Cancel culture has already outpaced the Red Scare, Greg Lukianoff argues

Lex Fridman opens with the word everyone uses and almost no one defines. Lukianoff does not love “cancel culture” — he says it has been dragged through the mud — but he will use it if it is pinned down. His definition is an uptick, especially of successful campaigns, starting around 2014, to get people fired, expelled, or deplatformed for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment. He adds the caveat on purpose: most of these fights happen where the Amendment does not apply, in private companies, private colleges, and student groups. The analogy he wants is still legal. If you could not lose a public job for saying it, you should not lose the private one either, and the climate of fear that follows is part of the phenomenon.

The date is not a vibe. Jon Ronson’s *So You've Been Publicly Shamed* was already documenting the pile-ons in 2015; Lukianoff’s own *Freedom from Speech* came out in 2014. The turn toward professors, he says, really arrives in 2017. “I've been doing this for 22 years and I've seen nothing like it.” FIRE itself is older than the era it is now famous for fighting. Harvey Silverglate, the civil-liberties lawyer, and Alan Charles Kors, a leading scholar of the Enlightenment and of Voltaire, founded it in 1999. Silverglate found Lukianoff in San Francisco after Kathleen Sullivan, then dean of Stanford Law, recommended him — “the best compliment I ever got,” Lukianoff says, because First Amendment work was the reason he had gone to law school.

The pairing of a litigator and an Enlightenment historian is, for him, the whole job description. People who spend a life on free speech are, whether they admit it or not, doing epistemology. Humans are creatures of limited knowledge and gifted at self-deception; Yuval Noah Harari’s line that the Enlightenment was “the discovery of ignorance” is one Lukianoff loves because it names the shock of finding that folk wisdom, and even the intuition that heavy things fall faster, does not survive a test. Early free-speech fights ran alongside the scientific revolution. Jan Hus, burned at the stake around 1419 by Lukianoff’s recollection, was “Luther before the printing press.” A century later the press made Luther unignorable, and Europe entered a hyper-disrupted age. Knowing how knowledge is made is why the lawyers and the Voltaire scholars keep ending up in the same building.

Asked to put the First Amendment in one sentence, Lukianoff reaches for history rather than doctrine. The Amendment, he says, is trying to get rid of most of the reasons humankind had been killing itself: no more wars over opinion, no more wars over religion, a right to petition the government, freedom of association. FIRE is not only a First Amendment shop. It is a free-speech organization, and the distinction matters. The Amendment is a legal limit on government. Free speech is older, bolder, and more expansive, and it is supposed to reach your boss, your classmates, and the group chat. A country can have decent free-speech law and a rotten free-speech culture. In a common-law system those are not two parallel tracks. Law is a projection of norms, and judges are people too.

The worst sin in the doctrine is viewpoint discrimination: speech is allowed, except that opinion. Drawing a topical line — this forum is for economics, not poetry — is a smaller problem than opening the forum and then forbidding the claim that Dante was bad. People usually feel the difference until social pressure deforms the intuition, which is when it starts to feel like censorship. Lukianoff will defend a business’s legal right to choose its employees. He will not accept “they had the right to fire him” as the end of the moral argument. If every firm becomes an expressive association on top of a profit-making one, people will conclude they cannot say what they think and keep a job. That, he says, was the dodge in the first wave of cancellations, and it is a disaster for democracy.

Culture is why he will not take his eyes off law schools. American First Amendment case law is still strongly protective, for now. It will not stay that way if graduating classes decide there is no higher goal than shouting an opponent down. He traces a campus lineage from Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech Movement to Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 essay *Repressive Tolerance*, which he reread and found less sophisticated than its reputation: free speech for the left, repression for “regressive” conservatives, and a system that would need something totalitarian to run. Nat Hentoff used to say “free speech for me but not for thee” was a line you were supposed to be embarrassed by. By law school in 1997 and an ACLU internship in 1999, Lukianoff already thought a slow-motion train wreck was coming, sped up by collapsing viewpoint diversity. Jonathan Haidt’s point, which he borrows, is that without respected dissenters you stop believing smart, decent people can disagree. Only heretics think that.

The new book, *The Canceling of the American Mind*, written with the libertarian journalist Rikki Schlott, takes on both sides. They are not the same. Left cancel culture matters more in academia, where the left dominates. Right cancel culture shows up in legislatures, in off-campus pressure, and in Fox-driven pile-ons against professors. About one third of the *successful* attempts to punish professors, Lukianoff says, actually come from the right. FIRE sued over Florida’s Stop-Woke Act, which tried to ban particular race-and-gender topics in higher education. The group told anyone who would listen that the bill was laughably unconstitutional. The legislature passed it anyway. FIRE sued and won. The state is trying again with something he calls equally unconstitutional, and he says they will sue and win again.

The right way to fight a curriculum you hate, he tells Fridman, is to argue that it is a bad idea, not to have the state forbid professors to teach it. The law is well established that you cannot tell higher education what it may teach without violating the First Amendment; the judge in the Florida case called the statute dystopian and it was not a close call. K-12 is messier because the state really does set public-school curriculum under democratic oversight. Lukianoff’s own children, five and seven, go to public school with “lovely teachers,” but FIRE keeps running into education-school graduates who become the administrators who clamp down on campus speech. Dictating that twenty or two hundred books may not be taught is, he thinks, the wrong fight. What legislatures *can* do is decide what is in the curriculum. He has been sketching a more positive alternative he half-jokingly calls “Empowering of the American Mind,” principles meant to push back on groupthink and identity politics without a banned-book list.

Religion creeps in as soon as curriculum does. Lukianoff is an atheist with an intense interest in religion — he read the Bible cover to cover this year, then the Quran, and hopes to get to the Book of Mormon — and he loves the First Amendment’s two religion clauses sitting side by side: no established church, and no interference with free exercise. Teaching the Bible as a historical document in public school would be wonderful in theory. In practice, from his ACLU days, every attempt he saw collapsed into advocacy for a Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox reading and crossed into establishment. Some believers will only accept the class if the text is taught as true. Under that constraint, you cannot teach world religions without offending someone. Serious people will notice a good-faith effort. He finds himself more drawn to Buddhism and Stoicism anyway.

People have asked FIRE for a campus free-speech ranking since day one. The group already had the best database of speech codes and a “disinvitation” list it now calls a deplatforming database — speakers blocked before they arrive, or shouted down once they do. What it lacked, for social science, was a count of punished professors and, above all, a way to ask students directly: Are you comfortable disagreeing with classmates and professors? Is violence, shouting down, or blocking access to a speaker acceptable? A 2019 test run covered about fifty schools. Four years of refining later, the 248-school list is live at rankings.thefire.org. Michigan Technological University came in first, Auburn second. The best-known prestigious name in the top ten is UVA. The University of Chicago, long number one or in the top three, fell to 13 after it refused to recognize a Turning Point USA chapter on the classic bad argument that the campus already had Republicans. FIRE told Chicago the case was serious. Chicago still said no. That single deduction, Lukianoff says, probably knocked them from what would have been second place. They remain, he adds, one of the best schools in the country.

Harvard scored −10.69. FIRE rounded it up to zero. It is the only school to receive what Fridman calls the abysmal ranking, and Harvard has not been happy. Some critics went, in Lukianoff’s phrase, very Harvard-sounding: statisticians had looked at the methodology and thought it a joke; one punished scholar was not famous or influential enough to count. “Your argument seems to be snobbery,” he says — you do not understand the method, and then you say the scholar was not important enough. Even if every one of those objections were granted, even if those two professors were dropped from the ledger, Harvard would still be in negative numbers, still dead last, still behind Georgetown and Penn, “and neither of those schools are good for freedom of speech.”

The rest of the bottom five, with Penn, are the University of South Carolina, Georgetown, and Fordham. All “very well earned.” The fastest way into that company is deplatforming. At the bottom five, 81 percent of attempts to block speakers succeeded. Georgetown and Penn, as he remembers it, had a 100 percent success rate: every time a student group objected, the speech was canceled. Harvard stood up for a couple of speakers and still mostly folded. The ranking is doing the work the Chinese write-up puts in the lede. A university is told it has a problem. Its first move is to attack the scorekeepers and downgrade the people it punished. What it did wrong does not come up.

For most of Lukianoff’s career, students were the best constituency for free speech, “absolutely unambiguously,” until about 2013 or 2014. Then they started advocating for deplatforming and new speech codes, a sad echo of the mid-1980s. The dirty secret, he says, is that it is not just the students. It is students and administrators, sometimes only a handful, working together. At Stanford, Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan tried to speak at Lukianoff’s alma mater. A fifth of the class showed up to shout him down. Ten minutes in, a DEI administrator rose with a prepared seven-minute speech: maybe the juice of free speech is not worth the squeeze. They were in a law school, the place that is supposed to teach people to challenge norms. Students later described extensive meetings. After she left, the heckling continued. Something similar, he says, has happened more than once at Yale. Every shout-down should start with an investigation: did administrators help create this, and did they do anything to stop it? The Stanford administrator was not invited back. She is one of the only examples he can think of where someone who facilitated a shout-down paid a price. More often they go scot-free, “or probably in some cases even gotten a promotion.”

Hard evidence is rare, which is why he dwells on the University of Washington. FIRE’s 2015 documentary *Can We Take a Joke?* caught administrators on paper. A comedian wanted to stage *The Passion of the Musical*, a South Park-ish project whose stated goal was to offend every group equally, around the same season Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock said they no longer wanted to play campuses. Administrators bought tickets for angry students and ran a training on jumping up mid-show to shout “I'm offended.” It did not end at “I'm offended.” Death threats followed, and the Pullman police told creator Chris Lee they would not protect him. You will not often get a receipt for the tickets. Lukianoff thinks the pattern is common, and he treats it as a reason to cut the hyper-bureaucratization of universities — a staff whose job, more or less, is policing speech.

Faculty are in it too, and that is the part that has disappointed him most. For the first decade-plus, attempts to punish professors were overwhelmingly led by administrators. Students piled on in 2014 and accelerated in 2017. Another rising source is fellow professors. Inside FIRE it has become a cliché: a professor is being canceled, and Lukianoff gets notes from friends saying they are so sorry — the same people who publicly signed the petition to fire them. Fridman says integrity still has a hungry audience, that a president who speaks early and clearly is hard to shout down. Lukianoff agrees about the early foot. A president who says, we are not entertaining firing this professor, we are not expelling this student, often ends the episode fast. The tell for administrative collusion is when students take over the president’s office and the takeover is catered. At Sarah Lawrence, when students tried to get his friend Sam Abrams fired, people treated the occupation as proof the university itself was under attack. Lukianoff’s reply: they *let* them take over the office.

Protest is not the problem. Lukianoff will defend the right to devote a life to ridiculing free speech as a concept. What he will not do is let the protesters win a firing. Randall Kennedy, whom he likes, once criticized FIRE’s deplatforming database as a claim that students cannot protest speakers. That, Lukianoff says, is silly. FIRE defends protest constantly. It does not call for punishing the protesters. It says they cannot be allowed to fire the speaker. The legal name for the line is the heckler’s veto. Government’s negative duty is not to censor you; its one positive duty, if you want to say awful or merely unpopular things in a public park, is not to let the crowd drown you out. On campus, shout-downs are mob censorship, and the university is supposed to break them up.

Cancel culture, Lukianoff says, is cruel and anti-intellectual, and it will never get you to truth. You do not reach truth directly anyway; you chip away at falsity. The book makes three claims: cancel culture is real and historic in scale; it is part of a lazy rhetoric for “winning arguments without winning arguments,” in both senses; and there are ways to fix it. The shared toolkit is an “obstacle course” of old dodges. Whataboutism sits first because it is everywhere. Someone says Biden is corrupt; someone answers that Trump was worse. The second claim can be legitimate. On social media it arrives every time, and it drifts further and further from the thing actually being argued. Jon Stewart’s *Daily Show* ran on a version of the move: I am talking about this problem; actually I care about that other problem over there. After January 6, people tried to deflect by pointing at CHOP in Seattle or the 2020 riots. Lukianoff lived on Capitol Hill that night and ate dinner in the basement because his father grew up in Yugoslavia and that is what you do “when this shit goes down.” Both nights can be serious. Using one to dodge the other is not an argument.

Fridman wants the reverse of strawmanning, which is harder because steelmanning takes empathy and homework. Lukianoff’s colleague Angel Eduardo calls a related move “star-manning”: translate the claim into a setting where you have no team, so “I hate Kansas” as a metaphor for middle America starts to sound like hating Croatia. Comparative writers — Thomas Sowell, and Francis Fukuyama’s *The Origins of Political Order* — puncture the American habit of thinking every problem is unique. Fukuyama’s ugly word is repatrimonialization, the slide back into favoring family and friends. Lukianoff sees traces of it in the near-miss of a Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton election, in legacy admissions, in a “ruling class” minted at Harvard and Yale. Elite colleges, Chicago and UVA excepted, do badly on free speech, which does not bode well for the rest of the country. He tries to empathize with Trump voters as resistance to that royalty. *The Coddling of the American Mind* could be almost a crowd-pleaser: good intentions, bad ideas, parents trying to protect kids. This book cannot be that kind. Cancelers are not kind. While writing it he grew depressed, in part because some of the cases involve going to someone’s house and targeting their kids.

The right, he thinks, feels constantly gaslit. Elite education is insulting to the working class, and the dominant campus ideology treats something like 70 percent of the public as illegitimate. The cruelty is then repackaged as infinite compassion: a simple story that sorts people by overlapping oppressions and, having done so, lets you withhold respect from most of your fellow human beings. It had a compassionate core. It gets used in a way that is dismissive and compassionless. That is the door into what the book calls the left’s perfect rhetorical fortress.

The perfect rhetorical fortress is a flowchart for never reaching the point. Step one, which Lukianoff admits he used in law school: if you can designate someone conservative, you are done. They do not have to *be* conservative. You just have to say they are. He never read Thomas Sowell because Sowell was a right-winger; he skipped Camille Paglia for the same reason. Among bright classmates it was already an intellectual habit. A gay-activist friend, to his left, once said that being conservative does not mean you are wrong. Lukianoff remembers feeling scandalized. Wasn’t the whole idea that these were bad people with bad ideas? The tactic stuck because it works, including among elites. It works so well that people now call the ACLU right-wing and the *New York Times* right-wing. Steven Pinker, on FIRE’s board, calls academia the “left pole”: from there, everything looks as if it is on the right. Lukianoff is a left-of-center liberal; Schlott is more conservative-libertarian. He briefly wondered whether he should write with someone to his right, then decided he had to live the thing he was arguing.

FIRE got the label anyway. With Bari Weiss’s *The Free Press* it hosted a debate, “Did the sexual revolution fail?” Grimes and Sarah Haider’s side — that it did not — won, and Lukianoff describes a meaty night. The *Los Angeles Times* review was scathing and included the claim that FIRE, which says it believes in free speech, only defends viewpoints it agrees with. He cannot believe the line survived editing. The staff leans left, and a minimal search would have shown defenses across the spectrum. A looser “in my opinion they’re right wing” he would have argued with examples. A factual claim that they only defend their own views is different: the staff cannot even agree internally which opinions are good. The episode demonstrated two of the book’s villains at once — dismiss them because they are conservative, and what Lukianoff named for Twitter, *hypocrisy projection*. “Hi, I'm a person who only cares about one side… I haven't done any actual research… but I assume everyone else is a hypocrite.” People tweet “where is FIRE on this?” on a link that already quotes FIRE, or on a lawsuit six months old.

His three-part reply is to keep showing both-sides cases — Israel and Palestine, terrorism, gay marriage, abortion — to beg the press to cover the “orphans of the culture war,” ordinary people with no political valence who are told they cannot protest or hold a sign, and to insist that right-wingers getting in trouble still counts. California community colleges, he says, now require even chemistry professors to work intersectionality and anti-racism into the syllabus. Telling professors what they cannot say, as Florida tried, is bad. Telling them what they must say is “downright totalitarian,” and FIRE is suing. Dismissing the messenger as being on the other team is a way of claiming none of those cases matter. He wants people to care about censorship even when it lands on people they hate.

Lukianoff knows DEI consultants, including a dear friend. They want bonds of understanding among different people. The research on what a lot of DEI actually does, he says, is often the opposite, in part because of assumptions borrowed from critical race theory. *The Coddling of the American Mind* distinguished common-humanity identity politics from common-enemy identity politics. Many practitioners want the first. The baked-in ideas push toward the second. Then he puts numbers under the fear. After 9/11, about five professors lost jobs for insensitive remarks, from both right and left, and that was enough to make the papers. From 2014 through July 2023 FIRE logged well over a thousand attempts to fire or punish professors, usually driven by students and administrators, often by other professors. About two thirds end in some punishment, from a pulled article to suspension. About one fifth end in firing: around 190 professors. The Red Scare is generally dated 1947 to 1957 and ended when the First Amendment made clear you could not fire people for ideology. The biggest contemporary study, around 1955, counted about 62 professors fired for being communists and something like 90 for political views overall, usually reported as about 100. Lukianoff thinks the real Red Scare number is higher, but only because hindsight keeps finding cases. Nine and a half years of cancel culture: 190. Eleven years of the Red Scare: around 100, maybe more. During the Red Scare, everyone could tell something was happening. The crazy part now is people still saying it is not happening at all.

Even 190 is a wild undercount. In FIRE’s faculty survey, 17 percent said they had been threatened with investigation or actually investigated for what they taught, said, or researched; one third said administrators told them not to take on controversial research. Most of those cases never become news, because the conformity machine does not need a headline. Adding a mandatory DEI statement on top of that, in an academy that already has a viewpoint-diversity crisis, is “completely nuts.” Nate Honeycutt ran an experiment with almost three thousand professors scoring four flavors of statement: standard identity-politics and intersectionality, viewpoint diversity, religious diversity, and socioeconomic diversity. The design copied schools that let administrators skim statements first and cut people before faculty see the file. About half the reviewers eliminated the viewpoint-diversity version on the spot; religious diversity fared about the same; socioeconomic diversity, the kind Lukianoff actually cares about in elite higher ed, still lost roughly 40 percent. The only version that sailed through was the one that spouted the ideology readers expected. “We've proved that it's a political litmus test,” he says, “and still school after school is adding these.” Richard Feynman, not a right-winger, would tear the form to pieces and not get the job.

Fridman makes the point the firing tallies can hide: even one dismissal sends a quiet ripple across tens of thousands of people — who is hired, which textbooks survive, which questions stop being asked. Conservative professors already report being afraid for their jobs. Among students, at least a quarter said they self-censor fairly often or very often with classmates (25 percent), with professors (27 percent), and in class (28 percent). A quarter also said they self-censor more now than when they started college: the institution is teaching the habit. The Red Scare study asked professors whether fear was chilling them. Nine percent said yes — already “really bad,” almost a tenth. FIRE’s latest faculty survey, combining research, classroom, and online, got 90 percent. That is why, Lukianoff says, we will study this in fifty years the way we study the Red Scare, and the claim that it is not happening will be viewed as insane.

When he started at FIRE in 2001 he did not take viewpoint diversity seriously; he thought it was a right-wing complaint. Cass Sunstein’s work on group polarization changed his mind. Politically mixed groups, including panels of judges, produce more moderate, reliable outcomes; homogeneous groups spiral. The *Harvard Crimson* has estimated Harvard at about 3 percent conservative; some elite departments have literally none. Economics is something like four to one, “not as bad.” The humanities can be empty. He does not like the left’s explanation that the left is simply smarter. Research from a decade ago suggested many people who call themselves left are closer to libertarian on some dimensions; Pinker has written about the smarter-left thesis, and Lukianoff is not comfortable with it. His better story is momentum. Once a department becomes a miserable place to be the token conservative, it reproduces itself. Education schools still carry a lot of what is correctly called critical race theory. It would be strange, though not impossible, to be a conservative professor of social work. There is a lot of pressure to shut up if you are.

After “are they conservative?” the left’s fortress still has layers: white, straight, male, each enough to dismiss a person, often on topics that have nothing to do with those facts. Haidt told them not to print the demographic math; they printed it because people are terrible at guessing the country’s actual makeup. By something like layer six you are down to 0.4 percent of the population, and it still does not matter. If that most intersectional person has the wrong opinion, they are a heretic, probably hated more. FIRE asked every prominent Black conservative and moderate they knew personally whether they had been told they were not really Black for an opinion. Every one of them said yes, often by white lefties. A reporter asked John McWhorter, after he dissented from what he called woke racism, whether he considered himself Black. Coleman Hughes’s line is the one Lukianoff keeps: he is constantly told that the legitimacy of his opinion depends on being Black, and then, when he dissents, that he is not really Black. Perfect. There is no way to falsify it. Practically, the fortress is a clock. Cancel culture as a way of winning without winning is about running out the time. Two steps in, the original argument is gone. Social media practically invented the thing. Each stage is viral, and each one lets you feel outrage and superiority without ever discussing the point.

The right’s version is shorter, which is why they call it the efficient rhetorical fortress. You do not have to listen to liberals, and anyone with the wrong opinion can be labeled one. You do not have to listen to experts, including conservative experts. You do not have to listen to journalists, including conservative journalists. On the MAGA wing there is a fourth provision: you need not listen to anyone who is not pro-Trump. It is efficient because it walls you off from people you should sometimes hear. Lukianoff gets being suspicious of experts; cancel culture helped wreck faith in them. Follow the fortress mechanically and you have an older uncle who has dismissed the rest of the world. COVID is the case study. Jennifer Sey, then a Levi’s vice president and a possible future president of the company, argued that school closures would hammer poor and disadvantaged kids. Petitions demanded her firing. She was offered what he recalls as a million-dollar severance and refused it because she wanted to keep saying she had not changed her mind. Conventional wisdom and the research later moved toward her. The sad aftertaste of cancel culture is that people forget why they hate you and never notice you were right. Free speech has to protect being wrong, or you cannot speculate your way to being right. It is especially galling when the people who were right never get the credit.

Fridman asks about hate speech. Lukianoff’s answer is a slogan he has clearly practiced: it is the best marketing campaign for censorship, and it came from twentieth-century academia. Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, and other CRT founders had as an early project the invention of a new unprotected category called hate speech, and the effort to ban it. FIRE will sue to protect the right to teach and research CRT; he wants the origin story attached whenever the acronym appears. Herbert Marcuse, in 1965, had already asked whether free speech should remain sacred on the left. He lost for a long time. Then hate speech offered a way to designate particularly bad speech as unprotected. Who decides? Overwhelmingly, only a low-viewpoint-diversity environment can agree on the most hateful things. A flag-burning case supplies the bedrock rule: you cannot ban speech just because it is offensive. That is why similar codes sit more easily in Europe, where people imagine a modal German or Englishman. The United States never had an honest thought that there is a single kind of American. Boston, Richmond, Georgia, Alaska always knew they were not Uncle Sam. In a genuine hodgepodge you cannot ban things for giving offense, which is why hate speech is not an unprotected category.

His own theory is more expansive than most constitutional lawyers’. He calls it the pure informational theory of freedom of speech, or, when he wants to be fancy, the lab and the looking-glass theory. If the project is knowing the world as it is, you cannot do that without knowing what people really think. Every “you can’t say that” is preference falsification, Timur Kuran’s term, and it leaves you with a false picture — one that activists often fill with more prejudice than is actually there. A book called *Racial Paranoia* argued that heavy codes can make people assume the only thing holding back raging racism is the code, so the thing underneath must be terrible. Censorship also does not change minds. It sends people to talk with those who already agree, and group polarization takes off. FIRE’s book includes data on users pushed from Twitter toward Gab in 2017 and again around 2020, and greater radicalization among them. Ban hate speech, he says, and you do not protect people from it. You hand the government a vast weapon you will regret. Fridman tests him with white supremacists and the Klan on campus. Lukianoff puts on a scholar’s hat. QAnon is wrong; where it came from still matters. Daryl Davis, the Black musician who befriended Klan members, deradicalized some of them by being curious. Even when that fails, knowing what the bad people in your society think is, “for your own safety, probably more important.” And the Klan, he adds, is never actually invited. The hypothetical usually appears as cover for shouting down Ben Shapiro or keeping Bill Maher off campus — whataboutism again.

Fridman, who interviews people for a living, says the devil is charismatic and that talking to current Klan members would take both compassion and a historian’s workload. Lukianoff reaches for a smaller example. Steve Bannon was disinvited from the New Yorker Festival after a celebrity pile-on. On *Surash* Lukianoff argued that you do not invite people because you agree with them, and treating a slot as an endorsement is nonsense if you look at the rest of the roster. Someone asked whether he would want Jihadi interviewed, at the height of ISIS. Would you not want someone to figure out what makes those people tick? Curiosity, he says, is the cure; we need more of it and less unwarranted certainty. Fridman thinks documentary filmmakers and biographers usually beat interviewers because they spend the time. Lukianoff points to *Mighty Ira*, a FIRE-adjacent film about former ACLU head Ira Glasser, who was not even a lawyer when he started at the New York Civil Liberties Union in the 1960s and then led the national group through the Nazis-in-Skokie case.

On film, the Skokie Nazis look like the idiots you would expect. The rally goes badly; the leader gets flustered and almost seems about to shout that people are making a mockery of a Nazi rally. The movement dissolved afterward. They looked like racist fools, even *The Blues Brothers* joked about them, and the disaster people predicted did not arrive — because they were allowed to speak. Glasser also tells the Jackie Robinson story: seeing a Black man literally on the Brooklyn Dodgers changed how people felt about racial equality. Lukianoff takes it as a metaphor. Expanding the circle of who is “on your team” solves more problems than treating the country as enemy camps. Early on, he and FIRE’s legal director Will Creeley hoped Facebook would make everyone more sophisticated about dumb things young people do. That never happened. The environment instead produced people waiting to keep you out of your dream school for something you said at fourteen. Fridman offers the term “offense archaeology.” Lukianoff says it is not his coinage, but it is a good one, and it is tactical. Once you have a target on your back, they will go back to 1995 and make sure that whenever your name comes up, the first association is the thing they did not like. It is cruel, it does not get anyone closer to truth, and it is a little scary to stick your neck out.

Asked how to raise children for a free-speech culture, he starts with curiosity and the vastness of what will always be unknown. Only fools think they know everything, “sometimes dangerous fools.” He preaches old-fashioned study and work, outdoor time, experiences that are not mediated. When his sons want to switch off a cartoon at a scary moment, he sits next to them, finishes the show, and asks whether it was as frightening as they expected. Every time they say no. The fear you do not go through gets bigger in your head than the thing itself. That is one reason he is fighting the culture: he wants kids to grow up with grace, with the possibility that the person who pissed them off is wrong, and with curiosity. Generation Z, he notes, hates cancel culture the most — another reason the “this isn’t happening” line rings false. You can just ask them. He is glad he was a child in the eighties and a teenager in the nineties. An upbringing where everything might go online is not one he envies.

When Lukianoff ran out of First Amendment classes, he studied Tudor censorship, because that is where American law got prior restraint. Henry VIII was first: nothing prints in England except on majesty-approved presses. He started getting angry at the new machine around 1521 and, with Parliament, locked in licensing in 1538. Lukianoff thinks that is where we are. The printing press was calamitous on purpose: witch-hunt manuals scaled, religious wars went crazy, misinformation and nastiness exploded. Henry wanted the genie back in the bottle. He was in an unavoidable stretch of epistemic anarchy. The only way to make the decades after Gutenberg orderly was totalitarianism and smashing every press, which Europe could not do. Long term, those extra millions of eyes became the best tool for disconfirmation the species had ever had — scientific revolution, Enlightenment, the discovery of ignorance. We have now added billions of eyes, “and we're using them for cat videos and canceling.” Attempts to ban TikTok or keep under-eighteens off the internet unless parents sign a form are, in that frame, more genie-bottling. Cultural adaptation has to do what top-down law cannot.

X, he says, is like the collective unconscious of the species, visible in real time. Writing and mass communication expanded the collective brain; this is looking at that brain while it is running, virtual particles of reaction popping everywhere. Nothing has been even vaguely like it. At its worst it is awful. At its best, a crowd going euphoric and cracking brilliant jokes at the same time can even be joyful. He lives in a “neighborhood” of people he finds thoughtful even when he disagrees; other neighborhoods are all canceling, and visiting them is always unpleasant. People keep coming back because the feed reveals raw parts of humanity we prefer to pretend do not exist. It can also stress you out to no end. Get off it sometimes. He is in the camp that thinks social media is part of the ugly youth-mental-health numbers. Fridman wants an algorithm that optimizes long-term flourishing rather than engagement — the right amount of challenge, the right amount of cat videos. Lukianoff answers with *Fleabag*: the heroine’s speeches asking why someone cannot just tell her the optimal way to live. There is a real desire to give up discretion for the right answer. That path scares him to death. A good system would keep offering options. A bad one would start giving orders.

Billions of extra eyes can tear down any person, idea, or institution, and some of those things needed tearing down. The replication crisis and a shoddy, arrogant expert class came into view because they could no longer be papered over. What the moment cannot do yet is build. People still need authorities they can respect. He thinks high-integrity people — he names Fridman — will become visible as always-honest, and FIRE wants to be the shop you can trust on speech, period. His design sketch with Fridman is a stream inside X, voluntary, with extra rules: no perfect fortress, no efficient fortress, none of the BS ways of debating. Limited “whataboutism cards,” three and you are done. Wikipedia is the closest existing leap, and it is impressive, especially when editors declare a political bias and recuse themselves from those articles. It still leans left, which shows on January 6 and on biographical pages that over-weight controversy — Einstein’s relativity, then a long stretch on how he treated women. Scientific and technical entries can be excellent. Community Notes beats Wikipedia on access and visibility: you can watch the argument. A truth-focused stream would make the rhetorical fouls visible, which is the point. Right now “whataboutism” is a zero-cost reflex. Tag it, count it, show it to the audience, and behavior changes, because what people want is to *look* like they won.

The last stretch of the conversation is the darkest, and it is where *The Coddling of the American Mind* began. In 2007 Lukianoff was in the Belmont psychiatric facility in Philadelphia. He had called 911 in a moment of clarity, after a trip to the hardware store to make sure that if he killed himself it would stick — head wrapped so that if the drugs failed he could not claw his way out. Depression had been with him; that year it got worse. He had become FIRE’s president in 2005 and moved to a city with no family that he felt did not like him. The deeper crush was living in the culture war. He was defending the left constantly and still not being forgiven for defending the right. He told a girlfriend he was a true believer, willing to defend Nazis and therefore Republicans; she said she thought Republicans might be worse. He nearly came to blows more than once with people on the right who learned he had defended 9/11 jokes. Friends turned on you for politics. Being FIRE’s president was an early preview of the culture that was coming, and it was exhausting. If someone at Belmont had told him this was the start of a better life, he would have laughed if he could have. He could tell he was okay later because he could still laugh. He was not laughing then.

Cognitive behavioral therapy gave him a clumsy homework assignment. When something upsets you, write down the thought. A so-so date becomes “I'm broken and will die alone”; you label catastrophizing, mind-reading, fortune-telling, several times a day, forever. Slowly the vicious inner voice stopped sounding like truth from God. Nine months after he had been planning to kill himself, he was happier than he had been in a decade. Doing CBT on himself is how he noticed that campus administrators were selling students cognitive distortions — the world as safe versus dangerous, offense as violence — and that incoming students already believed them. That observation became *Coddling*. The suicide passage in that book was the first time he had written the plan down. He tricked himself into thinking it was just between him and the computer. His wife had never seen it. It is now among the most public things he has ever written.

Writing *The Canceling of the American Mind* put him back in it. A friend in the book sent an insensitive tweet in June 2020 and was forced out; he got severance because everyone knew he would sue and win. Lukianoff spoke with him a week before he died. He sounded confident, so Lukianoff, drowning in help requests, did not follow up. The friend mentioned people still coming to his house. The next week he shot himself. Because Lukianoff talks publicly about depression, people in this fight come to him, and it is a psychologically taxing business. When his friend Mike Adams killed himself, people on Twitter celebrated a man’s death because they disliked his tweets, while telling themselves they were compassionate toward some abstract other. What helped more than anything was confessing to FIRE’s leadership — the people he loves and tries to keep some distance from. The other lift was Dialogue, Auren Hoffman’s invite-only, off-the-record gathering across the political spectrum, where liberals, conservatives, and none-of-the-above were all saying thank God someone is taking on cancel culture. Maybe taking a stand would not be a disaster for his family. Maybe it could have a happy ending.

Fridman thinks the pain of cancellation is badly underestimated. It need not be a job; a small number of people online can still hit the psyche, and the cruelty is the part that shakes his faith in people. Lukianoff says a social-justice banner often licenses unlimited cruelty toward someone you have never treated as real. The book answers “this isn’t happening” by quoting the Pope, Obama, James Carville, and Taylor Swift, whose point is that the nastiest layer has a “kill yourself” undercurrent. “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me” has been reinvented on campus as a claim that we now know words hurt. His retort is: *now* we know? You would not teach children a mantra to make words hurt less if words had never hurt. It is a sentence you repeat when the bullies have noticed you are weird. Assholes will say asshole things; you cannot give them that power. On whether humans are basically good or evil, his flippant answer to philosophy’s oldest fight is that there is nothing basic about humanity. What gives him hope is simpler: people are sick of not being authentic. Censorship is an instruction not to be yourself, not to dissent, not to be weird, not to be wrong, and that is not sustainable. His practical bet is new ladders around the old schools — brutally hard, cheap, highly respected tests that could give Harvard and Yale a run, a “super BA” maybe one in a hundred people could pass, plus whatever Sal Khan is building. Evan Mandery’s *Poison Ivy* documents the class scandal: elite higher ed has more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 50 or 60, depending on the school. Do not wait for institutions with tens of billions in the bank to reform themselves. Build new things. Fridman closes the circle: if you are weird, stay weird. Lukianoff’s addendum is that everybody should watch *Kid Cosmic*.