Greg Lukianoff: The Canceling of the American Mind

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
It is November 8th, 2023. 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 suggested 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 overperformed. And it was, I don't want to say it's a blue wave, but it was certainly 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.
There's 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 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 26 points, went all in on the Republican candidate who decided that he was going to put on the red hat.
Didn't work out that well for him. Andy Beshear is reelected, by the way.
Keep an eye on Andy Beshear. Democrats held both the Senate and flipped the House in Virginia.
You might have been reading all of that punitry about how Glenn Youngkin 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 15-week ban, kind of a compromise.
He thought maybe this was the sweet spot, did not work out for him. And as a result, Democrats control the legislature in Virginia.
And Glenn Youngkin's presidential aspirations are pretty well dead. Look, they were never more than wish casting by the donor class.
But last night, pretty definitively sent them to the rapidly filling unicorn graveyard. It's just not going to happen.
And it was that way around the country. In Ohio, 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 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 about that as well. And once again, Donald Trump's intervention in the race turns out not to be as effective as Republicans might have hoped.
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 Siena poll, and it's like, holy shit, Donald Trump is, he's leading in all of these swing states.
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 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 want to 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 illiberalism on the left is a real thing. And it is, I compare it to sort of the chronic cancer.
Now, the MAGA threat to democracy, I think is 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 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? I think it's perfect.
I mean, like, I have to be nonpartisan in my job, but there was a Politico piece, a profile of me, giving a little more of my opinion 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 the political fence that we have a serious problem and we can't actually be pointing 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 start the process, but it's never going to go anywhere 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 80s and early 90s.
And that problem has gotten worse over the decades. I think it's gotten substantially worse over the decades.
But let's step back here because I think we have the challenge of definition and we have the challenge of perspective. Because you talk about the canceling of the American mind.
You're talking about cancel culture. Let's define our terms first, what cancel culture is and what it isn't.
Sure. So cancel culture, you know, is 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 did national polling on what people call this phenomenon. They call it cancel culture.
And when you poll them about whether or not they hate it or are afraid of it, black, white, liberals, conservatives all agree that that's the name for it. And we hate it and we're scared of it.
Actually, interestingly, particularly Gen Z, which includes my 23-year-old brilliant author, Ricky Schlott, 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 it? So it's the uptick since 2014 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 want to 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 resulted from people losing their

jobs, 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 will make the argument, oh, cancel culture has

always been around. People have been getting in trouble with their opinions forever.
And my answer

is, yeah, I'm a First Amendment lawyer with a particularly intense interest in the history of freedom of speech, 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.
Human intolerance for people to disagree with is as old as the species. But there was a demonstrable uptick in campaigns to get people fired, particularly professors, in 2014 and accelerating.
We also include this in the definition, accelerating in 2017 and 2020 and 2021 were the two worst years on campus I've seen in my 22-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 thing, that concern is exaggerated, that, okay, we can nutpick a few bad stories from some elite universities, but it's not really a problem.
What's your sense? Again, been doing this 22 years, again, very aware of the history of censorship on campus. We can find no period in the last 50 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 at an all-time low among the professor. So it's already a pretty homogenous group, and they're still losing their jobs.
And by the way, a lot of the professors losing their jobs are ones who itself identifies being on the left, just in a lot of cases are 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 want to 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 standpoint, the fact that it's coming from more than one direction makes the problem worse, not better.
And I remember pointing out the 30% coming from the right and someone says, well, I can do math. That means you're saying that the rest comes from the left.
And I'm like, oh, honey, I'm sorry. No, we have to accept this.
I always think of it as the battle between people who self-describe as liberals like me and people who would self-describe more as progressives. Okay, but what about the argument that, okay, yes, there is a thing that's cancel culture, and yes, there's been an uptick on cancel culture, but many of those people deserve to be canceled.
If you, in fact, are overtly anti-Semitic, if you are overtly racist, if you have 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 cancelable? You can absolutely argue that there are people who deserve to be canceled. And that's something that we actually did have an appendix in the book.
But we probably might confuse people too much as to what we're saying. You can't argue that someone was canceled 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 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 want to learn too much because there's no way you're going to get through, and hopefully you will with an open mind, readers read Cancelling of the American Mind.
And you're not going to come out of that saying, all these people deserve to be canceled. Sometimes it's actually incredibly tame mainstream speech that 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 you opened the book with the story of this art history professor at hamline university in minnesota in 2022 who showed her students a 14th 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, he gave them a trigger warning that I'm going to show this picture in a future class and they could choose.
And it was on the syllabus with a warning as well. Okay.
So she kind of knew this was going to 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 going to show this painting what happens tell me the story put it in the context of cancel culture sure yeah and and this is something where like my british mother and russian father kind of come into sometimes, and I can find myself saying, Americans can 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 deeply offensive to all of them. And that just shows kind of a poor knowledge of the Muslim world.
One of the leading defenders of the professor, Professor Prater, was Amna Khalid, 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 partially, like, one of the things she was trying to do... It's an art history class.
It's an art history class. people 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 Prater's job back. Really? One good thing.
And my organization is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and we defended her and launched a whole campaign defending her academic freedom. And in a sense, we failed.
The university president has said that she is going to step down early, which I don't think is a coincidence. But more recently, Hamline College came out and basically said, yeah, we're totally right about that.

These battles can be very hard to win and fight. And one thing that was at least a little hopeful about that case is that unlike a lot of cancel culture cases, it brought a lot of people together saying, no, this is wrong.
I mean, I think 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 this 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 Paine's Age of Reason to a class and having an evangelical 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. And that's something that's been baked into speech codes and speech enforcement of censorship on campus for as long as it's been around.
It was something that, you know, Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate were pointing out in their book, The Shadow University, for example. For that matter, you know, Alan Bloom, I believe, was pointing it out as well back in 89.
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 this kind of century 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, I like Tim Urban's term, 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 name of social justice. This book is a follow-up to a book that you wrote with Jonathan Haidt back in 2018, The Coddling of the American Mind.
And I remember how much of the reaction to that was that the whole idea is that cancel 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 7th? Well, first of all, you know, universities sometimes issued four statements, you know, on the attacks, you know, because they felt like they never got one right to make both off campus and on campus constituencies happy, which is 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 actually otherwise people think that that's protected by speech and that gives free speech a bad name. We're seeing, you know, situations where they easily could punish students like the thing that happened at Cooper Union, you know, when the students were locked into the library and people were banging on 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 like, no, no, no, no, that's not OK.
And there is an assumption by the media that I'm running into that I find almost kind of 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 want to 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 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 pro-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 know your viewers will be familiar with this, and FIRE has already sent letters on both and deciding in both cases, is Ron DeSantis saying that Students for Justice in Palestine needs to be de-recognized.
And there's two offices that affiliate with the national national and that would affect them. And then Brandeis 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 hat on to say, that's an incredibly serious allegation to make.
And by the way, if you had the goods on them for actual legal definition of material support for terrorism, you'd be arresting them because that's a felony. And one of the things that the DeSantis administration pointed to was hordatory language from the national saying, consider yourself part of the pro-Palestinian resistance.
And it's like, no, that is not material support for sending money, sending arms, like that kind of stuff is. So unless and until they produce evidence of this very serious allegation, we're going to be absolutely fighting to keep Students for Justice in Palestine recognized at state schools and in places like Brandeis.
So what's so interesting about that particular story is it highlights the hypocrisy of some of this debate because Ron DeSantis and others have been very vocal in fighting against wokeness, fighting against the cancel 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 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 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 Ron DeSantis first started in Florida, we had some hopes for him because there was some pro-free speech legislation he was found of.
We were like, all right, cool. And then the Florida government, with the encouragement of Ron DeSantis, passed the StopWoke Act.
StopWoke Act very particularly saying that you can't teach opinions on certain topics. You can't teach certain topics at all.
When they went into court, they essentially had to argue that, well, 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. 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 warned them about it repeatedly. We got other similar laws not passed in other places.
We had a lot of success in everywhere but Florida. And then, of course, when it was passed, we sued and we defeated the StopWoke Act in court.
So did the ACLU, the separate lawsuits. Now there's a kind of a StopWoke 2, which is essentially just a cosmetic rewriting of it that we're also going to be challenging that's equally unconstitutional.
So this hypocrisy is actually something that happened some time ago, unfortunately. I want to go back to the specific case studies because I think they really dramatize this.
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 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 9, 10 a.m.
on 9-11 to look for an apartment to become the legal director of fire. Awful day of a week, a whole 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 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 this coming. You know, so the cases were interesting.
There's no disagreement that this was an unusually bad period for academic freedom and free speech. And it lasted over the course of several years until the Ward Churchill case in 2005.
So in the wake of 9-11, there were about 17 professors targeted for anti-Iraq war or... 17.
17. That's bad, to be clear.
That's bad. And three professors were fired.
Now, interesting thing, all three of 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 can tell. to Samuel Arion, you know, someone who was Bill O'Reilly, you know, showed on tape saying death to Israel in the 80s.

They eventually, thanks to fire, they dropped actually 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 rally against the Iraq War. And, you know, I've looked at it since and I'm like, OK, 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, let's look at the situation we have. So our definition is cancel culture begins around 2014, but it accelerates around 2017.
And that's when you really start seeing the increase in student petitions to get professors punished, which is very unusual just for people that don't know. So we're talking about more than a thousand examples of professors being targeted.
We're talking about two thirds of those being professors punished in some way. And this is just from 2014 to this past July.
And we're talking about nearly 200 professors fired, something like 40 plus of them are tenured, which is, of course, you know, 40 times zero. You know, it's literally mathematically infinitely more than I'd seen previously in my career.
And I also 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 10 are the worst offenders, top 10 U.S.
News and World Report schools. And we also know that it's wildly 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 9% of students, by the way, say the same thing in data that we're going to be releasing shortly, which is one in 10 is crazy. So one in six say that they've been investigated, but much larger percentages of them say that they're self-silencing.
People need to remember that, you know, 9% of professors during McCarthyism said that they were editing themselves, they were self-censoring due to the environment. Again, one in 10 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, et cetera, so it's not an exact comparison. But we got about 90% of professors saying that they're self-censoring now as opposed to then.
And even when you compare it to McCarthyism, 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 happened in 1957.
Prior to that, people were arguing, deans and presidents were arguing, these guys are doctrinaire, they're set in their ways, they're radical, we can get rid of them, right? And then of course, it was only in 57 at the very end of McCarthyism that they said, no, actually, you can't just fire them on the basis of viewpoint. So, okay, so what happened in 2014? You 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 I was writing about this in the late 80s, early 90s.
So what was the critical mass that exploded in 2014 on? Well, in some ways, it's good to read Coddling of the American Mind and Cancelling of the American Mind together. Or it's helpful to have read Coddling because in that one, we do more of a social science.
I like that. Selling two books at once.
That was good. I give you extra points.
You get points for that. And buying on learning liberty and freedom from speech.
It's a foursome. Anyway, so Coddling the American Mind spends more time on figuring out how this happened.
And we actually give a scholarly, you know, six causal threads to why the young people hitting campus around 2014 were so different than other generations. And that's one of the reasons 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 2014 being this year that the world met cancel culture, Ricky Schlott 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 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 witch trials upticking. And we just introduced billions of people into the global conversation.
There's literally no way you're going to 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 send a letter that ends up in a drawer somewhere. You can suddenly, partially artificially, create the illusion of, there are thousands of people who hate me.
Actually, there are four, and a lot of them have sock 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 how it plays out on the New York Times Slack channel, 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 and comedy, etc. Comedy is actually the one where it's having the fighting back has been the most successful, which makes sense.
And one thing that 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 relatively mainstream things, to ruin their lives in the idea of kind of like there's some abstract social justice good that I'm doing. But there's something much more profound, a 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 Hoeven at Harvard, Carol Hoeven, wonderful, absolutely brilliant scholar, she wrote a book called Testosterone, called Tea, talking about the role of testosterone in development. 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 that biological sex is real. And that essentially, you know, testosterone plays a role.
And immediately at Harvard, she was at Harvard, a DEI 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 between 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 it as a cancellation attempt. Now that's sad.
That's really bad. But there's something much more important happened here.

The public looks at that and they go, OK, so someone tries to argue that biological sex is real and they lose their career and go through hell.

When Scientific American comes up and says, actually, biological sex is a spectrum, they're not going to believe you because they're going to 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 more than a thousand examples of it, it really undermines faith and expertise because they think people aren't being objective or 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 pro-Zionist things as well.
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 think it's maybe seventh or eighth or something like that. So going back to the data, you had a survey where 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 is a hate group? On the flip side, the Second Amendment should be repealed so the 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 16% believe that a speaker should be allowed on campus who is anti-trans.
Only 32% 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 29% 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 to be clear, 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 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 99, 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 part of the sacred beliefs of someone on the left, like I grew up with, and one of the reasons why I ended up 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 weak. And it's like, no, no, you don't need it.
Like, that makes literally no sense. Like, in a democracy, you don't need a special protection for the majority.
In any society, you don't need any protection for the rich and the powerful. You really only need 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 doesn't 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 when I started at Stanford in 97.
And it was really even back then, you know, working at the ACLU, I got kind of criticized by my cause lawyer in class for me and 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 you begin talking about speech in terms of violence and harm, you know, that speech a harm, and 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 cancel culture and when is it justifiable? Stories in the news today involving the fallout from Gaza. Your organization has jumped headfirst into some of these campus conflicts.
Let's talk about this NYU law student, Rena Workman, who wrote in a student bulletin that Israel bore full responsibility for the attack on October 7th. I mean, this got a lot of attention.
New York Times reported that she wrote, this regime, Israel, 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 Strawn, withdrew its offer of employment from her.

Was that cancel culture?

And don't they have the right to do that? So it's one of these things where I got to explain the difference between law and culture. And essentially, does Winston Strong have the right to do this as its freedom of association? Want to be 100% clear? Yes, they do.
And we would fight for their freedom of association to 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, to each their own, all of these kind of ideas that were very popular in idioms. I'm not a lawyer.
I'm not a law firm, okay. Yep.
But if I was about to hire this person, Rena Workman, and I read that she wrote that, I would say, 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 to 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 going to lead to someone who they might think is actually a full-on anti-Semite get hired? Probably not. But in terms of this being cancel 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 the case law is a little, I think it counts as cancel culture in this case. And I think it's troubling, but it's the kind of thing that there, is that going to be enough to overcome Winston Stroud not wanting to work with that person? Probably not because they do have the right to make the final decision.
So here's one that I find myself wrestling with. 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 of people who are going around and tearing down the pictures of the hostages.
By the way, Rena 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 not a free speech issue. It's actually the opposite of free speech.
OK, because 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 I do, too. These are the same people who said, oh, it's free speech to come in and shout down Kyle Duncan at Stanford.
And 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'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 making it.

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 would say- Tearing down the signs, which you just said- No, no, no.
I got to finish the thought. But that's not First Amendment protected speech.
That's actually being a vigilante censor yourself. And meanwhile, one of the things that I always say in these caveats about cancel 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 thought that was completely irresponsible to say something entirely blaming Israel back when 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 people are 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 canceler, someone who shows up and says, you know what, I think actually this entire organization needs to be 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, one of the things 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 make 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 uh dei bureaucracies play in all of this is the diversity equity and inclusion this

has been a big hot issue massive growth you know you've tracked the growth of this

but at the same time, we're also having not just the growth of DEI bureaucracies, but the use of these sort of DEI pledges that professors have to sign, committing themselves to certain ideological agendas and using that to weed out anybody who is perhaps not politically attuned. So how does that relate to this? Well, if you read nothing else in Cancelling the American Mind, we have a chapter called The Conformity Gauntlet, where we talk about research on this.
I think at a stage where viewpoint diversity is lower than it's ever been, and professors are being cancelled at a rate that we haven't seen at any point even close to it in the last 50 years since the law was established. The idea that you would also add on top of that a political litmus test 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 litmus test. But if you're skeptical, we also have a scholar who now works for FIRE but was doing this before he joined FIRE called Nate Honeycutt, who did an experiment.
He basically did five versions of DEI statements. One, you know, you could describe as woke.
Again, I prefer social justice fundamentalism, basically saying all the right things. Then several others included things like socioeconomic diversity, like doing a DEI 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'm 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 to pieces.
So it is a political litmus test. FIRE very rarely proposes model legislation beyond 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 50s, someone said, 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 their test, it's like, well, no, there's no way that's not going to 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's too much heterogeneity among the professor.
Okay. So one last area.
I am really intrigued by your description 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. So what is the right's rhetorical fortress? What do you mean by that? No, no, it's my own term, and it's something I've been talking about since 2015.
It's actually a place where we get to have a little bit of 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.
We first talk about things that right and left use, which we call the obstacle course and minefield. 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 a culture more influenced by talk radio, et cetera. And there's just four layers.
One, you can dismiss anybody you dub liberal or woke. And that could be anybody.
That could be 99 percent of the population, even if they think of themselves as conservative. And the left does the same thing with dubbing people conservative.
And you don't have to listen to journalists, even if they're conservative. And 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 than we do for the left for that book.
Because apparently, in talking about Charlottesville, we were unfair to Trump. Oh, yeah.
Well, I think you also point out the irony that conservatives who create these rhetorical fortresses are informed by the same desire to spare their children from psychic harm, which they're quick to ridicule from the left. They are creating their own safe spaces while they're ridiculing the safe spaces, which I think is true.
So one of the points that you make in the book is also that, you know, I mean, there's no quick, easy answers to this, but it comes back to the need for parents in K-12 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 Nassim Taleb idea that essentially some organisms, 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 Coddling the American Mind. In Coddling 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 are disempowering them, which, by the way, was the title I wanted from Codling 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 going to spare kids 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 Buddhist, it's like, actually, it turns out life isn't pain.
And instead of the first noble truth, life is pain, isn't pain. And if you experience pain, that means something very wrong.
You and I are on the same wavelength here, because when I wrote about it, I used 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 that 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, 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 at 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 Lukianoff 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 Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
We'll

be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again.