it's wreaking absolute havoc on all of our knowledge-producing institutions.
Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk about cancel culture for a moment. The common response to a person's being canceled is, "No, this is a reasonable response. This is just accountability." What is the distinction?
Mr. Lukianoff: First, I should give our definition of cancel culture, which is very simple. It's the uptick of campaigns to get people fired, de-platformed, or otherwise punished for speech that would be protected under the First Amendment. We explain this in the appendix as an analogy to public employee law, and as a way of bringing in a tremendous amount of nuance and common sense to a definition that we wanted to keep short.
In the definition we say, “Starting in 2014 and accelerating in 2017..,” but we kept out of the definition, "..and going completely off the charts in 2020 and 2021." This is our definition of cancel culture. When people say, "There's no such thing as cancel culture. There's just an accountability culture," I have a very hard time taking that person seriously after that point, because generally, it tells me that they don't know a lot about the topic.
You're not going to finish, Canceling of the American Mind, believing that any of them deserve punishment. Even if you thought some of them deserved consequences, you're not going to think that in 90 percent of the cases. People don't bother to look into it. They basically think it's all like Harvey Weinstein being punished. Harvey Weinstein, by the way, wasn't canceled. He wasn't canceled for protected speech. He was arrested and sent to jail for serious ongoing crimes.
It's a pat answer, and it usually means people aren't willing to look into it. It's nothing more sophisticated than saying, "I don't know a lot about it, but I assume all those people had it coming." As someone who's looked into so many victims of cancel culture, I often struggle to understand, “How is what they said even controversial today?”
Mr. Jekielek: As to the person who is doing the canceling, we frequently describe them as woke. We're talking about critical social justice ideology.
Mr. Lukianoff: Woke is just kind of an insult that you're not really sure what it means. Tim Urban's term is perfect because it's self-explanatory, and it is a social justice fundamentalist.
Mr. Jekielek: I hadn't even heard of that. Okay, new usage. Thinking about the social justice fundamentalists, they believe in microaggressions. You were talking about Marcuse's idea, repressive tolerance. It was arcane and difficult to read that particular essay compared to how pleasant and readable your book is.
Mr. Lukianoff: He has the temerity in that poorly written article to take on John Stuart Mill. I thought, "John Stuart Mill was smarter than any of us." He spoke Greek at age three, for goodness sakes. He was able to write one of the best arguments for freedom of speech ever written, but also in riveting, clear prose that would win a court case for you today times 10.
Mr. Jekielek: The social justice fundamentalist writings are deliberately obtuse so that only the people who are the initiates, the elect, as John McWhorter would say, can understand. The social justice fundamentalists really believe that the speech of professor Mike Adams, a terrible situation that you chart in the book, was actually violence against them, and that they were somehow harmed.
Yet, at the same time, according to their twisted logic, they themselves can use any means including actual violence to fight back against that. That logic comes directly from Marcuse. John McWhorter says, "Let's just make sure these people are nowhere near the reins of power. We have to treat them with compassion." I agree with that, but that's not the situation right now. It's just the opposite.
Mr. Lukianoff: They already have the reins of power, particularly in higher ed. The realization that most people think they're doing the right thing is generally true. It's funny that sociopath was once the preferred term for psychopath, and I only discovered later that they mean the same thing. Recognizing that there are people like that in the world is key. I had one very unfortunate interaction with a sociopath, and it was not pleasant.
We have to remember that people like that do exist, but most people aren't like that. In this case, they're taking people who otherwise are of goodwill and trying to improve the world, and indoctrinating them with hyper-oversimplified ideas about the world. They are giving them a history that is entirely slanted, and then challenging them to make activism part of their life. They get this pretty much from K-12 on up.
There's an Aldous Huxley quote that explains one of the reasons why I can't feel too much sympathy for people who are in these cancel mobs. He points out that if you want to create a successful social movement you should give people permission to be cruel to other people. They should also feel righteous indignation when they do it, and feel good about themselves when they're actively being mean, because that will attract people in droves. Unfortunately, it’s true, and it has been true historically.
A lot of times a social justice fundamentalist, when they're going after a professor or a fellow student, will usually refer to an abstracted idea of someone who is less powerful, and who might theoretically be harmed by these words or these ideas. Usually, they're not arguing that they are harmed by this because somehow that doesn't sit right. They have to be doing it on behalf of someone else in the abstract. But it gives them permission to be incredibly cruel to people in the real world.
Mr. Jekielek: I saw people reacting to the Hamas massacre in Israel. Before any reaction from Israel, there was this strange, incredibly cruel reaction.
Mr. Lukianoff: Obviously, our book was written long before October 7th, 2023. It had the misfortune of coming out shortly thereafter when all the news coverage was on the atrocities going on in Israel. It was really horrifying to see highly educated people and people at Harvard immediately take the side of the people who were, at the time, still raping people, still murdering people, and still kidnapping innocent civilians.
I'm a First Amendment lawyer and a true believer. You have the right to have offensive points of view. I will defend your right to have offensive points of view, and not because I necessarily think those opinions are good. But it's good to know if someone actually thinks that, or worst of all, actually thinks that Hamas was right in their attack. That is an immoral belief, but you're entitled to it. If you have that belief, it's better that I know what you think.
For the actual kind of mentality that would see this, and then right out their heads make it this hyper-simplified story of good versus evil, somehow putting Hamas in the role the oppressed, these people who are engaged in rape and torture, it takes a lot of indoctrination to get to that point. In Coddling of the American Mind, we think that the mentality that leads to this oversimplified good versus evil way of thinking about things is what we call common enemy identity politics.
We believe very much in common humanity identity politics, widening the circle of what we are as a people in order to bring more people in, so that we can be friends on equal terms and create a community where people look different and worship different gods, but nonetheless think of themselves as part of the university community or America.
Common enemy identity politics has been much more successful on campus in the past several decades. It's like that Aldous Huxley quote, "Who am I allowed to hate? Because honestly, that's a lot more fun." By the way, it lets me win arguments without actually addressing someone's arguments at all.
In Canceling of the American Mind, we talk about cancel culture being the nastiest approach to winning arguments without actually winning arguments, which means not actually convincing anybody and not actually defeating someone in an argument. Right now, we are literally arguing like junior high school students.
I believe this more strongly even now because my co-author is a generation Z young woman. When I talk about cancel culture really starting around 2014, she makes the point, "No, I grew up with cancel culture." Cancel culture was exactly what happened to the first generation of teens, especially girls, but also boys, who had social media in their pockets.
They immediately figured out a way to bully people, not by standard bullying and calling them mean names, but by pointing out their moral infirmities. You could now use the anti-bullying system to punish the person that you wanted to punish, and then claim they were actually the bully or they were actually the regressive thinker. Unfortunately, there is a weird kind of twisted fun to this process. By watching someone suffer, and particularly if you perceive this person as bad, then by all means they deserve whatever they get.
That nasty habit and the New Age version of enlightened bullying made its way to campus in 2014 in large numbers, when Gen Z started hitting higher ed in large numbers. I don't want to blame this on just Gen Z, even though the cancel culture does tend to follow them along, partially because these are habits and techniques and tactics that they learned from a very early age for appearing to win arguments without actually winning arguments.
One of the reasons why it really accelerated, particularly in elite higher ed, is because elite higher ed already believed its job was to cultivate and create activists, instead of scholars. In Unlearning Liberty, my first book back in 2012, I wrote, "We should be cultivating scholars, not activists."
This is an entirely different mindset and this dirty little secret of why things got so much worse on campus. Administrators were pretty happy to have some students who were more into the idea of passing new speech codes and creating new exceptions, and in some cases helping organize shout downs. That is what happened at my alma mater, Stanford Law School, where a DEI administrator met with a huge number of law students for hours.
As we talk about in the book, they showed up for a speech from a Fifth Circuit judge. I always emphasize this because that's a big deal. That's one step below the Supreme Court. About a fifth of the class shows up to shout him down. They do it for precisely 10 minutes, and then the DEI administrator comes out of the crowd. By the way, there were multiple administrators there. In advance of the judge coming, they had promised that if there was a disruption, the administrators would give the students one warning and then ask them to come out.
What they did instead, to respect the letter of the law, but definitely not the spirit, was to let him be shut down for 10 minutes. Then the administrator gave a preplanned, pre-prepared, seven-minute speech on whether or not the juice of free speech, the juice of having Kyle Duncan there, a Fifth Circuit judge talking to law school people, was worth the squeeze of the pain that he had caused the community. By the way, these are her terms, I would never use this kind of language.
I thought, "I went to Stanford, for God's sake. We had conservative judges there routinely.” It was a forced situation where they were claiming the horrible pain of having a speech there, which they never even had to go to. Administrators were playing a role in this and encouraging the students that they favor to protest. One case involves someone on our board, Sam Abrams, at Sarah Lawrence College.
He wrote an article in The New York Times pointing out that administrators are even more politically homogeneous than the professoriate, which is crazy because the professoriate is incredibly politically homogeneous. But he wrote this in The New York Times. This is not controversial data, and this is something that has been pretty well established for a long time. It did show that it had gotten worse.
Then strangely, even though he didn't mention students at all, students started protesting and demanding that Sam Abrams be fired. They vandalized his door. They took over the president's office, which actually you should never take all that seriously because that means they were allowed to take over the president's office. A lot of these presidential office takeovers are catered by the university. They will literally have food for the students occupying it, and that takeover becomes a formal part of what you're doing.
Mr. Jekielek: The activism itself is performative. With the BLM protests or the protests that are happening now, I couldn't figure out why these things look so different to me than other protests in the past. There are a few different things. One, if there's some kind of institutional power behind the protest, it is more like a Red Guard or Brownshirt thing than a protest. The Truckers Convoy in Canada was a real protest.
Mr. Lukianoff: Yes. To pick on my alma mater again, I found it so funny these students are acting like they are big rebels. I thought, "Congratulations. This is the popular point of view at Stanford. You have the will of the people, and are essentially rejecting someone who might be a dissenter. Somehow, nothing's going off in your head that this makes you the bully. This puts you in bad company historically."
Many times the students are misled to believe that this is unpopular locally and that's why we can't have it. No. If it's unpopular locally, that's probably why you need to hear it. Otherwise, you're just living in an echo chamber and you're creating tighter and tighter walls for your echo chamber. This is precisely the kind of thing that higher education should be eroding.
It also should be teaching us habits of argumentation that actually get us towards truth, which is why we spend an awful lot of the book talking about cancel culture as just one among many rhetorical techniques to not argue. What's crazy is that higher ed isn't just not teaching students how to have productive debates that actually get somewhere. They are allowing and even facilitating habits of dismissing people by identity. For example, they find out if someone has done something bad in their whole life, and therefore their opinion is no longer taken seriously. Campuses shouldn't be within 1,000 yards of these kinds of poor rhetorical tactics, but they are actually teaching them.
Mr. Jekielek: Exactly. It's not just encouraged, but it's the way it's done today. You have 10 of these different ways of arguing that allow you to avoid having a reasoned discussion. Looking through them, this is just what everybody does right now. It's very rare to have an actual conversation where there's some level of disagreement, and you're trying to figure out the truth of the matter.
Mr. Lukianoff: Yes. One way to avoid a discussion we call the grifter. We set it up nicely in that we have the first chunk that we call The Obstacle Course, which are standard logical fallacies, which includes accusations of bad faith. Someone is a bad person, therefore they have bad opinions. This is what we talk about as the fourth grade on truth in the book. In this case, it's an accusation. The word that best epitomizes this is the grifter, who says, “I've defended thousands of students over the years. I'm second to none in terms of defending faculty and student rights.”
People who know nothing about my work will immediately say, "It's a grifter talking about this stuff." Unfortunately, you call everybody grifters that you don't want to listen to. This is just an assumption of bad faith and just an insult as a way to avoid actually engaging in any serious way.
Mr. Jekielek: I often wonder whether it’s also a projection, because the person themself has bad faith, so they assume you do.
Mr. Lukianoff: The next one I want to talk about is what we call hypocrisy projection. If you start looking on the interwebs, you will see this everywhere, particularly X and Threads. By the way, we get this both from the Right and the Left sometimes. When FIRE [Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression] takes a case when we're defending a Lefty, which is often, you'll have someone from the Right come up and ask, "Where were you in this case involving the Right?"
We say, "Here's the lawsuit we filed on behalf of this professor. We're quoted to the following 20 things here. You only care about one side of the political fence. You projected that onto us because you can't grok the idea that there might actually be consistent defenders of free speech. We watch the same thing on the Left. Time and time again, people will be accusing, "Where are you in this case that I just learned about where a Lefty got in trouble?"
I say, "First of all, how about you do something to help that professor? Second of all, do your homework. We commented on this a month ago, and here are the letters that we wrote." One time someone actually did this, citing a FIRE document, saying, "FIRE is not going anywhere near this." I said, "You're literally citing a document that you didn't even know was actually produced by a FIRE FOIA request."
Hypocrisy projection is one of these really lame and embarrassing techniques that we tend to use in the age of social media where people want to just dub you bad, dub you a hypocrite, dub you a grifter, so that they don't have to think.
Mr. Jekielek: A quote from Solzhenitsyn appears at least twice in your book, "The line between good and evil goes through every human heart." Please tell me about that.
Mr. Lukianoff: I thought our society was improving in our moral sophistication maybe 20 years ago, and that increasingly our art, like in TV shows, for example, moved from typically good vs. evil, heroic characters or even just good characters who are kind hearted to more exploration of people who were really bad in a lot of different ways, but also showing the weird relatability and humanity that they had in themselves as well.
I thought we were moving to a level where if we take human nature seriously, there is good and evil inside of all of us, and that essentially we do have complicated motives. Things are oftentimes more morally complicated than we think. There are genuine moral dilemmas where your only choices are situations that might be truly awful and only slightly less complicated.
Somehow, as we seemed to be progressing that way, everything went entirely in the reverse. In Coddling of the American Mind, we call this the third great untruth. The untruths are the ideas like if the worst guru in the world was giving you the stupidest advice you ever heard in your life that would really make you miserable. It would be advice that disagrees with ancient wisdom and with modern psychological thought.
The first three great untruths that we cover in Coddling are, one, “What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.” Two, “Always trust your feelings,” which sounds nice, but it's terrible advice. As someone has said, “Your feelings are data, not directions.” Three, “Life is a battle between good people and evil people exclusively.” In this book, we introduced a fourth, which is, “No bad person has any good argument.” That essentially means if I can magically declare you bad, I don't have to think about any argument you made, even though I know full well bad people sometimes make correct arguments and good people often make wrong ones. There's no relationship between these two.
Mr. Jekielek: The four great untruths provide a very interesting and valuable framework, if you remember to ask, “Am I engaging in any of this right now?
Mr. Lukianoff: Actually, for me, it comes from a family habit. My family is Russian and British, very different cultures. My mom, being an Irish girl growing up in Britain, has an exaggerated sense of politeness. With my father, being polite is a form of deception. Russians sometimes pride themselves on being brutally honest. Actually, once you get used to it, you kind of like it. But sometimes you can't be both polite and honest.
In our family, we all have the civil libertarian kind of personality, and we don't like being told what to do. We are all very independent. But there was one way where we could get through each other's defenses. I remember my brother going to my sister Alexandra one time when she was really mad about something and saying, "You know what, Alex? You know what you should do with that anger? You should push it all together. Every morning when you wake up, you should look at it and remember that you're doing this."
Basically it was making the point, “I'm going to give you some terrible advice to immediately point out that what you're doing is foolish. I know you won't listen to me if I give you positive advice, but if I say, ‘At least don't do this incredibly stupid thing,’ you will start to see it.” I actually like the technique of negative advice because I don't want to run your life. But if you believe that only good people have good opinions, you know that's not true. It also leads to a silly situation where you're trying to prove your side good and the other side evil, which is arguing like children.
Mr. Jekielek: At the beginning of your book, you start off with an allegory. It's a mythical society that removes all these fallacious ways of making arguments and people actually have truth-seeking discussions and find incredible truths. I was half wondering, “Could this be real?” It actually brought a tear to my eye because we're so far from that.
Mr. Lukianoff: I love allegory as a way to bring people in and as a way to explain a larger premise. The story that we set up in the beginning was about the sorceress, Pandora, who has a society that is doing terribly and everyone is at each other's throats. She removes the ability to make ad hominem arguments from their mouths or do anything other than address what the person's actually saying. At that point, they have to argue towards the truth.
After 100 years of this, the place becomes known as Knossopolis, the city of knowledge. It's the richest, most influential city in the entire world with the greatest university that has ever been established because all arguments are productive. They all argue towards the truth. But then as her magic starts to wane, her two granddaughters come. She's trying to convince them to unite the increasingly alienated east side of the city and the west side of the city.
She says, "You have to help me, girls. My magic is waning. You just have to persuade people to argue this way." Her granddaughters say, "No thanks, Granny. We want to win. We want your kind of arguments locked away so that we can win our arguments, because we can win arguments every single time with these things. We don't care about the truth anymore. It's about defeating the other guy." They both feel that way. Of course, it destroys Knossopolis.
That feels like what we're doing as a country right now. A great way to make free speech useful and a great way to tame and moderate your thoughts is trying to figure out actual solutions to sticky problems in the real world. But if you remain totally in this silly oversimplification of good vs. evil, that my side is good and your side is evil, and with all of these ways of dodging rather than addressing the substance of someone else's arguments, you're going to be wasting time and cognitive energy. In the case of cancel culture, you're going to be ruining lives. You're going to destroy trust in expertise, because nobody thinks they're going to be honest, and rightfully so, when you could actually be fixing things.
Mr. Jekielek: I think of it not as much as you think you're good and you think they're evil, but that you think my way is good and their way is not.
Mr. Lukianoff: I don't know if I agree with that. The Right thinks the Left has bad ideas. The Left thinks the Right are bad people. Being more from the Left than the Right, I can attest that things very quickly go to, “These are morally bad people. These are racist troglodytes,” rather than listening to the actual arguments that they are making. Whereas, the Right will point out there are still people who think Lenin and Mao were great. But it is now morphing to a stage where both sides actually think the other side is either stupid or evil.
Mr. Jekielek: Let's talk about the perfect rhetorical fortress vs. the efficient rhetorical fortress.
Mr. Lukianoff: Those were things I started talking about in 2015 when I noticed that, particularly on my side of the political fence, there were terrible ways that we were learning to argue without arguing, and always dismissing the people we are debating. A lot of them were, again, just kind of lazy techniques. I dubbed it the perfect fortress at first because so much of it was coming from academia. You had all these wonderful academic ways to discount somebody on the basis of their race, gender, or sexuality.
There are also rhetorical techniques that say if they get mad in public, you can dismiss them. If they've done anything bad in their lives, you can dismiss them. We go through about 14 different steps for the perfect rhetorical fortress in the book, and we give examples each way. Step one is magically declaring someone Right-wing even if they're not. Then you don't have to think about them anymore.
Mr. Jekielek: Incredibly effective, it seems.
Mr. Lukianoff: Incredibly effective. The way you can tell how effective it has been is that people are now accusing the ACLU of being Right-wing and The New York Times of being Right-wing when they do anything the Left disagrees with.
Mr. Jekielek: Like Noam Chomsky, as I recall.
Mr. Lukianoff: Noam Chomsky, yes. They say, “All the people in Harper's Letter are just Right-wing or Right-adjacent.” I say, “Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky? Do you even know who signed that letter?” Usually, they have no clue. They just know it's bad somehow. Step one, they can basically eliminate 99 percent of the population. It doesn't matter if they're actually conservative.
Then we get to the demographic funnel which asks, “Are you white? Are you cisgendered? What is your sexuality?” We follow this down the rabbit hole, and only about 0.9 percent would still be considered valid in some sense. But here's the thing. Even if you're in that 0.9 percent, but you have the wrong argument—surprise, you don't count. Because then the argument is, and this is brilliant, they say that you have internalized misogyny. You have internalized racism. You have internalized transphobia. This is amazing and you can always run out the clock.
Coleman Hughes, who is a brilliant, black, independent, 20-something podcast host, has this great quote in the book, "Listen, I'm always being told the most important thing about the validity of my opinion on any number of topics is the color of my skin. But then as soon as I give my actual opinion, if people don't like it, then I am told I'm not really black."
I checked on this. I asked all of the conservative and moderate black authors that I know, "Have you been told you're not really black for your opinions?" All of them have, including John McWhorter, Jason Riley, and a number of other people.
Mr. Jekielek: I recall Larry Elder becoming the black face of white supremacy, according to the LA Times.
Mr. Lukianoff: That is exactly right. What's particularly galling is these are oftentimes highly educated, affluent white people telling black people that they're not really black if they don't happen to like their opinion, while at the same time kidding themselves that somehow they're on the side of minorities. But actually, when you fall down this rabbit hole, none of this actually matters. This is just about protecting dogma. This is about winning arguments without winning arguments.
Then, there is the one that says that you can’t get angry in public. That gets used against people a lot. That got used a lot against Judge Kyle Duncan and the San Francisco Chronicle. A number of critics actually said that Duncan was really mean to the students who were shouting him down. The students shouted many horrible things. They actually said, "I hope your daughters get raped." I would be angry too if someone was shouting me down like that. He was also angry on behalf of the students who invited him who couldn't hear a word that he was saying. It's all cheap and it doesn't get you anywhere near the truth, but it can make you feel like you have defeated somebody.
Mr. Jekielek: A lot of this cancel culture movement, as you said, comes from this Left godfather, Herbert Marcuse. As you point out, the Right also has created a kind of fortress that it uses at times, but it works differently. It's worth exploring that.
Mr. Lukianoff: We're nonpartisan. We call out cancel culture on the Left and on the Right. We spend more time on it with the Left, because in the institutions we're talking about, it's more from the Left. That's higher education and elite corporations. But when we talk about cancel culture from the Right, we give a number of examples, including going after journalists for being anti-Trump.
We talk about there being four steps to the efficient rhetorical fortress where you can, just like on the Left, dismiss somebody for being conservative. It doesn't matter who you count. You can dismiss people on the Right for being liberal, woke, Lefty, or whatever you want to call it. I've seen this used against people who are very far to the Right, and suddenly finding out that they are woke in order for someone not to listen to them.
Mr. Jekielek: Yes, for sure. Is this like adopting the weaponry of the enemy?
Mr. Lukianoff: It is kind of, and we call it the efficient rhetorical fortress because it just has four levels. You don't have to listen to anybody who's woke. You don't have to listen to journalists, even if they're conservative, if you don't like what they have to say. You don't have to listen to experts, even if they're conservative, if you don't like what they have to say. At the most extreme, you don't have to listen to people who criticize Donald Trump.
We give three chapters on this, which is about proportionate, because we have many more chapters on threats from the Left. But we do point out that the rising tendency to want to use the illiberal tactics of the Left, advocating for laws that might be unconstitutional, is the wrong way to tackle this.
Mr. Jekielek: I never thought I would be thinking this much about free speech. I thought about it in the context of being a student of communist China. There's a very extreme version of what we see happening here that is happening over there, including genocide. I have not looked at all the things that you have looked at as a free speech lawyer. Is it okay to promote Holocaust denial? I find that reprehensible.
Mr. Lukianoff: It is.
Mr. Jekielek: It's an important part of history because we don't want to repeat that.
Mr. Lukianoff: True.
Mr. Jekielek: There are multiple reasons not to deny that history. Since that time, I've started calling myself more of a free speech absolutist. But then I realized, I'm really a First Amendment absolutist. Deciding that certain things can't be talked about means that someone else will use that for their own ill.
Mr. Lukianoff: Absolutely. You should always imagine that weapon in the hands of your worst enemy. When it comes to limitations on freedom of speech, always assume it's going to be used by your worst enemy because it probably will at some point in the future. But at the same time, bad laws can come back to bite you, and they almost certainly will, depending on who's in charge. To me, it's not the most compelling reason for freedom of speech.
I want people to care about freedom of speech, even if they think, "I'm never going to be punished. I'm safe forever, but I still don't think those people should be shut up." Part of my own idiosyncratic idea about freedom of speech is called the pure informational theory of freedom of speech, which is me being fancy and trying to make it sound a little more musical.
It is basically as follows; the project of human knowledge is to know the world as it is. You cannot know the world as it is unless you know what people really truly think and why. You're kidding yourself if you think that people being silent about their opinion is somehow making you safer. It just means there's evil in the world that you don't know about.
Here is one example that I give. If you believe that the world is controlled by lizard people who live under the Denver Airport, I'm comfortable with saying, “You're absolutely wrong.” However, if my girlfriend, my uncle, or my new buddy actually thinks that, it's really a good idea that I know that information. That is very important information. If a substantial portion of a society believes the lizard people theory, that is incredibly important for the world to know.
A lot of times, people will try to skirt freedom of speech by saying, "Then there is no protection from falsity." They seem to be under the impression that truth is easy to know, which it certainly is not. It's an ongoing, never ending process, as Jonathan Rauch calls it, “Small-L liberal science.” There is no truth in saying that these people just believe in conspiracy theories.
The fact that people believe things that are wrong is incredibly valuable information to know about your world. By the way, if you're that certain that you actually know everything about your world, and that you know when everybody else is wrong, you're probably kidding yourself.
Mr. Jekielek: If people have something that they don't want to hear or they don't believe or they're deeply against or they just maybe think is really wrong, and if that opinion can be seeded disproportionately through the society and have an impact, you have freedom of reach, but you don’t have freedom of speech. I don't really care if someone thinks something alone, but if all these other people believe it because of this megaphone, it’s not good. With social media, there are actual disinformation campaigns coming from foreign powers that have serious repercussions. All of this is this big mishmash mixed together.
Mr. Lukianoff: I'm more afraid of the people enforcing what misinformation and disinformation are than the disinformation/misinformation itself. That's what people have to remember. When you're evaluating freedom of speech, one of the most important arguments for it, besides the pure informational theory, is what the justification for censorship is and what will actually be done if the powers that be are allowed that power.
It's one of the reasons why the First Amendment is stated as, "Congress shall have no law." They keep this entirely out of the hands of power. Right now, we're seeing a campaign largely based on genuine misinformation/disinformation campaigns sometimes coming out of foreign governments that some of the research indicates are not really all that successful in tricking people, although there are some limited successes here and there. But they are not tremendously significant because people aren't as stupid sometimes as people think.
But because that problem exists, the idea is that giving that power to the government or the people in power will somehow solve the problem. I say, "Do you want to make authority the final arbiter of truth?" Because we've played that game before, and actually for most of human history. This is something that Jonathan Rauch talks about, the fundamentalist model of freedom of speech, where essentially the chief, the big guy, or the people in charge get to decide what truth is, and that you dissent at your own risk.
Mr. Jekielek: If there's ever been a more obvious case study, it is how we dealt with Covid. We have it right in front of us why this can never be allowed.
Mr. Lukianoff: I see lots of examples of this. Right now you're seeing a real campaign to go after people who will argue for something that was once entirely universally accepted—that biological sex is real. I talk about how this destroys faith in expertise, as in the case of an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, Carole Hooven, who wrote a book called, T, about testosterone. The idea that this would be controversial is something that I wouldn't have believed 10 years ago.
She went on Fox News to promote her book. She's a lovely woman. She explained we should be kind and compassionate towards trans people, and we should even use their pronouns. We should definitely do everything to be inclusive, but we can't pretend that biological sex isn't real. It has real scientific meaning, and things like testosterone have real implications that are profound.
Immediately, a DEI administrator at Harvard starts calling her out for it. Then students won't take her class, and there's a petition against her. We don't actually count her as a successful cancellation in our giant, “Scholars under Fire Database,” because she did leave voluntarily. She got so depressed because friends were turning on her and Harvard did not have her back. The only person who really did was our advisory council member, Steve Pinker, and a couple other friends at FIRE did try to defend her.
But what should have happened in those circumstances is the president of Harvard should have stood up and said, "Wait a second. No, we don't have orthodoxies here. This is absolutely within her rights, and this is the kind of dissent that we should be allowing." But what does that do to faith in expertise on this topic?
It utterly destroys it. Then if everyone hears from Scientific American, that biological sex is a spectrum, nobody's going to believe you. They think, “What's the alternative? Oh, that's right. The person who said the alternative, the one that we've always believed for as long as we've been talking about this, that biological sex is real, the last time they said something like that, they got canceled." This did not happen just one time.
We're talking about over 1,000 times just on campus. We're talking about many more times when it's applied to students. We go through the book talking about this in journalism, publishing, medicine, psychotherapy, and even in comedy.
Mr. Jekielek: Greg, you've done a lot of cases related to campus free speech, and that is what FIRE does. Please tell me about what your organization is. Also, we both signed The Westminster Declaration. What does that mean to you and why do you think it's important?
Mr. Lukianoff: FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, was founded in 1999 by a Right-leaning libertarian and a Left-leaning libertarian to defend freedom of speech and academic freedom and due process on college campuses in 1999. Unfortunately, it was a much bigger lift than they expected. One of the founders, Harvey Silverglate, thought this would be all taken care of in 10 years. He makes fun of himself by saying, “Actually, it's much, much worse.”
But over the years, we've been able to save countless professors and students from being punished, kicked out, and expelled from their jobs for their speech. In 2022, we rebranded as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to make the point that we're expanding beyond just the campus. We now litigate cases for defending free speech rights all over the country. We also have a research department which is second to none.
We do a campus free speech ranking, which everyone needs to check out. It's a 13-factor examination of 248 schools and I'm hoping one day to be able to afford to get it to 500. We do 13 factors, including the largest student survey ever done on campus freedom of speech about whether or not you can speak freely on a campus and, on the darker side, whether or not the students think that violence is acceptable in response to speech. The answers there will horrify you, depending on the campus.
We also include a large database of professor cancellations, student cancellations, de-platforming, and speech codes. Harvard, by the way, finished dead last this year. They tried to say this was a stunt. I said, "No, you earned your score. You're dead last."
Mr. Jekielek: That's astonishing.
Mr. Lukianoff: Meanwhile, what could really help the situation on campus is for people to exit these Ivy League universities, because all of them did poorly. The second to last was University of Pennsylvania. Third to last, interestingly, is Washington DC's Georgetown University. Fourth to last was University of South Carolina. That's the interesting thing about following the data. Sometimes it takes you to surprising places. But we knew that there were a number of issues there.
In the top 10, there are a lot of technological universities you might not even have heard of. UVA [University of Virginia] actually made the top 10, which we were pleased to see. The University of Chicago does quite well. If all these students who are currently finding the academic or even personal environment at Harvard and Yale just completely scary and a place where it's difficult to actually disagree with people took their kids and actually spent their money on competitors like University of Austin or, for that matter, sending them to Michigan Technological University, it would send a badly needed message, particularly to elite colleges, that they're not invincible, because right now they still do think they're invincible.
Mr. Jekielek: When you published the ranking, a number of people reached out to me because they know that I'm a fan of Hillsdale College. Hillsdale has the Academy of Science and Freedom which fosters free inquiry and science. We have Martin Kuldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas pushing that forward. You flagged it as a school of concern or warning, which was unexpected. Why was it flagged?
Mr. Lukianoff: Yes, Hillsdale is really annoyed with us, because we call them a warning school. I want to be clear, warning school means that it's not a school that contractually promises free speech in the same way that a public school would have it. They have caveats about not allowing this speech or that speech, which the president, to this day, still adheres to. That's all we need to know. The warning does not mean this is a bad school. I should be very clear that I actually think Hillsdale is a great school.
When it comes to the polling that we did on the environment for freedom of speech, we have other Christian colleges that don't promise freedom of speech. I think Baylor was among them. We have a list of other colleges that don't promise free speech on our warning list. A lot of them, to be clear, are excellent schools. But Hillsdale was up here in terms of how good the environment was for free speech according to their students, and then everything was probably a standard deviation below it.
They do really well in our ranking, but they're warning schools because they don't promise full freedom of speech. All we're saying is that if you go there, the contractual promises of free speech are not as strong as you would have at most other colleges. I'm perfectly happy to say that students report that it's a great environment for debate and discussion. But unless and until they change some of the policies, we're going to call it that. But it's not the insult that they think it is.
Mr. Jekielek: Great to hear. Regarding the Westminster Declaration, I generally don’t like signing things, but there was nothing there that I could disagree with. I thought it was very important in this climate. Please tell me why you think this is important?
Mr. Lukianoff: The Westminster Declaration makes a point that should be obvious and shared by practically everybody—that government leaning on social media companies to censor, to do the dirty work of the government for them, and to go after disapproved opinions is wrong in the United States, and could be of questionable constitutionality. I've seen some horror stories, particularly coming out of my mother's country, Britain, about how much the government is willing to lean on social media companies.
Of course, we've seen horror stories coming out of the United States about how much social media is willing to lean on companies. There are even worse examples coming out today about how extensive the jawboning by the government was against places like Facebook and Twitter. One thing that's been really disappointing in the First Amendment community is the decision from Missouri v. Biden that said, “No, there are serious First Amendment issues when the government jawbones or pressures a social media company to censor people for them.”
Now, the criticism of the initial decision was that it was a little too vague and a little too loosey goosey. But then it got up to the appellate court level which made it much clearer and a much better ruling. We are still seeing First Amendment people saying, "This is going to limit the free speech rights of the government.” I reply, "To what? Pressure people to censor the private actors?" We should all be applauding this ruling. We at FIRE think the Missouri v. Biden decision was completely right, and we of hope it gets vindicated all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Mr. Jekielek: Although at the moment, it seems like the government is still allowed to collude with social media companies for the time being until this is decided, because for a while there was an injunction that prevented that. I find that curious.
Mr. Lukianoff: Something that has really changed on the Left and it is why I call myself a liberal but not a progressive. There were always these two arms on the Left. One was the more working-class version, which loved civil liberties, and might think that universal health care would be swell, even if some of the ideas on that were half-baked. But they really didn't trust government power. They wouldn't trust the CIA, and didn't trust government power. There was a little bit of a libertarian aspect to it as well.
On the more elite side, and here's where my reverse class snobbery comes in, it tended to be the rich kids who said, "Lenin was right. The people who believed in the philosopher kings were right, that essentially we'd be much better off ruled by people like us, people who think they are geniuses and actually have a better understanding of truth." That's a much more authoritarian vision of the world.
I hesitate to use this word, but in some cases they even seem to go totalitarian with the idea that you should have correct beliefs and we can more or less police that. We see this going on currently on campuses today with DEI statements. The idea that you can't get a job in higher ed in many cases unless you fill out something that is a clear political litmus test very much goes into the realm of your private beliefs excluding you from being part of the all important marketplace of ideas that is higher ed.
Mr. Jekielek: You dedicate a full third of your book to solutions, which is actually incredibly useful, because there's so many people right now feeling rather despondent. The first solution I came across was to bring back the Golden Rule. Please tell me about your solutions. You have solutions for corporations. You have solutions for parents. I'll say right away that I love the book. People should read it and we'll encourage them. Why the Golden Rule?
Mr. Lukianoff: We're pointing out that we already have mechanisms in our society, older sayings and older ideas, including ancient ideas like the Golden Rule, that already exist, in order to have a free speech culture. That's one of the reasons why we point out old idioms, like everyone's entitled to their opinion, walk a mile in a man's shoes, and treat people as you wish to be treated. These are all brilliant pieces of wisdom that you and I grew up with. But Rikki, my 23-year-old brilliant coauthor, did not grow up with them.
She didn't hear these idioms and expressions. It's good to remind people that we have some of the framework in our very recent past that could help us practice free speech culture. But I do want to be very clear. We spend a third of the book talking about potential solutions, because we think it's hard to get out of this. We don’t think, “Ta-dah, we're done, we fixed three things.”
Particularly when it comes to higher ed, and particularly given the current skepticism about higher ed, now is the time that we push for major reform. A lot fewer jobs should require a bachelor's degree. We should be investing heavily in low cost, high rigor alternatives, and be funding and looking into every experiment under the book. We should really be de-bureaucratizing universities, because how much that bureaucracy poses a threat to academic freedom and free speech is badly underappreciated.
Mr. Jekielek: What about bringing back apprenticeships?
Mr. Lukianoff: I would love bringing back apprenticeships. Those are exactly the kind of solutions we need. I would love for people to not go to college until they're at least 20, because right now they're taking advantage of students' lack of experience in the world when they get to campus and create a false picture of what the world looks like and what regular people are really like. You sometimes can end up with a caricature of the evil person from the countryside or evil person from the city for that matter. Then you actually meet them and you think, "This was who I was taught was regressive?"
Mr. Jekielek: Greg, a final thought as we finish up?
Mr. Lukianoff: I've been doing this a long time, and it definitely can be hard to stay positive. Sometimes people will point out, "You seem so positive." I say, "I'm positive about the future of free speech for only one reason. Free speech works really well."
Societies that practice free speech have a huge advantage over other societies. They're more creative. They also find out where the problems are in a way that closed societies literally can't.
But I don't want people to think I'm optimistic about the future of higher ed. If we don't do something, and if we don't rethink how we're doing things, this will just come back and end up worse very soon.
Mr. Jekielek: Greg Lukianoff, it's such a pleasure to have you on.
Mr. Lukianoff: Thanks so much for having me. This has been tremendously fun.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Greg Lukianoff and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (1h 9 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1118GregLukianoff
Epoch Original DVD collection: