Greg Lukianoff: The Canceling of the American Mind

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is November eighth two thousand twenty three, and I think that what that feeling you’re feeling is It’s kind of a vibe shift. We had all of these grim, scary polls earlier this week that sort of suggests the Democrats were about to go into another dark night of the soul. But once again, when you actually had elections and the votes were counted, they over performed.

And it was I don’t wanna say it’s a blue wave, but it was sort of a blue ish wave. It was at least a modest, blue wave, and it was a terrible night once again for Maga. Almost like there’s kind of a pattern out there. We have a much more detailed breakdown in my morning shots newsletter, a lot of punditry this morning, If you go over to our YouTube channel, I also have a rant about all of this. But, again, you you look at the numbers, you know, a centrist Democrat was reelected in deep red Kentucky kind of a big deal, especially when you think about the fact that, Donald Trump won Kentucky by twenty six points, went all in on the Republican candidate who decided that that he was going to put on the the red hat.

Didn’t work out that well for him. Andy Beshier is reelected, by the way. Keep an eye on Andy Beshier. Democrats held both the Senate and flipped the house in Virginia. You might have been reading all of that pedantry about how Glenn Youngen might launch his presidential bid if in fact he succeeded in winning control of the legislature.

He actually thought that he had cracked the abortion code by proposing a fifteen week ban, kind of a compromise He thought maybe this was the sweet spot. Did not work out for him as a result. Democrats control the legislature in Virginia. And Glenn Yonkins presidential aspirations are pretty well dead. Look, they were never more than wishcasting by the donor class, but last night, pretty definitively sent them to the rapidly filling unicorn graveyard.

It’s just not gonna happen. And it was that way around the country in Ohio, a swing state. Ohio becomes the seventh state to have a referendum on abortion, and abortion rights advocates have gone seven for seven. So abortion rights has won in deep blue states, in deep red states, in swing states, I mean, it’s almost like there’s a pattern here. And in Ohio, like the other states, the vote was not particularly close.

So, I mean, you you look at the record, where this has been on the ballot. It’s been on the ballot in California, Vermont. No surprise, but also, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana. And now you add Ohio to the list. And by the way, in Ohio, they also voted for free pop.

Meanwhile, moms for Liberty had a very, very bad night. You can read that as well. And once again, Donald Trump’s intervention in the race turns out not to be as effective as Republicans might have hope. So when I talk about a vibe shift, think about where we were just a couple of days ago, including on this podcast. We’re looking at that New York Times Sienna poll, and it’s like, Holy shit.

Donald Trump is he’s leading in all of these swing stays. Donald Trump can win this election. He could still win this election. I mean, keep that in mind. Joe Biden could lose this election, but the mood is very, very different today as Democrats had a very good night in places where they have not always had good nights.

And I think that you’re going to see, you know, perhaps many of the narratives changing. So again, check out morning shots, newsletter, check out our YouTube channel. And I thought we would try something a little bit different today. Let’s step back from the horse race. Let’s step back from the trumpocalypse.

We’re going to go back to that over the the next couple of days. We’ll have a recap of the Republican debate, whether or not Nikki Haley, has a good night. We’ll talk about that tomorrow. And, of course, we’ll do the trump trials again on Friday. But I think it’s time to step back for a moment.

And talk about what else is happening in our culture. And I wanna make it clear that I think there’s a distinction between a heart attack and cancer. And let me explain this again. The fact is that illiberalism is a two front war. Liberal democracy and liberal values, especially free speech.

Is facing a two front attack from both the right and the left. That may not be equal and equivalent, but they are both there. And the liberalism on the left is a real thing. And it is I I compared sort of the chronic cancer. Now the mother threat to democracy, I think there’s like a heart attack.

It is an immediate threat. That does not mean, however, that we can pretend that there’s not an illiberal problem on the left as well. And I understand there’s a lot of denialism about this or the argument that, you know, we need to focus solely on what Maga is doing and any distraction from that? Well, it’s a distraction from what really matters. Well, I think that we can walk and chew gum at the same time and recognize that even though we’re committed, to dealing with the immediate heart attack.

We can’t ignore the other problems. And so we are joined by arguably one of the nation’s most prominent experts on what’s going on on university campuses. We’re joined by Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO, of the foundation for individual rights and expression, who is the co author of a new book, the canceling of the American mind. Greg, welcome back to the podcast.

Great to see you, Charlie.

So what do you think of the heart attack, cancer analogy?

Yeah. I think it’s perfect. I mean, like, I have to be non partisan in my job. And, but there was a political piece of profile of me. I mean, a little more of my opinion on on Trump.

Let’s just say, I’m a Democrat. But I am a Democrat who’s always trying to explain to people on my side of political fence that we have a serious problem, and we can’t actually be pointing all the all the time to, oh, those guys are worse. Because we can’t actually fix those guys on our own. We can fix the problems on our side on our own or at least we can we can start the process. It’s never gonna go anywhere if we’re if we’re like, oh, no.

Free speech on campus is fine. No. It’s not. And Charlie, you were actually one of the first people to point this out in your books in the late eighties and early nineties. And that problem has gotten worse over the decades.

I think it’s gotten substantially worse over the decade, but let’s that back here because I think we have the challenge of definition, and we have the challenge of perspective. Could you talk about canceling of the American mind, you’re talking about cancel culture. Let’s define our terms first what cancel culture is and what it is. Sure.

So cancel culture, you know, one of those controversial terms. And, of course, one of the first things that people mention is why did you use this term that I hate? And it’s like, well, because we Right. We did national polling on what people call this phenomenon, they call it cancel culture. And when you pull them about whether or not they hate it or are afraid of it, Bulwark white liberals conservatives all agree that that’s the name for it and then we we hate it and we’re scared of it.

Actually, interestingly, particularly Gen Z, which includes my twenty three year old, brilliant author, Ricky Schlot, you know, she points out that she grew up with cancel culture, and she absolutely hates it. So our definition of cancel culture is and what I’m trying to do What is So it’s the uptick since twenty fourteen of campaigns to get people fired, punished, deplatformed, for speech that would be protected under the first amendment. There, we explain that a little bit more in the appendix because we don’t wanna bog down. I’m a first amendment lawyer. We liken it to public employee law.

And so that actually brings in a tremendous amount of nuance and common sense to the definition, and the culture of fear that was resulted from people losing their job for example, for just saying cracking a joke or saying their opinion. And the reason why we talk about it as an uptick is because people make the argument, oh, cancel culture’s always been around began again trouble with their opinions forever. Yeah. And you know, my answer is, yeah, I’m a first of a lawyer with a particularly intense interest in the history of of freedom is going back to long before the invention of the printing press. So we’re trying to address that argument, but essentially it’s like, yeah.

No. Some of these threads are part of human nature. Like human intolerance for people to disagree with is is as old as the species, but there was a demonstrable uptick in campaigns to get people fired, particularly professors.

Right.

In twenty fourteen and accelerating, we also include this in the definition, accelerating in in twenty seventeen and twenty twenty and twenty twenty one were the two worst years on campus I’ve seen in my twenty two year long career.

Okay. Well, that leads to my next question because, I mean, cancel culture is a thing, but I’ve been reliably assured that it’s not a big that that concern is exaggerated that okay. We can not pick a few You know, bad stories from some elite universities, but it’s not really a problem. What’s your sense?

You know, again, been doing this twenty two years, again, very aware of the history of censorship on campus. We can find no period in the last fifty years on college campuses with anything even remotely close to the number of professors who have been losing their jobs. This is also, by the way, at a time when Viewpoint diversity is an all time low among the professorate. So it’s already a pretty homogeneous group, and they’re still losing their jobs. And by the way, a lot of the professors losing their jobs are ones who would self identify as being on the left, just in a lot of cases, they’re actually being targeted by other people on the left.

And sometimes about one third of the punishments come from targeting up from the right So if people wanna focus primarily on the threats from the right, you can focus on turning point USA, the professor watch list, you can focus on, you know, Fox News targeting professors as well. But that makes the problem, you know, particularly from a nonpartisan endpoint. The fact that it’s coming from more than one direction makes the problem worse not better. And I remember saying this, pointing out the thirty percent coming from the right. And someone says, well, I can do math.

That means you’re saying that’s that the rest comes from the left. And I’m like, oh, honey. I’m sorry. No. We have to ex like, we have to accept this.

Like, I always think of it as the battle between sort of people who self describe as liberals like me. And people who would self describe more more as progressives.

Okay. But what about the argument that, okay, yes, there is a thing as cancel culture. And, yes, There’s been an uptick on canceled culture, but many of those people deserve to be canceled.

Yeah.

If you in fact are overtly anti semitic, if you are overtly racist, if you have, you know, celebrated Hamas in your class. If you have said something that is threatening then don’t you deserve to be canceled? I mean, are there people who are eminently cancel a ball?

You can absolutely argue that there are people who deserve to be canceled that’s something that we actually did have an appendix in the book, but we follow-up, mate, confuse people too much to to test to what we’re saying. You can’t argue that someone was cancelled appropriately. That’s fine. But I do bristle at the accountability culture, consequence culture argument that I hear a lot because really what you’re saying what when you’re saying Oh, no. There’s no cancel culture.

They’re just accountability culture. Sometimes it includes people getting fired, in violation of the first amendment. That’s not a very good argument. It tends to mean that people don’t know a lot about the numbers, don’t know a lot about the comparisons in history, and that they don’t really wanna learn too much because there’s no way you’re gonna get through and hopefully Will Saletan open mind, the readers read canceling of the American mind. And you’re not gonna come out of that saying.

All these people deserve to be canceled, like, sometimes it’s actually incredibly tame mainstream speech so they can get you in trouble.

Okay. So let’s start with a case study as you do in your book. And this is a case that I think a lot of our listeners might be familiar with, but they really all ought to be familiar with. Yep. You opened the book with the story of this art Chief at Hamline University in Minnesota in twenty twenty two, who showed her students a fourteenth century painting that included a representation of the prophet Muhammad.

Her name was Erica Lopez Prater. And apparently, she warned her students in one class you give them a trigger warning that I’m gonna show this picture in a future class and they could choose And

it was on the syllabus with a warning as well.

Okay. So knew this was gonna be a little bit edgy, but she said this is art. Yeah. And gave students the option to skip the class if they choose to. So the class comes up, she warns the students again.

I’m gonna show this painting what happens. Tell me the story, put it in the context of cancel culture.

Sure. Yep. And and this is something where, like, my British mother and Russian father kind of come into this sometimes, and I can find myself saying, Americans gonna be so parochial. Because, particularly on the left, there’s this assumption that all Muslims hate any representation of the prophet Muhammad and it’s that it’s deeply offensive to all of them. And that just shows kind of a poor knowledge of the Muslim world.

One of the one of the leading defenders of the professor professor Prater was Amna Khaled making the point that I’m offended by this as a Muslim because this is not a character of Muhammad. This is devotional art. It was commissioned by a Muslim Prince and painted by a Muslim to show when Gabriel visited the prophet. And it’s a classic, and and partially, like, one of the things you were trying.

It’s an art history class. It’s an

art history class that you’ve worn. This art multiple times. Okay. And even though she gave multiple warnings, she still lost her job over this because it was assumed to be incredibly islamophobic to actually publish this, which again shows that, like, that’s not actually the opinion of the entire muslim world Americans. And what’s disappointing about this case is we haven’t been able to get Professor Prader’s job back.

Oh, really? One good thing. And my my organization of the foundation for individual rights and expression, and we defended her and launched a whole campaign defending her academic freedom. And in a in a in a sense, we failed. The university president has said that she is gonna step down early, which I don’t think is a coincidence, But more recently, the Hamline College came out and basically said, yeah, we’re totally right about that.

These battles can be very hard to win and fight. One thing that was at least a little hopeful about that case is it unlike a lot of canceled culture cases that brought a lot of people together saying, no, this is wrong. I mean, I think even even the Council for, American Islamic Relations, you know, came out and said, no. No. No.

No. This professor should not be fired.

One of the things that really struck me about particular story was the hierarchy of victimization and the hierarchy of sensitivities because it’s pretty hard for me to imagine. That a professor would be fired for assigning, say, Tom Payne’s age of reason to a class and having an evangelical of Christian say I am offended that we are reading this book or that there would be a piece of art that might be considered offensive to orthodox Christians having the same reaction. So in this particular case, it is that sense that these groups must be protected. They have special distinctive forms of fragility that require us to override artistic freedom, academic freedom, free speech, all of that.

Yeah. Oh, and and that’s something that’s been baked into speech codes and speech enforcement of of censorship on campus for as long as it’s been around. It was something that you know, Alan Kors and and Harvey Silver Glate were were pointing out in their book the Shatter University, for example, for that matter, you know, Alan Bloom, I believe, was was pointing it out as well back back in eighty nine. And it cannot exist without double standards. And as Alan Kors likes to say, kind of like it has to exist with double standards or else kind of sensor, it wouldn’t last a minute because everybody would be reduced to silence.

So the double standards are baked in, and you’ll see a lot of the argumentation coming from campuses particularly as it relates to, like, Tim Urban’s terms, social justice fundamentalism, is that a lot of it is trying to say, no. No. No. Actually, being, singling people out in double standards are actually fine in the in the name of social justice.

This book is a follow-up to a book that you wrote with, Jonathan Last back in twenty eighteen, the coddling of the American mind. And I remember, how much of the reaction to that was that the whole idea is the canceled culture is a myth to the people on the left. It is interesting that there’s a lot of people that cling to this. But right now, we’re living through this firestorm on campus over Israel and Hamas. So Tell me where you come down on some of those fights because some of those lines seem to

be a little bit blurry. Sure. Yeah. No. No.

The book had the misfortune of coming out. Right around the time of the horrific Hamas attacks, which, meant that it was pretty hard to actually, you know, get on TV to talk about it. Rightfully so because, like, with something much more horrible was going on in the world. So what have we seen at Fire since October seventh? Well, first of all, you know, universities sometimes issued four statements, you know, on the attacks, but, you know, because they felt like they never got one right to make both off campus and on campus constituencies happy, which impossible to do.

And we are seeing an uptick, and this is awful. We are seeing an uptick in cases of unprotected speech. At Cornell, very clear death threats. That’s not protected. And I actually am very much a hawk on no.

No. No. Punish true threats that that actually otherwise people think that protected by speech, and and that gives free speech a bad name. We’re seeing, you know, situations where they easily could punish students the thing that happened at Cooper Union, you know, when the students were locked into the library and people were banging out the doors for them. We’re seeing situations that involve assault, you know, some of the videos we’re seeing are people grabbing, you know, protesters and like, no.

No. No. No. That’s not okay. And there is an assumption by the media that I’m running into that I find almost kinda funny, they assume that this must mean a huge uptick in cases that we’re seeing at Fire pro Palestinian speech being shut down.

And I have to give a nuanced answer on here because I’m like, okay. I wanna say we’re not seeing a big uptick in cases this year. But here’s the thing, because the normal year is terrible now. Like, the the situation normal for free speech for the last six years on campus has been sufficiently terrible that Although we are seeing an uptick in cases. We are seeing an uptick in Prop Palestinian.

We’re not seeing an uptick in overall cases at all. Because a normal year is very bad at this point. The biggest thing that’s going on, though, nationally, because I I know your viewers will be familiar with this. And Fire has already sent letters on both and then deciding in both cases. Is Ron DeSantis saying that students for Justice in Palestine needs to be de derecognized if there’s two offices that that affiliate with the National, and that would affect them.

And then Brand Dice University, which is a private university, but it does promise freedom of speech and association, de recognizing students for justice in Palestine. And the argument there, which is a better argument than just saying you don’t like their opinion, is that they are materially supporting terrorism. And, you know, you don’t have to have your lawyer head on to say, that’s an incredibly serious allegation to make. And by the way, if you have the goods on them for actual legal definition of material support for terrorism, you’d be arresting them because that’s a felony. And some one of the things that De Stantis administration pointed to was hortatory language from the national saying, consider yourself part of the, pro Palestinian resistance.

And it’s like, now that is not material support for, you know, sending money, sending arms, like that kind of stuff is. So unless and until they produce evidence of this very series, allegation. We’re gonna be absolutely fighting for it to keep, you know, students for Justice and Palestine recognized that state schools own places like Brandeis.

So what’s so interesting about that particular story is it highlights the hypocrisy of of some of this debate because Ron DeSantis and and others have been, very vocal in fighting against Wocus, fighting against the canceled culture, free speech. We are advocates of free speech. But in the case you just cited, he is using the power of the state to punish a private organization for speech. So you have people like Ron DeSantis and people on the right who have really, you know, wrapped themselves in the cloak of free expression. Who have shown themselves very, very willing to use the power of the state to punish and to to exile groups like this from public universities.

And you can’t reconcile that. Can you? I mean, you can’t.

Well, no. But the one thing that we tell media when they ask about this, because there is this presumption that things have gotten so much worse you know, just last week. It’s like, no. No. No.

This actually happened quite some time ago. And so when Rhonda Sanders first started in Florida, we had some hope form because he there was some pro free speech legislation. He was found that we’re like, alright. Cool. And then the Florida government with the encouragement around DeSantis passed the stop woke act.

Stop woke act very particularly saying that you can’t, you know, teach opinions on certain topics. You can’t teach certain topics at all. When they went into court, they essentially had to argue that this would prevent you from making pro affirmative action arguments. It would allow you to make anti affirmative action. And I’m like, okay.

The jig is up guys. Like, that means it’s the definition of viewpoint discrimination. That’s unconstitutional. The law is very clear here. We try to work well with the legislature, so we warn them about it repeatedly.

We got other similar laws past and other places. You know, we we had a lot of success in everywhere, but Florida. And then, of course, when it was passed, we sued, and we defeated the stop woke act in court. So did the ACLU their separate lawsuits. Right.

Now there’s a kind of a stop woke too, which is essentially just a cosmetic rewriting of it that we’re also gonna be challenging. That’s equally unconstitutional. So this hypocrisy is actually something that happened some time ago, unfortunately.

I wanna, you know, go back to the specific case studies because I I think they really dramatize this, but But you’ve made several references to just the data. You track what’s been happening on campuses. So what we are talking about is not just anecdotal. I think it’s probably important to put that in in some context because we have lots of anecdotes, lots of case studies, but you track this in terms of frequency. So give me some sense of how you quantify these attacks on free speech the rise of what you call cancel culture?

First of all, people need anchoring in what normal and bad years look like. So I landed actually in Philadelphia International Airport at nine ten AM on nine eleven to look for an apartment to become with a legal director of fire. Awful day of a week, a full year. And all of my first cases were defending people who said insensitive things about the attacks, you know, in one case, literally, my very first letter was defending a professor at University of New Mexico who said anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote, not very popular speech at the time. But we also had cases like the case of of my departed friend, Mike Adams, where he actually got in trouble for calling out a student who had written the entire listserv saying America had the coming.

You know, so the the cases were interesting. There’s no disagreement that this was an unusually bad period for academic freedom and and free speech. And it lasted the over the course of several years until the word Churchill case in two thousand five. So in the wake of nine eleven, there were about seventeen professors targeted for anti Iraq war or seventeen seventeen. That’s bad.

To be clear. Yeah. That’s bad. And, three professors were fired And now, interesting thing, all three of those those professors were fired for, reasons that actually didn’t relate to freedom of speech or academic freedom, So for example, Ward Churchill, we defended him and he didn’t get fired for free speech. He got fired for gross academic misconduct, which he really did as best I could tell.

To Samuel Arion, you know, someone who, was a Bill O’Reilly, you know, showed on Dave saying death to Israel in the eighties, they eventually thanks to fire. They dropped actually the the free speech claims and then said, well, actually, really it’s your connections to international terrorism after he was indicted for that, and he actually moved to Egypt. The remaining one was one where someone devoted a large part of their technical writing class to to rally against the Iraq war. And it’s and, you know, I’ve looked at it since and I’m like, okay. Yeah.

Actually, taking a big chunk of your class to not teach your class, they can actually punish you for that. But still, three is bad, even over the course of years. It was almost unheard of for the early part of my career for a tenured professor to get fired. Now look, let’s look at the situation we have. So our definition is cancel culture begins around twenty fourteen, but it accelerates around twenty seventeen.

And that’s when you really start seeing the increase in student petitions to get professors punished, which is very unusual just for people to don’t know. So we’re talking about more than a thousand examples, professors being targeted. We’re talking about two thirds of those being professors punished in some way. And this is just from twenty fourteen to this past July. And we’re talking about nearly two hundred professors fired, something like forty plus of them are tenured which is, of course, you know, forty times zero, you know, it’s literally mathematically infinitely more than I’d seen previously in my career.

And I also really want to be really clear. One of the reasons why this is so dangerous is it’s wildly disproportionately concentrated in the most elite schools in the country. The top ten are are are the worst offenders, top ten US news and world reports schools. And we also know that it’s widely underreported because one in six, professors say that they’ve been targeted for their academic freedom. And they’ve been told that they either will be investigated or were actually investigated for their speech.

About nine percent of students, by the way, say same thing in in data that we’re we’re we’re gonna be releasing shortly, which is one in ten is crazy. So one in six say that they’ve been investigated. Much larger percentages of them say that they’re self silencing. People need to remember that, you know, nine percent of professors during McCarthy said that they were editing themselves. They they were self censoring due to the environment.

Again, One in ten is really bad for professors to say that they’re self censoring. When we expanded the question to include things like social media, in the classroom, etcetera, so it’s not exact comparison. We got about ninety percent of professors saying that they’re self censoring now as opposed to then. And even when you compare it to, McCarthy, which in some ways, you shouldn’t because the law wasn’t established yet. The law that made it clear that you can’t fire communist professors only happen in nineteen fifty seven.

Prior that, people were arguing the deans and presidents were arguing, These guys are Doctor. Nair. They’re set in their ways. They’re radical. We can get rid of them.

Right? And then, of course, it was only in fifty seven at the very end of McCarthy. That they said, no. Actually, you can’t just fire them on the basis of viewpoint.

So, okay. So what happened in twenty fourteen? You you’ve mentioned that the big uptick So what do you attribute that to? I mean, again, this impulse, the intolerance has been around for a long time. You mentioned, you know, I was writing about this in the late eighties, early nineties.

So what was the critical mass that exploded in twenty fourteen on?

Well, in some ways, it’s good to read coddling at and canceling the American mind together. Or, it’s helpful to have read coddling because we in that one, we do more of a social science.

Selling two books at one. That was good. That was that was I give you extra points. You get points for that.

And buying and learning liberty and freedom from speech. Anyway, so commonly, the American Mine spends more time on figuring out how this happened. And we and we actually give us scholarly, you know, causal threads to why why, the young people hitting campus around twenty fourteen were so different than other generations. This one, the reason why it’s so great to write the follow-up with someone who is actually gen z. In the simplest sense, What is cancel culture following?

Cancel culture is following gen z? What I mentioned, when we’re in interviews, about twenty fourteen being this, you know, year that the world met cancel culture, Ricky Schlot, you know, points out. It’s like, well, I grew up with this, this junior high school way of figuring out ways to defeat your enemies at whatever cost using the kind of tactics that we call in the book rhetorical fortresses. We go a lot into the way we argue and how we how we can argue better in the book. But as far as, like, the single thing that changed everything and that people are tired of hearing it, but they should understand that, you know, the printing press brought millions of people into the global conversation and led to the religious wars and and which trials uptaking.

And we just introduced billions of people into the global conversation. There’s literally no way you’re gonna be able to do that. That’s not highly disruptive, and you created the ability to rather than when you hate that journalist, that you you, you know, send a letter that ends up in a drawer somewhere. You can suddenly, you know, partially artificially create the illusion of there are thousands of people who hate me. Actually, there are four and a lot of them had soft puppet accounts.

So cancel culture was something that the instincts were there, but it wasn’t really possible to have it on this kind of scale until social media was pervasive enough.

And, obviously, what we’ve also seen is that these things that were at one point, basically, confined to universities have now seeped out into the general culture. So in answer to the obvious question, why should we care about this? Is this a big deal? Well, we’re seeing it playing out in corporate America. We’re seeing it played out in newsrooms.

We’ve seen what, you know, how it plays out on the New York Times slack challenge all of this. Right? I mean, what you’re describing is not just an academic issue. It is not just happening to professors. Is it?

It absolutely isn’t. And we spend a lot of the book talking about publishing, journalism, psychotherapy was the one that depressed me the most in medicine, in comedy, etcetera. Comedy is actually the one where where it’s having the fighting back has been the most successful, which makes sense. And one thing that I I really want people to understand is You should be concerned about cancel culture because, yeah, it allows for a certain kind of cruelty to sort of make an example of someone oftentimes for saying perfectly protected things, oftentimes even to leave mainstream things to ruin their lives in the idea of kind of like there’s some abstract social justice good that I’m that I’m doing. But there’s something much more profound, harm of cancel culture, and that’s that it undermines people’s faith in expertise.

And this is how it does it. Well, you know, I always make the point. People aren’t stupid. And when they see a situation like Carol Hoven at Harvard. Carol Hoven, wonderful, absolutely brilliant scholars.

She wrote a book called testosterone, called T, talking about the role of testosterone, in in development. She’s a she’s an evolutionary biologist. And she went on an interview, and she talked about how we should be kind to trans people. We should use their pronouns. We should do everything I can to be compassionate.

But we can’t ignore the biological sex is real, and that essentially, you know, testosterone plays a role. And and immediately at Harvard, she was at Harvard a DI administrator, you know, objects to this. Next thing you know, students are refusing to work her class. There’s a petition against her just like at all these other schools, which oftentimes are collaborations administrators and students. And she has since left, and we don’t even actually count her as a full on cancellation because she just got so depressed and demoralized she left.

We count as a cancellation attempt. Now that’s sad. That’s really bad. But it’s there’s something much more important happened here. The public looks at that and they go, Okay.

So someone tries to argue that biological sex is real and they lose their career and and go through hell. When scientific American comes up and says, actually, biological sex is a spectrum, they’re not gonna believe you because they’re gonna say to themselves, oh, but the last person who said differently was canceled And that’s if it only happens once. When you’re talking about, you know, more than a thousand examples of it, it really undermines faith and expertise because they think people aren’t being object honest because they’re too damn scared.

What is the most dangerous thing to say on campus today? Is it about gender? Is it about race? What is the taboo idea now that is likely to get you canceled?

Yeah. No. It’s interesting looking at the data that we have. There is an assumption particularly among pro palestinian speakers that the easiest way to get yourself in trouble on campus is saying something pro Palestinian. It is a case that we see pretty often, but it’s not anywhere close to say what we see.

And by the way, actually, people get in trouble for saying prozayanist things, as well. Yeah. From the data of what we’re seeing professors getting in trouble for, race is still number one. Gender is number two. It was really Palestine is actually surprisingly, you know, I might think it’s maybe seventh or eighth or something like that.

So going back to the to the data, you had a survey where you you basically asked people, you know, what would you allow a speaker to say? Yeah. You know, for example, what percentage of students would allow a speaker to say that transgender people have a mental disorder or that abortion should be completely illegal or that Black Lives Matter as a hate group on the flip side. The second amendment should be repealed so that guns can be confiscated or that religious liberty is used as an excuse to discriminate against gays and lesbians. And if I’m reading this correctly, among liberal college students, only sixteen percent.

Believe that a speaker should be allowed on campus who is anti trans. Only thirty two percent of left wing students would think that a speaker should be able to espouse pro life points of view. In fact, I’m looking at this all respondents. Only twenty nine percent of college students think that a speaker should be allowed on campus if they are anti trans. I mean, so These numbers are rather extraordinary in terms of the intolerance.

Yeah. And and to be clear, that you you you see this, you know, among the right leaning students as well. It’s just not nearly as bad. That there are surprising numbers of of people who are more conservative saying that these speakers shouldn’t be invited, but on the left, it’s decidedly worse. And this is one of those things where, you know, I refer to this in the book as the slow motion train wreck.

Back when I was interning at the ACLU back in ninety nine, I could see that there was a both intentional and both sort of naturally occurring effort afoot to sort of change the political valence of freedom of speech. So that instead of being, like, a part of the sacred beliefs of someone on the left, like, I grew up with, and one of the reason I ended as a first amendment lawyer, that it was becoming more problematized and this especially weird argument that freedom of speech is the argument of the powerful against the week. And it’s like, no, no, you don’t need a, like, That makes literally no sense. Like, in a in a democracy, you don’t need a special protection for majority. In any society, you don’t need any protection for the rich and the powerful.

You really only need a a special protection for people who are, either in the numerical minority of opinion that are unpopular in general or unpopular with the ruling class, which unfortunately, it does sound like a Marxist, but there is there is a real thing. And the ideology has been turned on its head on campus, and I could see this I started at Stanford in ninety seven, and it was really even back then, you know, working at the ACLU, I I got kind of criticized by my calls lowering class for me and my my best friend who are working at the ACLU, they’re like, oh, that’s very paternalistic. I’m like, protecting people’s freedom of speech is paternalistic. So a lot of us first amendment and free speech people have been seeing this change coming. We’ve done everything in our power to try to prevent it.

And unfortunately, we lost.

Well, also, when when you begin talking about speech in terms of violence, and harm, you know, that speech is a harm and that that if this person is allowed to be in that room saying these words that it makes me feel unsafe, so let’s just talk about What’s canceled culture and when is it justifiable? Stories in the news today involving the fallout from Gaza, your organization. Yeah. Has jumped head first into this, some of these campus conflicts.

We always do.

Let’s talk about this NYU law student, Reno Workman, who wrote student bulletin that Israel bore full responsibility for the attack on October seventh. I mean, this was got a lot of attention. New York Times reported that she wrote this regime is real of state sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary I will not condemn Palestinian resistance by which people read Hamas that same day, Major law firm, Winston and Strong, yeah, withdrew its offer of employment from her. Was that cancel culture? And don’t they have the right to do that?

It got it’s one of these things where I gotta explain the difference between law and culture. And essentially, does Winston strong have the right to do this as its freedom of association, wanna be hundred percent clear yes, they do, and we would fight for their Freedom Association, but we do this. However, we’re trying to warn people more about private censorship, things that aren’t bound by the first amendment and make an argument for free speech culture. And what we would like to see is a world in which people when they’re making these kind of decisions, pause to consider old fashioned idioms, like everyone’s entitled to their opinion, you know, to reach their own, all of these kind of ideas that were very popular in India. I’m not

a lawyer. I’m not a law firm. Okay?

Yep.

But if I was about to hire this person, Rina Workman. Yeah. And I read that she wrote that. I would say, I I’m I’m a I’m a free speech guy. I am with you on this.

I don’t want her in my office. I don’t want her be associated with her. She’s done. So have I canceled her though? This is

what I’m arguing. Is that if you actually do this balancing, you know, if you do this balancing, that essentially some of the worst cases of private censorship we see in this case, we might actually win on some of those. Do I think this is gonna lead to someone who they might think is actually a full on antisemite get hired? Yeah. Probably not.

But in terms of, this being canceled culture, this would partially, since we make an analogy to public employee law, the question is whether or not public employees would fire somebody for that or withdraw an offer. And so the case law is a little, I think it counts as cancel culture in in this case, and I think it’s troubling, but it’s the kind of thing that they’re Is that gonna be enough to overcome Winston’s try not wanting to work with that person? Probably not because they do have the right to make the final decision.

So here here’s one that I find myself wrestling there’s a there’s a couple of, sites that I see on social media. I think one of them is stop anti Semitism, and they have a lot of these videos the people who are going around and tearing down

Oh, yeah.

Pictures of the hostages.

By the way, Rita Workman, my understanding is, and hopefully, I’m correct on this She was one of the people who tore down the posters as well, which is which is not a free speech issue. It’s actually the opposite of free speech.

K. Because the one of the defenses is, well, you know, putting up the posters free speech, tearing down the posters is also a political statement. Well?

I hate that argument. It’s just slightly too. These are the same people who said, oh, it’s free speech to come in and shout down Kyle Duncan and it’s Stanford. It’s like, no. That’s silly.

I don’t think you even think that, to be honest. Like, I think that if a speaker you liked got shouted down, you’d be like, no, this is mob censorship. And of course, it is. That that that’s one of those, like, arguments that I’m just kind of like, I don’t believe you even believe this, the person who’s again.

Is it cancel culture to be going around and videotaping people doing this and saying, help us identify them knowing that the intention is to perhaps have them fired.

If it’s a campaign to try to get people punished for first amendment protected speech, I I would say.

Sharing down the the science, would you decide?

No. No. I got a bit of a thought. But that’s not speech. That’s that’s actually being a vigilante sensor yourself.

And meanwhile, one of the things that I always say in these caveats about Council Culture and how it relates to intolerance on campus is one, you know, like, my preference, if someone signed, for example, the Harvard letter, and you otherwise extended an offer to them, and you that was completely irresponsible to say something entirely blaming Israel back when the the the horrific attacks were still going on. That you should at least give them the chance to, you know, defend themselves. Because in a lot of cases, by the way, it actually turns out that they didn’t even know about this particular letter going out and a lot of a lot people like, no, no, that doesn’t actually represent what I think. But I do make the caveat that a major problem in corporations is that they’ve been hiring too readily from elite higher education. And there’s a good chance they’re actually going to end up with a counselor.

Someone who shows up and says, you know what? I think actually this entire organization needs to be, you know, pro palestinian slash pro Hamas. And by the way, your IT director who seems vaguely trumpy needs to go because that’s regressive. I do caution organizations, but one thing they should be doing particularly if they’re hiring from elite education is make sure that they’re not actually hiring people who will harm the organization itself by actually demanding that it makes statements on a lot of things it doesn’t want to, or for that matter can’t work with people they disagree with.

So what role do, deI bureaucracies play in all of this? This is the diversity, equity, and inclusion. This has been a big, hot issue. Massive growth. You know, where you’ve tracked the growth of this, but at the same time, we also have, I mean, the not just the growth of DEA bureaucracies, But the use of the sort of DEA pledges

Yeah.

Professors have to sign committing themselves to certain ideological agenda and using that to to weed out anybody who is perhaps not politically attuned. So how does that relate to this?

Well, if you read nothing else and and and canceling the American mind, we have a chapter called the conformity gauntlet where we talk about research on this. I think at a stage where few point diversity is lower than it’s ever been, and professors are being canceled at a rate that we haven’t seen at any point even close to it. Yeah. Now in in the last fifty years since the law was established. The idea that you would also add on top of that, a political litmus test.

It is just it seems completely crazy. Now I think that most of your listeners will get kind of like, yeah, asking people about their personal commitments to diversity equity inclusion can’t not be a political at this desk. But if you’re skeptical, We also have, a a scholar who now works for fire, but was doing this before he he joined fire called Nate Honeycutt who did an experiment. He basically did five versions of, of deI statements. One, you know, you could describe as woke.

Well, I, again, I prefer social social justice fundamentalism. We’re basically saying all the right things Then several others included things like socioeconomic diversity, like doing a DI statement that actually pointed out that the thing most missing in higher ed are more working class and poor people, which I totally agree with, by the way. So I am sympathetic to that or religious diversity or viewpoint diversity. And when they did this experiment with a huge number of professors, the candidate who did anything but the social justice fundamentalist kind of answer would not have gotten hired even for the socioeconomic one, which absolutely drags my head at the pizza. So it it is a political litmus test.

Fire very rarely proposes model legislation beyond, you know, just things like free speech zones and that kind of stuff. But in this case, we’re like, no. Just the same way that you would understand that in the fifties, someone’s and we actually specifically point out, like, if a school wants to say, you know, a more conservative school, public school says, oh, give me your thoughts on patriotism, you know, like, as they’re test. It’s like, well, no. There’s no way that’s not gonna be a political in this test.

So we call for the elimination of political in this test from higher education period because it’s not like the problem in higher ed right now is there. There’s too much heterogeneity among the professor.

Okay. So one one one last area. I’m I am really, in frigued by your description in in the book of what you and your co author called the rhetorical fortresses for the left and the right We’ve talked a lot about bubbles. We’ve talked about alternative realities. This is where we’re living in, but I don’t think I’ve seen that term rhetorical fortresses.

And both sides have them. What is the rights rhetorical fortress? What do you mean by that?

No. No. It’s it’s it’s my own term. And it’s something I’ve been talking about since twenty fifteen. It’s actually a place where we get to have a little fun, which is dissecting the absolutely rotten way we argue on social media, but also increasingly argue as a society.

And we make the point that none of this will actually get you to the truth. When we first talk about things that right and left use, which we call the obstacle course and mind field, We get to the perfect rhetorical fortress, which is perfect because it’s just layer after layer, partially of identity based things. But on the right, we call it the efficient rhetorical fortress because it’s actually pretty simple. And it makes more sense in in a culture more influenced by talk radio, etcetera. And there’s just four layers.

One, you can dismiss anybody. You dub, liberal, or woke, and that could be anybody that could be ninety nine percent of the population, even if they’re they they think of themselves as conservative. And the left, you know, does the same thing with, dubbing people, conservative. And you don’t have to listen to journalists even if they’re conservative. You don’t have to listen to experts even if they’re conservative.

And then, of course, for the most extreme of the right, anybody who disagrees with Trump. This is where I usually point out that people should know that for coddling the American mind, which did a fair amount of taking on some sacred cows on the left, we get more hate mail from the right by orders of magnitude, but then we do for the left for that book. Because apparently in talking about Charlie Sykes, we were unfair to Trump.

Oh, yeah. Well, I I think he also pointed out the irony that all that conservatives who create these rhetorical fortresses are informed by the same desire to spare their children from psych harm, which they’re equipped to ridicule from the left. They are creating their own safe spaces while they’re ridiculing in the safe spaces, which I think is is true. So What are the points that you make in in the book is also that, you know, I mean, there’s there’s no quick, easy answers to this. But it comes back to the need for parents K twelve schools to raise and teach more resilient children.

Talk to me about that. This is an old theme that I have, by the way.

You know, it’s very much continuing from coddling the American mind that training kids for anti fragility is something we talk about. This is an esteemed taleb idea that essentially some organ is actually pretty much all organisms need challenges or else they wither and die essentially. And one of the things that actually can point out one of the things that makes this book a little different than than coddling American time. In calling the American mind, the subtitle is, good intentions and bad ideas. I’m a parent myself.

I am a protective, anxious parent. And I get the instinct to protect your kids no matter what and keep them from harm or difficulty. But I also know you’re not doing them any favors. Because eventually, like, they have to actually live in the world as it is. And if you actually are always shielding them from that, you’re disempowering them, which the way, was the title I wanted from coddling the American mind.

That’s the one we signed the contract under, was disempowered. And I think that in this kind of short sighted thought of, we’re gonna spare a kid’s emotional difficulty. We’re actually creating ones who are more likely to be anxious and depressed because if you think actually everyday pain is part of the world gone wrong, that’s kind of like saying to a a Buddhist. It’s like, actually, it turns out life isn’t pain, instead of the first noble truth life is paying isn’t paying. And and if if you experience pain, that means something

very wrong. You and I are are on the same wavelength here because when I wrote about it, I use the analogy of the bubble boy. You know, bubble boy may be protected, but he also has no immunity to any of the germs out there. He is totally unprepared for the world. And so this idea of bubble wrapping our children may seem attractive, but your bubble wrap child is not prepared to deal with the bumps and bruises of life.

They are not going to be resilient. Oh, yeah. The reality is is if you spend time around kids you realize that in fact they are resilient, And so many of these policies that you’re talking about start with the assumption of absolute fragility that they are just so breakable that you cannot have them challenge. And, of course, you know, the fact is you in theory, you go to a university campus to be exposed to ideas that might make you uncomfortable that will challenge your priors So the idea of bubble wrapping children in itself to prepare them to be adults, I think, is flawed, but the idea of bubble wrapping their minds and a university campus seems to completely misunderstand the concept of higher education.

Yeah. No. Absolutely. Higher ed can’t actually function, with a right, not to be offended.

Exactly. The book is the canceling of the American mind, Greg Gyanoff is the president and CEO of Fire, the foundation for individual rights and expression. It is a must read book. Thank you so much for today’s conversation, Greg.

Thank you, Charlie. Always a pleasure.

And thank you all for listening to today’s Bullworth podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We’ll be back tomorrow, and we’ll do this all over again. Secret Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.