1216: Greg Lukianoff | Failing Arguments Against Free Speech

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I think that there is a value in knowing what people really think, full stop.

I think it's a scientific value.

I think it's an artistic value.

I think it's a democratic value.

You're not safer for knowing less about what people really think.

And I think, in a situation where people are scared to say what they actually think because they think their job's going to be on the line, whether that's cancel culture from the left or pressure from the right, that's not good for a democratic society.

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Now, today, Jimmy Kimmel got canceled over the jokes he made.

Some people call that accountability, others call it censorship.

So where is the line between legitimate backlash and mob justice?

If comedians are scared to tell jokes, isn't that kind of already the joke?

Why do late-night hosts lose their jobs over words while politicians can say worse and walk away untouched?

Does free speech only protect the powerful?

Well, today, we're exploring cancel culture, comedy, the intersections of free speech, and the future of free expression with insights from The War on Words, a new book from Greg Lukianov that tackles the 10 most common arguments against free speech and why they just don't hold up.

And hey, even if Jimmy Kimmel is probably back by the time this airs, my point still stands.

If comedians and talk show hosts aren't safe, who is?

And what's more dangerous?

Bad jokes or a society that can't tolerate them?

Here we go with Greg Lukianov.

I was thinking this morning, man, you know, we're doing a show on free speech.

And it's just, it's unfortunate that there's nothing relevant in the news.

Yeah.

It's been boring.

Yeah.

I've been like doing my nails and stuff.

Yeah.

It was like Monday I'm prepping this show and I'm going, all right, free speech, always timely-ish, you know?

Yeah.

And then by Friday, the day we're doing the show, it's, oh my God, we have to talk about free speech because Jimmy Kimmel gets canceled and the people on the left are like, this is crazy.

And the people on the right are like, oh, so now you care about free speech.

It couldn't be more relevant and more timely right now.

Yeah, no, it's business is booming, unfortunately.

In the censorship, free speech, defense business, yeah.

It's never a good thing.

No, free speech, it's one of those things that's like the fire extinguisher business.

We want these around, but when they're getting used a lot, that's a bad sign, right?

It's like that kind of thing.

So it's free speech, all right, we want to defend this.

Oh, if we're really busy, that's no good.

We want to make sure that we're just moderately busy.

But unfortunately, yes, business is good, as you mentioned at the top of the show.

To give people a little bit of background, just in case they are not paying attention or maybe they're not from the United States, Jimmy Kimmel, popular comedy late night show host.

Was he canceled?

Is that technically the term that happened?

Or he fired, really?

I have a very particular definition of cancel culture.

I wrote a book called Canceling of the American Mind with Ricky Schlott.

Young genius, real pleasure to work with.

But our definition is that the uptick of campaigns to get people fired, punished, or otherwise expelled for speech that would be protected for, let's say, a public employee under the First Amendment that began around 2014 and resulted in a sort of climate of fear.

And there's no political valence to that definition.

And it can come from the left and the right.

It tended to come somewhat somewhat more from the left for sure.

I would say that as serious as cancel culture was, I do think that the use of federal pressure in order to get media to do the dirty work for the Trump administration is worse.

More classic, in this case, what's called jawboning, which is when the government goads private entities to censor speech that the government itself is forbidden from punishing under the First Amendment.

I see.

Did you say jawboning?

Jawboning.

Okay.

Sounds a little dirty, doesn't it?

Yeah, but I like it.

I like it more because it sounds dirty, I think, actually.

So when I say canceled, Jimmy Kimmel was canceled, I guess I should have clarified his show was canceled.

Oh, in the very literal sense.

Yeah, not like his personality, his career is now canceled.

I should have clarified that, especially given the context of your previous work.

They're saying suspended.

Yeah, but he doesn't work there anymore.

So I don't know.

Oh, has he been full on fire?

I've been on the road for nine days straight.

I probably should have double-checked this morning because the problem with the news is it's like his show's off the air.

That must mean all these things.

It doesn't necessarily mean that, but thanks for all the speculation.

And so I really don't know.

And also it doesn't matter because by the time this is out, that'll have changed 10 times anyways.

That show could be back on the air tomorrow.

It could never come back on the air and he could be fired by tomorrow.

He could have retired or resigned by tomorrow officially to get some sort of severance.

I mean, like, who the hell knows?

So it almost doesn't matter.

The point is there was federal pressure to take him off the air.

So can I tell you the story of my ill-fated business trip that I just got off of?

Yeah, sure.

So I had this ridiculous breakneck thing where my itinerary was Pittsburgh.

I'm in order to do a debate with the free press team and Barry Weiss.

Cool.

Then Sol Solito in California, then San Francisco, and then Santa Fe, then New York.

And this was stretched over about nine days.

That's a brutal travel schedule.

It was too much.

Yeah.

And when I land in Pittsburgh, the first thing I find out is that Charlie Kirk has been shot.

And at that point, he wasn't dead yet, just they knew they knew he'd been shot.

And of course, that's horrifying and an obvious threat to freedom of speech because I guess there was some tiny possibility it wasn't for his speech, but we all kind of counted that as negligible.

And not only that, but you're also about to go up on stage.

And also you're like, wait a minute, is that going to be a copycat thing that happens to me in an hour?

I tell you, what's worse about it is they actually asked me, Utah Valley University, to come out and give a talk.

I might be standing where he was shot in about a month.

And I'd be lied if I said it didn't spook me, but I'm doing it because you can't actually let your speech get chilled.

And honestly, I'm less worried for me, but I think of people I love like Barry Weiss, like Sarah Hayter, like Carol Hooven, like people who I feel like would be are understandably really scared because there are crazy people who hate them too.

Carol Hooven, it was interesting.

She was on the show.

She was really good.

I thought relatively non-controversial in some ways.

Look, some of the stuff was like obviously going to strike a nerve, but you just think, wow, she she almost lost her job at Harvard.

That's really bad.

That's as bad as it gets.

You don't think sniper rifle from 200 yards.

So it's the stakes are even higher and it's even crazier.

So Jimmy Kimmel canceled, fired whatever overjokes he made.

This is probably a dumb question in light of our previous conversation here, but do you see that as accountability working?

Because that's what some people view it as.

Or is that a failure of free speech?

That's a failure of free speech.

I realized that I was going to tell the Odyssey of my entire trip because, and people are really focused on the Jimmy Kimmel thing, but there are so many other things that happened that the Trump administration tried to pull, including having Pam Bondi talk about hate speech not being protected, which, of course, hate speech is like the tool developed by the left to go after freedom of speech and that we've fought on campuses for decades now at FHIR.

And suddenly Trump himself is accusing reporters of engaging in hate speech.

Can you explain what FHIR is briefly?

Because I think some people are like, oh, this guy just hates Trump.

Where's the channel changer on my phone?

Yeah, yeah.

We're the Foundation for Individual Rights and and Expression, formerly the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

And if you've ever heard of horror stories of people getting in trouble on college campuses, it's probably because we've been involved in defending those students or professors.

And what that's looked like has changed over the years.

But for a lot of it, what we were fighting was the censorship instinct of what is now called loosely wokeness.

So there are people who really loved us for that.

But of course, like, we've always been a genuinely nonpartisan defender of freedom of speech since day one.

My very first time on TV was defending a lefty professor who was extremely controversial after 9-11, and I got tons of hate mail immediately after that.

We lost donors.

So it was good training from day one to have that.

You just figured out a way to piss off the left and the right at the same time, which is one of your talents.

Yeah, I've been told that I have a terrible business model as a fundraiser because we piss off the left and the right.

It's like you need to find those rich centrists, which maybe don't exist anywhere.

Yeah.

Well, we have to find are actually the people who believe in free speech for its own sake.

And thankfully, there are wealthy people who aren't even necessarily centrists who actually get it from a principled standpoint.

I just wish more people would.

Yeah, it's funny because you say, we got to find people who appreciate free speech.

And when I go online, depending on what the speech is, there are people defending free speech on both sides.

The problem is when it changes to something they don't like, then it becomes something else suddenly.

And that's the problem, I think.

I mean, to me, like the Trump administration dusting off hate speech was pretty comical, but watching people say unironically, people on the right say, this isn't cancel culture, this is consequence culture, which was like a favorite refrain of the left defending cancel culture.

Like Michael Hobbes has made his career basically like on the idea that, well, that's just accountability culture while he tries to wish away even the existence of cancel culture.

But the right actually making that argument verbatim is like, okay, the worm has turned here.

So to give people a little bit of background on this, because my audience, this show is very not political.

So when we mention politicians, and there's also an international audience, so sometimes I got to be really careful to be like, oh, so this is these are,

yes, exactly.

Hello, Australia, where they're like, wait, I thought you had freedom of speech, but now you're mad that people are speaking.

But then also, you don't have freedom from consequences, but like when other people get consequences, everybody's mad.

Make up your mind.

You don't have to go to Australia to be confused.

You just have to go to Canada.

You have to like throw a stone hard enough from the United States and you hit people who go, I don't get it.

You said this last week, but now it's on the other side and you didn't mean it that way.

No, not like that.

And so the idea that the left was saying, hey, this isn't cancel culture.

This is just consequences.

What they mean by that is basically like, look, we have the legal right to free speech, but if you're a surgeon at a hospital, you kind of represent that hospital.

So if you're like, ah.

I hated that Charlie Kirk guy.

I don't care that his kids don't have a dad.

You can get fired for that.

You're not protected by some invisible shield of the First Amendment.

You're only protected because the government can't arrest you for that.

It doesn't mean the hospital can't go, man, that was in really poor taste.

And regardless of our politics, you can't be spouting that crap on our company Twitter account.

So you are no longer employed here.

But one of the reasons why I object to cancel culture is because I believe in a culture of free speech.

And to be clear, your company can decide to fire someone for embarrassing the company.

That's absolutely within your first amendment rights.

We'd even fight for that First Amendment right.

But if you live in a society where you can have an opinion or a job, but not both, that's what it was starting to look like back in 2020.

That essentially if you disagreed with the boss on his politics or the loudest people at your firm, you're not going to have a job anymore.

And so I think that people need to remember that broader principle.

And we always try to get people to step a little bit back about what kind of country they want to live in in terms of whether or not you should have free speech as a citizen if you have a job.

Now, of course, one of the reasons why I compare it to public employee law is because there are all sorts of additional nuance in that of being like, yeah, like if you're a spokesperson for something and you say, by the way, I think the boss is an idiot, of course you're going to lose your job.

But if you're like a pizza boy, like let's give the example of the pizza boy wearing a Biden hat or a MAGA hat and their boss doesn't like that candidate, I think as Americans, we can agree that person probably shouldn't lose their job.

Yeah, it's really difficult to pay your rent with an opinion.

So if I had to choose between an opinion and a job, I'd probably choose the job, right?

Isn't that your point?

So there's a chilling effect if you just can't ever express anything.

And like, yeah, there's a difference between, like you said, being a lawyer that goes to work every day and nobody can really tell what your politics are and you volunteer at a fundraiser for something and someone finds out.

That's different than, oh yeah, there's the guy that will never shut the hell up about this particular presidential candidate at work in the office.

And anybody who disagrees with him is an idiot and he'll tell you that.

Oh yeah.

If it's on the job, that's an entirely different thing.

It's one of those things kind of like, sort of a paradigmatic case in First Amendment law is someone who was like a K-12 teacher.

He wrote an op-ed talking about education policy in his town.

And in a case called Pickering B.

Board of Education, the Supreme Court said, listen, he's a public employee.

We shouldn't be firing people just for having actual opinions as citizens.

That seems to really limit the ability of public employees.

And I still think that's like a good model.

By the way, I just got a news alert saying Jimmy Kimmel has been fired.

In real time.

Wow.

Breaking news.

So he has officially been fired.

And I wonder how they handle that.

Does he just get the rest of his contract paid out?

Surely it costs them a bunch to do that.

There's definitely going to be some lawsuits filed in response to this.

Oh, yeah.

And when it comes to the lawsuit that should be filed, is there should be a lawsuit from Jimmy Kimmel against the FCC, because like the extent to which it's quite clear that the FCC was pressuring a lot of parties at the same time to come to this.

And it's been so frustrating watching Twitter explode with people being like, oh, no, this is just a business decision that ABC made.

But Trump said Jimmy Kimmel will be next like several months ago.

He repeated this like a couple of times.

He's definitely shown that he's very willing to use mergers as a way to coax Paramount, for example, to do what he wants.

And then Brendan Carr was on the Benny Johnson show and was like, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.

And he was really quite explicit that they need to dump this guy.

And to be clear, like I'm critical of what Jimmy Kimmel said.

I think that Jimmy Kimmel.

was going with this kind of embarrassing for the mainstream media kind of narrative that this guy has to be right wing, which they really jumped on to a degree, which I think was embarrassing for them.

And Jimmy being a Hollywood guy implies, sure, of course, this guy might be actually MAGA.

So tell me what he said, because I think a lot of people are like, what did he do again?

And the answer from my end is I'm not entirely sure.

Yeah, what he said was that MAGA was desperately trying to figure out a way that he wasn't actually one of theirs.

The person who shot Charlie Kirk.

Yeah, which is a literally true statement, but the implication was that, of course, he's going to be a right-winger.

Gotcha.

The kind of dumb thing that Hollywood people, that you just kind of roll your eyes at.

And they'll be clear.

I understand why conservatives were mad about it.

But if that was the case, then you can say that this guy should lose his job.

And maybe he would have if there wasn't state intervention.

The thing that distinguishes this case is the state intervention and Trump's clearly demonstrated tendency to use every lever of power at his disposal in order to punish his enemies.

How did the federal government apply pressure then?

Do we know the specifics of that?

Well, basically, they held out their licensing.

And Trump then doubled down on the idea that essentially, like, we're thinking about pulling every network's licensing.

And he said something like that earlier in the week as well.

Weirdly, he said that for NBC and ABC, but not CBS or Fox, the threats have been accelerating over many months.

And then specifically here, I mean, when the chairman of the FCC is basically saying the same thing, and specifically about Jimmy Kimmel, yeah, if these are companies that want a merger, they get the message.

You know, like this guy's got to go.

So what they said essentially was, you might not be able to legally broadcast unless you do what we want.

And also, we know you want to merge with another company and we have to approve that as the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission.

If we're going to approve that, you know, you got to be in our good graces.

And that was loud and clear.

Okay, so we have to fire this guy, then you'll approve our merger.

And I guess that's why people are like, it's a business decision.

It's like, okay, but not really.

I mean, it was like extortion.

It was a little bit mafia.

It's totally like nice business he got there.

Wouldn't want anything to happen to it.

Yes, extortion.

Yeah, that's scary.

So I think the conservatives trying to wish this away as a big deal are kidding themselves.

I see.

Okay.

I try not to make it a a political show, but I think it's really difficult to discuss this without discussing what each political side is doing.

As you mentioned before, the left was doing the cancel culture before, and I think that's what a lot of people on the right or even in the center are applauding.

They're like, yeah, remember when you guys were doing all this other horrible stuff?

Well, it's our turn now, but that's kind of what is it?

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind kind of thing.

So it's really not good that the shoe is on the other foot.

At least the shoe's on the other foot.

Maybe you shouldn't be kicking people with it.

I don't know.

The metaphor breaks down at some point.

So where is the line between legitimate backlash and basically mob slash government censorship?

And maybe I just gave the answer away here.

Yeah, like legitimate backlash.

Of course, people have a First Amendment right to complain about anything.

I would defend that right.

It was a noticeable change, though, within my own lifetime that people started going, that person's a jerk, hit that person, to I have to engage in a campaign to get this person fired.

That was kind of in some ways only like logistically possible to do in a quick way until social media existed, that you could create like the appearance of a million people demanding that you fire Harry when it actually turns out there's 30 people who actually think that.

But when you start getting into like, what's the line with government coercion, like the government's not supposed to place any meaningful pressure on institutions to censor speech the government itself cannot censor.

So this is one of the things that was so frustrating about the Murthy v.

Missouri case, which I'll explain for the international audience.

So there was a case where a number of conservatives were saying that they were kicked off of social media because the Biden administration was pressuring a number of social media companies to kick off people who were questioning things like COVID and vaccines and that kind of stuff.

And the pressure was dramatic.

It was not pussyfooting around.

It was very tough on a lot of these social media platforms.

And then these were people who were actually kicked off social media.

And the Supreme Court found that it wasn't clear that these guys would have standing.

It wasn't clear that it was absolutely certain that the government was the butt-for reason they got kicked off social media.

And meanwhile, I think the case is overwhelmingly clear.

I'm embarrassed on behalf of other First Amendment people who are, the government was right on this.

It's like, no, the government should not be pressuring social media companies to punish speech that the government itself cannot punish, period.

But the Supreme Court figured out a way to not deal with this case, and I think they got that case wrong.

in Murphy v.

Missouri.

Now we're seeing, I guess there's a bit of I told you so on this, that essentially, of course, the government is now using pretty overt pressure to get revenge on some of Trump's personal political targets.

So it's basically saying, hey, the Biden administration shut down a lot of speech on social media during their administration.

Many of us opposed and other people thought this is fine.

And now it's happening from the other side during the Trump administration.

And it's hard to go, hey, you're not allowed to do that.

And didn't we just establish that we can do that?

Because Joe Biden's administration did it.

And we don't want it to happen like that.

We were right and you guys are wrong.

And

look, the counter argument is, hey, one was disinformation about a pandemic.

The other one was a joke from a comedian you don't like.

That's different.

Okay, but also like you're the ones that opened the door to this BS in the first place.

And the thing is, like some of the stuff that the Biden administration was targeting is disinformation and misinformation.

First of all, it wasn't disinformation.

It was people having theories like the lab league theory.

It was people saying maybe vaccines aren't very well tested on human beings, which is also factually true.

And so maybe we should be worried about some of this stuff.

And some of the stuff like myocarditis and this kind of stuff, yeah, there was some reason to be concerned about this stuff, but it was treated like blasphemy.

And in this case, what Kimmel was saying was barely a joke, but it was certainly an opinion.

So the problem is now, right, people are going to start self-censoring to avoid the backlash.

Oh, they already are.

And they are already.

Look, one of the reasons I'm so glad this is a non-political show, not that I'm going to make a dent in the universe with this podcast or anything, but I don't have to worry about, oh, gosh, am I going to get shot for something?

Am I going to get put off the air?

Am I going to get dumped by sponsors?

Because while there are controversial guests and stuff like that, I'm just not that much of an agitator for either side.

At least I don't think so.

That could always break down as people start getting crazier and I'm trying to anchor myself to sanity.

Well, remember, your words can be violence, but also your silence can be violence.

So you're kind of.

Right.

So I have to speak and also not speak unless you're right.

Okay.

Well, we'll get to that in a bit.

So people are self-censoring to avoid the backlash.

That seems to me like evidence that the marketplace of ideas, as they called it during law school, is breaking down.

I agree.

And I was talking to someone where they asked me, like, how I define free speech.

And, you know, I always stumble over it because of the formulation, but to think what you will and to say what you think.

And that essentially it's just that simple.

And I got this very like, well, anything?

And I'm like, if you're talking about opinion, then yeah.

I gave a TED talk and one of the things I said is like, I've been defending freedom of speech professionally for 24 years now, but even longer unpaid.

And that essentially, like, people bring up sometimes derisively, sometimes as a compliment, oh, you're a free speech absolutist.

And I made a point in my TED talk, like, I've been doing this for a long time.

And if there are free speech absolutists, I have not met them.

Define what that is, because people do label themselves or others that.

And it turns out to never be true when the shoe is, again, when it's directed at them, they're like, this is unconscionable.

Remember when you didn't give a crap a month ago when that other thing happened about the guy you didn't like?

Yeah.

So a free speech absolutist in theory is someone who believes that if you do something with words, essentially, it's always protected.

And that's not true.

That's an extreme version even of that definition.

But for example, a free speech absolutist might not even believe that defamation should be unprotected.

And defamation is like saying, even when you know it's untrue, this person molested so-and-so as a child.

Something that is clearly trying to destroy someone's career, particularly if you know you're lying and everybody knows you're lying and it's legit harmful to a particular person.

All these special protections that apply to defamation.

I believe defamation should not be protected.

I don't believe incitement shouldn't be protected, which is tortures are just about to be lit, you're in front of the mayor's home and you're saying, let's burn down the mayor's home.

That's incitement.

And then you have other categories like obscenity or obscenity towards minors, which basically means things that allow you to protect kids from, say, hardcore porn, for example.

I actually think the exceptions to the First Amendment as established by the Supreme Court, for the most part, make a lot of sense.

I think they're well thought out for the most part.

But what I am is an opinion absolutist, which basically means I think that there is a value in knowing what people really think full stop.

I think it's a scientific value.

I think it's an artistic value.

I think it's a democratic value.

And that you're not safer for knowing less about what people really think.

And I think in a situation where people are scared to say what they actually think because they think their job's going to be on the line, whether that's cancel culture from the left or pressure from the Trump administration on the right, that's not good for a democratic society.

Yeah, that's not good.

I mean, that sort of answers my next question here, which is what's more dangerous, bad jokes or a society that can't tolerate bad jokes.

Yeah, definitely the latter.

Yeah, like hands down and very obviously for everyone involved.

And I mean, hell, we had Don Rickles back in the 80s and we survived.

I barely remember him.

But yeah, it's crazy because I remember my mom talking about how obscene Rodney Dangerfield was or something.

And now she's probably just like, okay, he's still stupid, but I've seen worse, right?

Back to school is a masterpiece.

I'm going to get us derailed if I go down that road.

All right, so we're apolitical, at least.

Yeah, there you go.

There you have it.

People say words are violence, and if that's true, my inbox is a war crime.

Let's take a break from the carnage and hear from the amazing sponsors that support this show.

We'll be right back.

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Now, back to Greg Lukianov.

It's hard to imagine that anybody's against free speech, but here we are.

I mean, you mentioned this in your book, War on Words.

Authoritarians are really used to these same arguments, right?

They use a lot of the arguments that you mentioned in the book against free speech.

Free speech laws are used frequently against the press.

And this is kind of why, as a member of the press, we have to be really vigilant against this kind of stuff.

And it seems to me like the latest generation is really a lot less protective of free speech.

And I'm not trying to throw Gen Z under the bus because I think they've just had to face harder issues when it comes to free speech than maybe my parents' generation.

Look, you're already disagreeing.

Tell me why you disagree.

My parents, they're relatively educated people.

I don't think they could formulate a free speech argument.

I think you'd be surprised.

Yeah, you might be right.

Can I get a sense of like when your parents were born?

Oh, yeah, the 40s.

40s, yeah.

You'll be shocked at how good they are, actually, at formulating free speech arguments.

I'm going to give that a try tonight at dinner.

They were coming up in like the 60s and 70s.

That's true.

That was one of the major topics of one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, like much more intense than they are today.

I think Gen Z is the victim of an educational system, K through PhD, who really tried to explain the downsides of free speech, partially because when you have a monoculture in K through PhD, the incentives change.

And suddenly, like, if you're in charge of an institution, then why on earth would you want to limit your power against people's freedom of speech?

Because you understand what right think is.

So I do actually think that a lot of these attitudes about free speech really fall on education schools in particular within higher ed, but just the way we educate young people.

That's why I did my, you know, again, to come back to my TED Talk, I tried to do in 12 minutes like my most basic lesson on what free speech is, what young people are getting wrong about it,

have they been miseducated on it, and what's scary and how bad this has gotten.

Fire does a campus free speech ranking, and it's this massive undertaking.

We pulled about 70,000 students this year, the biggest survey of student opinion about free speech in American history.

And we have some really terrible news.

For a long time, the students who tended to be more pro-violence in response to free speech, like it's okay in some circumstances, tended to be on the left.

This year, the right has caught up.

So right now, a little more than one in three students think that under extreme circumstances, speech can be met with violence.

And

in some schools, I think UC Davis, I think it was like 52% of students said that.

That's terrifying.

The answer should be, that should be zero.

So explain what that essentially means.

That means that if you don't like an opinion that somebody is expressing, you can beat them up.

Is that kind of where we're going with this?

The way it's asked is that can you respond to speech with violence?

So yeah, like potentially actually physically harm them because we also ask is it okay to shout down speakers is it okay to block entrances so we're clearly talking about something more extreme than those two options and when it comes to shout down speakers we're talking about that's more than like two-thirds i think overall and by shouting down we don't mean heckle a shout down is when you can't proceed with a speech because students are preventing it from happening and i always point out that's mob censorship that is not freedom of speech that is the oldest form of censorship literally in the book where basically groups of people get together and are like, I don't like this guy and you can't hear him because I don't like them.

And that's imposing your will on everybody else.

And that this is probably not a brilliant observation or anything, but it seems like that would make actual violence inevitable because if you can just then go and do that.

anything you feel strongly enough about, you can just say like, hey, let's just go throw things at this guy until he stops talking.

And we can just do that for everyone we don't like everywhere.

Yeah, there's a great quote from a Supreme Court case about what's called the Heckler's Veto, which we're describing here, is basically we can't limit speech to just speech that isn't unpopular with bottle throwers.

Essentially, it incentivizes violence, response to speech, once you actually let the violent perpetrator silence.

And behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.

For 2023 and 2024, those are the two worst years for shoutdowns in U.S.

history, as best we can tell, when it comes to campuses, at least.

That's what happens if you don't actually say, listen, if you respond to speakers on campus with shoutdowns, or God forbid, respond with violence, which has happened in cases, that's something that should get you punished at minimum, expelled, and in some of these cases, probably arrested.

Yeah, look, it makes sense to me.

It depends on what you're doing, of course, but there seems to be a lot of not just, hey, I don't want, I don't know, Ben Shapiro to speak at my university, but I don't want Ben Shapiro to speak at my university.

And we are going to make it so people can't get in, make it so he can't get out.

There was a couple of instances where professors professors were being false imprisonment is really what it was.

They were like, can I go to the bathroom?

No, you're going to stay here until you agree to, I don't remember what it was, but

at Barnard.

Right, yeah.

They also did it at Evergreen State University to the university president.

Yeah, oh, that's what I'm talking about.

And then they were like, yeah, the people who wouldn't let you go to the bathroom until you agreed to their demands, but you didn't feel unsafe.

Okay, sure, pal.

He meekly requests if he can go pee.

And they say no, and they laugh at him.

And it's kind of like, that's not okay.

That's not liberalism.

Insane.

What about the idea that hate speech isn't free speech?

I know it's hard to draw a bright line around that.

It's a very common misconception, and certainly young people have this belief, but a lot of adults do as well, that hate speech is not protected speech in the United States.

And actually what we have rather than hate speech codes is something called the Bedrock Principle, which comes out of a 1989 case called Texas V.

Johnson.

that said that if the First Amendment means anything, it's that you can't ban speech in this country simply because it's offensive.

And I think this is the right rule for a multicultural, diverse society because like people's idea of what is offensive.

I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of immigrants.

Mother's British.

My dad's Russian.

They have wildly different ideas of what is and isn't offensive.

Wow.

And you grew up during the Cold War.

That must have been an interesting dinner.

Neither of my parents much like the Soviets.

I suppose that makes sense.

So essentially, I think about even just the kids I grew up with, they had all radically different ideas what you should and shouldn't be allowed to say.

At least their parents did.

And then as I got to like fancier, more upper-class places like Stanford, I was like, then the upper class of the United States has some real ideas of what you shouldn't be allowed to say.

And campuses, Ivy League campuses certainly have all sorts of quasi-Victorian ideas of what you should and shouldn't be allowed to say.

So the bedrock principle is the right call.

You can't ban speech just because it's offensive.

And that's kind of the hallmark of hate speech laws.

It's essentially like the main thing is that it's offensive.

Now, what we don't have any issue with at Fire are harassment laws, as long as you define harassment as being a pattern of behavior that is severe, persistent, or pervasive, that targets someone for a discriminatory intent that actually, in the case of higher ed, denies them the ability to fully engage in their education.

It's a high standard, but it's how you actually prevent someone saying something rude from being harassment.

And believe me, we've seen plenty of probably thousands of examples of people trying to do that.

But you change it into a pattern of harassing behavior.

That's the difference between, hey, we don't like like this class on Israel and we don't want Jews here or something, which is gross, but hates gross, yeah.

As opposed to, we are going to make sure that these five Jewish professors can't ever do anything on campus because they're scared.

Yeah, I mean, that would be easily harassment.

That would probably even be stalking.

It depends on what you would actually mean by that.

Just trying to give people an example so that they're not like, because it could be a little bit confusing.

Sure.

So, for example, like people would ask us if the pro-Palestinian chant, from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free, was protected.

And the correct answer is, if that's all you're doing, then sure, it's protected.

I don't like the sentiment.

I feel like a lot of people don't even know what river or what sea they're talking about, but they're still chanting it.

But if you're doing that and you're like marching towards Jewish students and surrounding them and you're following them around campus, menacing in a way that actually indicates that you are targeting them to make their lives miserable, that can be harassment.

And there was a lot of things that happened on campus that really crossed the line.

Take Columbia, for example.

Columbia was just a freaking mess on this kind of stuff.

They allowed a lot of stuff they shouldn't have allowed.

There was one video of this guy who later got kicked out, I think, for death threats against someone.

There was an encampment on campus, and these Jewish students are trying to like get through their own campus.

And the guy shouts out, Zionists have entered the camp.

And students lock arms together and start marching towards them to push them out of their own quad, essentially.

And it's, okay, that's harassment for sure.

It's probably also assault because like when you're actually getting someone to go because they're reasonably afraid that they're going to be pushed out, that's assault.

So campuses, I never want to pretend campuses haven't brought a lot of this on themselves, but that doesn't mean that Trump suddenly magically gets to have all sorts of powers that exceed his rightful powers under the First Amendment.

Yeah, that was a scary time.

And I understand, I can't imagine being Jewish on campus, openly Jewish, whatever on campus.

It's crazy to me.

Yeah, and I've been saying this for a long time.

And apparently there's one Twitter personality who will remain unnamed who basically made it sound like I'm the victim of some kind of mossad op that suddenly I care about anti-Semitism on campus and believe it's a problem.

And I have always pointed out, dude, I've been saying this since 2014.

I've been saying this, pointing out that I do actually think that there is an anti-Semitism problem, both in elite higher ed and in schools in California.

I don't know exactly why the latter.

But at the same time, that doesn't actually create sort of a blank check to just go after speech that you disagree with on Israel-Palestine.

Sure, exactly.

So you actually need to let people say some pretty gross racist shit in order to get rid of that type of belief in the long run.

Yeah.

For me, my whole point on freedom of speech is we think about freedom of speech wrong, that essentially we have a tendency, and I think this is part of the K-through PhD miseducation practice, we consider whether or not we agree with the speech at all, as if that matters.

And we forget that's one irrelevant.

Even bigots have their own freedoms.

But almost more importantly, as far as I'm concerned, from an epistemological standpoint, it's valuable to know what people really think.

In almost all circumstances, you are not safer for knowing less about what people really think.

And if they think horrible things, that's good to know.

So if someone is a bigot, it's better that you actually know that they are a bigot.

That is crucial information to have about your world.

But if you create situations in which people are afraid to say what they really think, that, by the way, has also really demonstrable negative effects.

So I was on the Bill Maher show and we were talking about these hate speech laws in Europe and the rise of anti-Semitism.

But there's been laws on the books banning anti-Semitic speech in France, for example, I think since the 90s, but it's gotten way worse.

Now, of course, some of that is immigration from countries that are very hostile to Israel in the first place.

But also some of it is censorship doesn't change anyone's opinion.

It just teaches them to, hey, since you can get in trouble, why don't you just talk to people who already agree with you?

And here's the thing.

One of the best established phenomena in social science is if you have people talk only to those whom they agree, they get radicalized in the direction of the group.

And as I said it really simply, of course, anti-Semitism got worse.

You told all the anti-Semites that they could only talk to other anti-Semites.

That's an interesting point.

It's kind of like the Streisand effect.

Remember, Barbara Streisand didn't want a photo of her house, I think it was, out there in the internet was like, oh, you don't want a photo of your house floating around, so you're going to drop cease and desist letters everywhere?

I am going to reap all 18 million people who are trolling right now are going to post this everywhere forever.

And thus the Streisand effect.

And hate mongers, they love censorship because now it's like, oh, I got deplatformed because they're afraid of what I'm saying.

You hear that crap all the time.

The Nazis loved it.

They love it.

Like the literal Nazis.

Yes, the literal Nazis, yes.

It's called the Weimar fallacy.

That essentially there's this argument by the sort of like the people who really want less free speech saying that essentially if we had hate speech codes back back in the 20s during Weimar Germany, we could have stopped Hitler.

And that's stupid to begin with, because even before I knew some of the actual state of the law in the 20s, it's like, so you're saying that would have stopped people for voting one-third of the population voted for Nazis.

That's a hard thing to overcome.

But it actually turns out that Weimar Germany did have hate speech laws on.

They weren't called that, but they were specifically designed to protect people of faith, including Jewish people.

Nazis went to jail for saying bad things about Jews.

And guess what?

They turned these into massive PRCUs that they would have like big parties for people when they got out of jail for saying anti-Semitic things.

And they really exploited the fact that Hitler, he got a slap on the wrist for trying to overthrow the German government.

Insurrection called the Beer Hall Putsch, in which I believe like at least one, but I think several police officers were killed.

And normally in Germany, historically, someone doing that would be hung.

But instead, he was given a slap on the wrist, but then told he couldn't speak.

He couldn't give speeches for several years.

And the Nazis love this.

They made big posters of Hitler with like tape over his mouth saying out of 2 billion people in the world, of course, much smaller world, only one cannot speak on a German campus.

And so they turned these things into coups for them.

Meanwhile, if you just let these guys talk, at least in a free society, they're going to turn more people off than on.

Yeah, I find that to be an interesting point you make because I'll hear something where I'm like, oh, this person makes some decent points.

And then, I don't know, they'll go on Sam Harris.

And I'm like, oh, never mind.

But if you can't have that conversation, then a bunch of people are just going, oh, you know, I guess Jews did get kicked out of 109 countries.

Whatever like the disinformation nonsense is.

And it's like, oh, we can't talk about why that's BS because then I'm talking about anti-Semitism.

And we can't really have the other guy can't show up to the debate because he's going to get arrested for that.

So I can't really counter that.

And then they're just on whatever the equivalent is of Reddit or Twitter talking about it.

And like you said, they get more and more radicalized because they're having the meeting in the basement somewhere instead of out in the open.

That's the whole thing about Holocaust denial.

Like when I'm over in Europe, I definitely get that treated as kind of like, okay, Mr.

Free speechy American weirdo, but surely Holocaust denial should be illegal.

And I'm always like, why does that need to be illegal?

Because here's the thing.

The only way you actually are able to maintain that the Holocaust didn't happen is if no serious person ever gets a chance to challenge you because they never knew knew you were saying it in the first place.

It is the easiest argument in the world to refute.

But instead, we turn these Holocaust deniers into heroes.

They don't have to go through the process of being like, how do you explain this?

I think one of the theories, by the way, for Holocaust denial was something like yellow fever in the camps, which was largely Jewish-specific or something like that.

They're not good arguments.

They don't stand up unless they are whispered into your ears and you're told, no one wants you to know this.

I see.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I looked at Holocaust denial stuff before, not because I believed in it.

My family, as people who perish in the world.

I wasn't worried.

Yeah, I didn't think so, but it's a podcast.

You got to say everything or the email you get is like, I can't believe you toyed with the idea of Holocaust denial.

And that's literally not what anybody said.

Please listen to more than 10 seconds of an hour and a half long show.

But you're right.

You hear these arguments like.

What was there was a movie about this where the guy was like, I don't believe that this was a thing because the gas chambers were designed so poorly that they couldn't have been gas chambers.

And it's, yeah, it's almost like they made them in a hurry and didn't care if the people were comfortable when they were inside.

Is it a craftsmanship argument they're making there?

Right.

It was literally like, oh, if you really wanted to efficiently gas people, you would have made the hole for the Cyclon B less deep or something because it's heavier than air.

And it's, I don't think they had their finest scientists on the case.

I think they would like throw this cannon there and make it so that nobody can cover it.

Trying to do it, like the horrifying thing about it, like the more you study it is like how much they were trying to do it on the cheap was what are the major goals because apparently bullets were expensive.

Yeah, it was wartime.

And it's just, oh, if this would have killed them faster, and there's scratch marks on the wall, so that can't be it.

And it's like rooms were stuffed with people, and people's lungs were filtering out the poisons.

You have to make these like really gross arguments to show why they're wrong, but the arguments are really stupid in the first place.

And that's also, this is probably just mean, but when you hear these people talk, you go, even before they make an argument, you usually go, yeah, this isn't the finest genetic specimen.

This is not the most intellectual kind of guy that I would

this is not somebody where I would go, I'm going to take this guy's word.

This is an intellectually rigorous person.

This is a weird fringe guy who, if he approached me on the road, I'd probably slink away and start running as soon as I can crease the gap large enough.

And so if you have these people hiding on the internet, you're like, oh, this is well written and da-da-da-da.

But no, I want them to be in front of a room full of people so I can go

along with half the room and then just walk out the back.

Yeah, Jonathan Rausch makes this argument.

Like, so Jonathan Rausch, he's a famous defender of freedom of speech, brilliant dude, friend of mine, but also gay and married to a man and like very early on was one of the like the real sort of advocates for gay marriage before almost anyone else was saying it.

But he makes the point that listen, the gay rights movement could have actually been stymied if there was, say, I don't know, like hate speech codes going back to like the 1960s that prevented people from saying, you know, what they actually thought about homosexuality.

Because you're like, we benefited from the fact that people could hear how pitable and how bigoted our critics sounded.

We're a numerical minority.

We have to convince the majority to be on our side.

And that's an uphill battle.

And essentially, if you had this kind of forced silence, he doesn't think it would have happened.

And it's one of these things, it's just really important that one of the key things about reality is trying to get a solid sense of what reality actually looks like.

And you have no chance of doing that whatsoever if you've scared the hell out of everyone from saying what they really think.

And again, it's those troubling beliefs that are oftentimes the most important thing to know.

Yeah, I think that's a good argument.

I should have brought this up earlier about the idea some people make that speech can lead to violence, hateful, inflammatory speech.

That can incite real world violence.

So it should be restricted to prevent such outcomes.

And you, of course, incitement.

is actually illegal, correct?

It is, but it's a tough standard to meet.

But in my response on the free press to the Charlie Kirk assassination, that was my point.

It's like, can we finally retire this whole argument that speech is violence or speech can be violence, which is very rhetorically popular on campuses over the last 15 years, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny outside of sort of an echo chamber.

In an echo chamber, you could be like, well, that was so offensive then your speech was so offensive that my speech is self-defense.

And that may make you sound righteous and passionate.

But then you're not thinking it through to be like, okay, so that means you can respond with violence to someone else's speech.

That means unquestionably they can respond in violence to you.

It's still the same downward spiral that we're trying to protect the world against.

Yeah, I think it was either you or Sam Harris said something like, campuses are supposed to be safe physically, but very dangerous intellectually.

That might even be like a Jonathan Hyde thing.

I don't know.

One of you smart dudes said that, and I loved it.

I wrote it down.

It was very fun to do Sam Harris's show.

I just, I really liked that idea, but we've, of course, we have lost the plot on that.

I mean, safe, physically, dangerous intellectually.

Now it's actually inverted.

It's actually just dangerous intellectually and dangerous physically now that I think about it.

What about the idea that speech should be limited to prevent disinformation and lies?

You know, we talked about the Biden administration limiting or essentially pressuring social media companies to kick people off for COVID stuff.

But I don't know, man, look, devil's advocate.

False and misleading statements are harmful and we got to restrict those to protect public health and elections and trust.

And I don't know.

You know, you could make.

that case as long as nobody's fighting against me.

It sounds good, right?

Yeah.

It's one of these things where the libertarians are very right on this.

And I feel like otherwise intelligent people miss this fact that sounds almost trivial, but has to be remembered every single time.

Laws have to be enforced by people.

And people are just as biased as you are, if not more, or maybe less.

They're going to have their own power interests, their own motivations, their own incentives.

And you don't want to give power the ability to define what truth is.

You don't want to make the president of the United States the arbiter of truth.

So the way we actually have figured out how we can tell what the world actually looks like is first to accept the fact that truth is very hard to know.

This goes entirely against our own senses and our own intuitions.

We assume that what we see and what we assume is true.

Of course we do.

There are assumptions.

But one of the things that was powerful about the Enlightenment, I think Harari's characterization of the Enlightenment as actually being the discovery of our own ignorance is exactly the way we should talk about it because it was more about being like, oh, wow, if we start testing these things, we're wrong.

We're wrong, wrong, wrong.

On so many of our most sacred assumptions, they just don't fit once you start actually applying scientific method to it.

And I think that realization that truth is that hard to know is something that really people need to understand.

So how to figure out what's true, at least provisionally, is something I called structured friction, where essentially scientific methods part of it, peer review, which doesn't work well at all at this point, is part of it.

But also things like checks and balances in the U.S.

government or lots of forms of government.

Things where you have actually separate entities with separate motivations challenging you and preferably poking holes in what we think is actually true.

And I believe we don't have nearly enough of this right now.

I think that higher education is way too group thinky.

Journalism is way too groupthinky.

Like we need actually to really commit to structures, not just pinky swear to be better.

structures that challenge what we think is true in the first place.

But the last thing you want is power being in in charge of deciding what is and is not true.

Yeah, because that's kind of 1984, right?

That's just like the point of that book was largely that they can just decide what the press prints.

And if they decide that history needs to change, they just have to reprint all the newspapers or whatever that was back and read it a while ago.

But that and rats are scary.

Politicians can lie on camera and keep their jobs.

I mispronounced quinoa once at Whole Foods and I'm socially dead.

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Now, for the rest of my conversation with Greg Lu Kianov.

What about the idea that free speech hurts marginalized groups?

So now another critique is that, hey, free speech, it just entrenches inequality.

It hurts vulnerable communities.

If somebody has less social power and they're constantly subjected to slurs and harassment and racism and stuff like that, doesn't unlimited speech just deepen that imbalance?

It's one of those things where if you're talking about actual harassment, like we've talked about before, or things things like true threats, can you ban that?

Yes, absolutely.

But when it comes to what is the remedy for minorities, whether they're numerical or racial, just people who are not in the majority, when they are never going to get to the majority vote.

And this is the way I explained what I think has happened.

It was about 15 years ago, again, I started noticing younger people were coming to fire thinking that free speech is the argument of the three B's, the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron.

And I have to explain that's just terrible history.

Like the robber baron, as in like the merchant class, like the wealthy people, they do fine because they're rich and powerful.

They do fine in almost any society, with some exceptions.

And so much of the story of parliaments is the nobility going to the merchant class to ask for money and then getting a say in government.

So that they do fine.

They don't need some special protection for freedom of speech.

And when it comes to the bully and the bigot, once you get to democratic societies, they call the shots, even if they are bullies and bigots, if they have 51% of the vote or a plurality of the vote, if they have enough.

You literally only need a special protection for free speech, like the First Amendment, for two types of speech, speech that is unpopular with the majority or speech that is unpopular with, and I use this term just saying that people need to understand we have one, everywhere does, an elite or also known as the ruling class, like essentially like the people who are in charge of enforcing the laws, the most powerful people in society.

You only need it for those two scenarios.

So why so many young people today think that this argument is compelling, that essentially the powerless need power to have more power in hopes that we would actually better protect the powerless, it's because that's what they've been learning in K through PhD, because it is a monoculture.

It is a situation within that monoculture, when people say to themselves, but I'm in charge of speech now.

And they very rarely say, I'm power now, but that's what they are.

They say, this is limiting our power to better protect minorities and the disadvantaged.

But guess what?

Even when they do this in higher ed, time and time again, it works to the interest of, just like you'd expect it, for the government, to power and their own interests.

And I've been watching this for 25 years.

So it's not an accident that John Lewis, Nelson Mandela, Mahapa Gandhi, Frederick Douglass, Ida B.

Wells, Martin Luther King, Frank a pioneer in the gay rights movement.

They were all such strong defenders of freedom of speech because they knew it was one of the only tools they had against the will of the majority and the will of the powerful.

Speaking of powerful, our Robert Barons or whatever you want to call them, I guess our elite, they own a lot of places where discourse happens, like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, whatever.

What role should free speech principles play when it comes to private companies moderating content?

Because their house, their rules.

Why should platforms be forced to host speech they don't want?

But that's scary because not only, yes, it's a private company and you can't force them to do stuff, or you can if you're the Biden administration or the Trump Trump administration, but then also it's how everyone talks.

So is it really, yes, it's a private company, but it's also public square?

I don't know.

It's just this weird gray area for me in certain ways.

I get it.

And I understand the instinct.

And we talked a lot about it.

Like, what happens if one jillionaire owns the public square?

And that was a concern I took seriously because you want to avoid outright plutocracy that essentially like rich people get to control or a rich person gets to control everything.

But this was proven to not be true.

So people were making this argument, particularly on the right, but also some people on the left were making this argument with regards to Twitter and Facebook that essentially we have to pass laws that will limit the

owners of these social media platforms' ability to kick people off for speech that would be protected.

That's what the right was primarily arguing in Texas and Florida.

But in California, they were arguing that now these platforms have to police hate speech or heavily imply that they have to police hate speech because they have to report it to the the government.

That means they have to police it, even if they don't want to.

And those are laws that FHIR flat out opposes because it introduces power's role in deciding what these institutions will do rather than letting the free market decide, for example.

But there was some real pushback on this, saying, oh my God, but look, like a handful of people own like the entire public square.

And almost no sooner had this argument been made that Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter, Elon Musk buys Twitter, and then everybody runs to Blue Sky.

They run to Threads, which is still a thing, believe it or not.

They run to Mastodon, and it's proven that this is not a monopoly.

Pretty fast, they run to Substack, which I love Substack.

I have a Substack.

And that essentially it's that competition, that ability to move that actually best protects it.

But as soon as you introduce power's role, the government's role to be like, I now have a regulation that I can hold over all these guys, prepare for it to be abused.

And particularly under the current circumstance, where it doesn't seem like there's anything holding back the government from utilizing every lever of power it has over every institution it affects.

That's a scary possibility.

Yeah, no, I definitely agree there.

But another counter argument to free speech is that this is the digital age.

You got cancel culture.

There's deep fakes, viral nature of online outrage and how a lot of people are arguing, hey, free speech, this is a pretty outdated principle, man.

We're a long way from somebody printing up something off a printing press and handing it out in the middle of the village or downtown New York or something like that.

I mean, come on.

So how do you convince skeptics that old principles of free speech are still relevant in the digital age?

Yeah, if you have an entirely new technology that is not very analogous to anyone that's previously listed, then you have to do some real thinking.

But even as we're thinking through AI, Like the analogies for the most part are very similar to pre-existing technology.

And of course, some of those analogies are with pretty recent technology, like for for example, the internet.

And some of those First Amendment principles, they're perfectly portable to a variety of different settings.

So, for example, a very basic one is viewpoint discrimination.

And that means that as bad as censorship is, like if you're saying on this platform, nobody should talk about economics, that's not great.

But if you actually say on this platform, nobody can advocate anything but, I don't know, free market economics, or for that matter, or the other side, Marxist economics.

That's something where you'd feel more troubled by it.

And that essentially, it goes for the principle that if you're allowing discussion at all, you can't simply ban people because of their opinion.

So I think a lot of the principles that exist out there, also, this is where I actually call for more policing of social media.

I think social media companies' unwillingness to enforce prohibitions on true threats has undermined a lot of young people's faith in free speech in the first place and falsely caused them to conclude, in many cases that threats are protected.

And that's bad.

That essentially like saying, like, I know where you live.

I'm going to come to this address.

I'm going to kill you.

That's a threat.

That would place a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death.

But by not actually reporting those to the police or the police actually looking into them, you create this misimpression that it's, oh, if this is what free speech is, I don't want it.

And then you have to explain.

It's not protected.

There's not a country in the world where threats like that are actually protected, nor should it be.

You're not wrong.

Not that I was ever under the impression that threats were protected, but I get threats.

I get people saying, if I ever see you, I'm going to punch you in the back of the head or hit you with a rock and kill you.

And no one's going to find out.

And it's on Instagram.

And I'll report that.

And then four months later, they're like, we found that this content does not violate our policies.

And I'm like, so this was not automated because it wouldn't have taken four months.

So some human ostensibly looked at this and thought, that's fine.

You can say that you're going to hit Jordan Harbinger in the back of the head with a rock and kill him.

Whatever.

They just don't care.

I don't know.

I have a dear friend who's actually facing some some real scary threats.

And it was funny because she was basically saying we shouldn't have cancel culture in response to Charlie Kirk.

And weirdly, like a left-winger came after her that and really was saying things specifically about knowing where you live and all this kind of stuff.

And it's okay.

But at least in this case, the police were taking it seriously.

Yeah.

I didn't report it to the police.

I should have because it was from a guy who owns a boxing gym in Chicago.

And I'm like, everyone can find you.

You just don't have any fear about it.

And it was like some Israel-Palestine thing.

It was just like actually crazy.

I should probably go ahead and do something about that.

But it sort of just blended in with the other death threats I was getting.

So I don't know.

It didn't stand out that much.

I've gotten a fair amount of them over the years.

And the light of the murder of Charlie Kirk makes you feel that much more worried about not taking them seriously.

You're absolutely right.

If we start eroding free speech, even with the best intentions, what do you think the long-term consequences will be?

Not just for politics, but for everyday people.

Because a lot of people are like, I checked out of this political crap.

I don't care anymore.

Those people should still care, right?

Yeah.

And here's the thing that everyone needs to understand.

There is not a moment in censorship history where the censor or the advocates for this didn't think they were doing something very good.

Oftentimes they thought they were doing something blessed.

They thought they were doing something that would save the species, save humanity, save your soul.

The most dangerous censors, frankly, are the ones who believe they're saving the world or saving the country.

So they always think they're motivated by goodness.

Good intentions can't protect you because if you're the kind of person who looked at the history of censorship and said, that all sounds fine to me, then I don't really know what to tell you.

except that actually i do know what to tell you it's going to be worse because when you look back to like say red scare number one or censorship the civil war or the great comic book scare a real thing of the 1950s they didn't have the technology to censor you at the scale that we have now and to punish you for speech that we have now so we need to be even more protective of freedom of speech going into the future.

On a personal note, though, what gives you hope that free speech will survive this current wave of skepticism?

Because I think, depending on how old you are, this seems pretty serious, what's going on right now.

It is very serious.

And the reason why it's so serious is that they used to be able to rely on the civil libertarian aspect of the left, which is the tradition I come from, and a libertarian aspect on the right, which is probably the thing on the right that I've always related the most to.

And both of those factors have been badly marginalized on each side.

So like the civil libertarian left is very weak.

And the the libertarian right has been pushed aside largely by populism, which sneers at libertarianism.

So the political climate, there isn't a clear constituency for free speech other than older people in the middle who get freedom of speech.

So it's a very worrisome time and it's the kind of thing that once you lose it, it's very hard to get it back.

Why do I still have some hope, though, is one, when you look at the polling, Americans still really value freedom of speech and I think they could be convinced to do it again.

But also because free speech works.

Free speech is how you know know what problems you have in your society, what problems you have in your community, what problems that are coming your way.

Free speech is how you innovate.

It's how you actually make money, how you actually know things scientifically.

It is huge advantages to have a, for that matter, even just having a company that internally allows freedom of speech and dissent.

Huge advantages.

And the research, by the way, is getting better on the role of dissent, not worse.

Dissent in a cockpit in the operating room.

All of these things actually help improve things.

So I'm optimistic that free speech is effective in addition to being morally right.

So that's one of the things that gives me hope.

Do I, however, think we're currently in a crisis?

And I think we're in a crisis not just in the United States, but in the larger world, we are.

And this is why I think Fire and I were put on this earth, is to defend freedom of speech, even in the dark times.

You mentioned that it's a problem in the United States.

Tell us, can we do like a few minutes on why it's a problem internationally?

Because I think a lot of people do view this as an American problem that they don't have to worry about because they live in Europe or they live in Asia or they live in Australia, whatever it is.

Oh, you poor deluded Brits.

Like how much they think everything's fine there.

I'm just kind of like, you got to be kidding me, dude.

I did something on the BBC where they got really mad at me.

Yeah, we've got issues in the United States.

We've got serious issues in the United States.

You're arresting like 12,000 people a year for speech.

That's insane.

And you're a fraction of our size.

I did a whole piece on like trying to get a sense of scale.

So you're never getting invited back to the BBC.

Oh, yeah.

They love me.

My mom's British.

Actually, no, they want to invite me back because I think, what do you think now, Mr.

Lukianov?

It's even worse now.

Scoreboard, Lukianov.

It got worse since last time I talked to you, but still the scale's not good on your side.

But let's take the unfree world first.

China, Iran in particular.

They have been able to really take the nightmarish potential of AI and use it against its own citizenry in a way that actually makes the situation from worse to worser, worser, worser in Iran and China.

Like the extent to which it allows for mass surveillance,

some of the examples is they can turn off your car remotely if you're a woman in Iran driving and your hijab is not done quite right.

Yeah, that's right.

I forgot about that.

Terrifying.

And of course, Russia is a mafia state.

They don't allow free speech at all.

They'll shoot you for it.

But the European Union is terrible on free speech.

And it's also the place where innovation goes to die at this point.

But they have everything from national security laws to hate speech laws that they enforce in ridiculous ways.

They have this idea of the right to be forgotten that means that if I did something pretty terrible five years ago, like I can have that link explaining that I was guilty of domestic abuse removed from Google, essentially, or at least delisted.

The kind of thing that Americans, when they come back from a date, take for granted.

You can find out, hey, I really like this guy, but.

Oh, look, he's a sex offender.

Oh, he just got out of prison.

That explains the resume gap, right?

That kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly.

But five years, he seemed to be doing nothing.

But in Britain and the Anglosphere, I mean, like, Ireland nearly passed a law that would punish hate speech.

Canada was considering just last year a law that would actually give you life in prison for speech crime.

And to give you a sense of like how bad 12,000 people a year are in Britain, back in 1920, we had the first Red Scare in the United States.

Red Scare, by the way, was the result of a massive bombing campaign by Marxists and anarchists and like really scary times in the United States in 1919 as the mass murders were going on during the Bolshevik Revolution.

So people had some reason to be be freaked out.

We arrested about 2,000 people a year during the Red Scare.

And that's bad, by the way.

That is actually really quite bad, even though we were in a genuine crisis and even though the First Amendment didn't really apply in any meaningful way way back then.

Only about 1925 that it really had a lot of legal meaning.

And also at the time, by the way, the population of the U.S.

was twice what Britain's is now.

So that's like more like, they're arresting 12,000 people a year.

And that doesn't even include the stuff that involves the national security security laws they have or the non-crime hate offenses, which number in the hundreds of thousands overall.

So it's a genuine disaster over there.

But Brit after Brit, it's kind of like, oh, it's not too bad.

And I'm like, I'm willing to bet you no more than one or two degrees of separation from someone who has had a visit from the police or run in for something that they've said.

Non-crime hate incidents.

That is that if you say something that is considered hateful, you will get a visit from the police to take down that you did this, or it could be actually considered something that could get you arrested.

One example of this was Rishi Sunak was being criticized by fellow East Asians.

It was a Pakistani Brit who had a poster of saying, Sunak is a coconut, by which they mean brown on the outside and white on the inside.

Oh.

Insulting.

Yeah.

Sure, it was intended to be insulting.

And she was arrested for that.

And it's like the kind of stuff that we're like, no, this is completely insane.

And yeah, it's not hard to find videos of this stuff all over the internet of people actually taping like why they got arrested.

And of course, the Gran Linehan thing that happened when this guy, he got arrested at the airport with five armed guards showing up because he made some mean-spirited jokes about trans men in female spaces.

Is that a comedian?

I don't even know who this person is.

Oh, he's the guy who wrote the I.T.

Crowd, which was pretty well known.

He did Father Ted, which was pretty well known.

He was one of the best known comedy writers in Britain.

Wow.

Going after the comedian thing, because that's one of those, I don't know if it's a sacred space, but it certainly is a space where we have decided that you can say crazy stuff and get away with it for the sake of humor, speaking truth to power, social commentary.

It's almost like the first line of maybe not defense, but it's certainly a canary in the coal mine when you see somebody like Jimmy Kimmel or whoever, honestly, getting pushed off the air.

As a podcaster, it's like, again, I'm not as relevant as Jimmy Kimmel and I never will be, but it's a little bit scary that that's even a thing that can happen.

Yeah, that was something that we even did a documentary back in 2015 called Can We Take a Joke, telling young people about the story of Lenny Bruce.

You know, he was a comedian who was arrested for rude jokes back in the 1960s.

He died of an overdose, but one of the things that drove him into drug addiction was the fact that he had to defend himself so often.

And it's a very sad story.

And we started noticing that comedians were saying that the atmosphere was not so friendly to free speech, particularly on campus.

We started being told this by comedians way back in 2012, 2013.

Greg Luciano, thank you for coming on.

what are you now on tour what are you doing now i am incredibly excited to be at home for a whole week been promoting the book on a lot of podcasts and running around like a crazy person trying to defend free speech from all comers well i appreciate you coming on the show man thank you very much absolutely excellent it was fun talking to you thank you likewise

You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show about the warning signs for civil war.

There were times when I was writing that I myself started to get terrified.

Is this right?

Am I getting this right?

Because what I'm saying is going to hit people hard.

There have been hundreds of studies of civil wars.

The group that tends to start these wars are the once dominant groups that are in decline.

The group that has been politically, socially, economically dominant since the very beginning of this country, white Christian males for the most part.

America is going through this radical demographic transition.

From a white majority country to a white minority country, white working class men have declined on most social and economic measures that hasn't happened with any other demographic group.

And there's a subset of this population that's deeply resentful of that, that's deeply threatened by that, and truly, truly believe that it's their patriotic duty to do something about this.

January 6th was so public.

It was so obvious.

This is part of a far-right white supremacist, anti-federal government movement here in the United States.

We know that some of the far-right militias, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters, actively encouraged members to join the military, to join law enforcement.

If you continuously portray this as these are just crazy individuals, then you remain blind to what's actually the cancer that's growing slowly from within.

To hear whether we're on the cusp of a civil war here in the United States, check out episode 718 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Thanks to Greg for coming on.

All things, Greg Lukianov, will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

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If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It really is a good companion to the show, a great one, in fact.

JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.

Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com.

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And this show, it's created in association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Robert Fogarty, Tatus Sadlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

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