This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. What a pleasure this is to talk about the freedom of speech, the First Amendment, the perhaps most vital principle any self governing people can hold with Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and expression Greg is actually the president and CEO. Also the author of a handful of books that I have really, really enjoyed, including Unlearning Liberty, Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, Freedom from Speech. And I really enjoyed a shortage book. It'd be a great place to start the war on words, arguments against free speech and why they fail with Nadine Strassen. Greg, welcome. How are you? I'm pretty good. Unfortunately, business is booming for First Amendment attorneys these days. And that's never a good sign for the country. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think both sides indulge too frequently, too easily in let's silence the other guys because we don't like what they say. Obviously. Oh, how would you characterize the state of free speech in the US right now? And we'll just go from there. Well, you know, I want to expand it even from there because I think people really need to get in and I want to say this to your entire audience. Free speech is in trouble globally. Obviously, China and Iran and Russia were not free countries, but the level of totalitarianism that you can deliver with a combination of surveillance and AI is terrifying. The European Union and the UK have completely turned turned around on on free speech. So they're arresting something like 12,000 people a year in Britain now for essentially hate speech in Britain. I mean, they my mother's British, they used to laugh at us for a political correctness here and now they're enforcing it by law. Canada and Ireland were playing with actually passing a hate speech code that could result in life in prison. And even within the US, we're the only country left that really cares about free speech, you know, down to our core. And here I'm afraid we're blowing it as well due to partisan politics. So I know it like I'm a Gen Xer people, my age and older, whether we're right, left or center, we get freedom of speech, but we need people to come together to defend it for opinions they don't like, just like we used to in the old days. Because the only way you really prove that you care about free speech is not defending the free speech that you already agree with. But it's the stuff that you actually disdain that that's how you show your commitment. Precisely. I think we need to teach over and over again that it's the sort of speech that anybody would object to that needs to be protected because speech nobody objects to doesn't need protection, you ninnies. You know, it strikes me. Well, except on campus sometimes, something can get you in trouble on campus sometimes is like, I don't even understand how people managed to be offended by that. You know, I want to get to campuses specifically in a minute, but it struck me as you were describing the global free speech issues, that the motivations beat behind the cracking down on speech were different in different places. I'd rampant immigration from the Muslim world in the UK in particular. And Canada is one of the core issues there. Very different issues in the US, but the thought that clicked in my brain and give me long enough, I'll come up with the obvious, is that the right to free speech is a bulwark against like any out of control cause or philosophy. It absolutely is. Because here's the thing, you know, our founding fathers were brilliant. They were basically proto-neuroscientists. Like they understood that we, our brains are incredibly good at rationalizing our way into something that suits our interests, that we can, you know, kid ourselves, we're actually thinking of all of humankind. And power always wants greater control over, over speech and even more dramatically, Bruce. And this is one of the reasons why we have the protections of the first amendment. So why we have an establishment clause for that matter. These are, these are things that, that our system of government really understood. But power will always rationalize its ability to be like, I should be able to shut up people who really pissed me off. You know, like I should be able to go after that speech. And here's my high minded, sounded sounding reason to do it. And having something as powerful as the first amendment to say, no, we're not doing this here has been one of our real, real saving graces. But we're undermining it with by death of a thousand cuts at the moment. Well, and as you mentioned, it is highly disturbing that a lot of the younger generations have, and this is entirely our fault, have been anesthetized into either not noticing the incursions and free speech or encouraging them. A COVID, the COVID period was an absolute nightmare in my opinion. The exercise of government control, quashing of dissent and that sort of thing. But also, but also the cultural aspect of it. So COVID in 2020, fire, you know, my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression used to be the Foundation for Individual Rights in education, because we were focused on the really severe threats to free speech, academic freedom, et cetera, in higher ed. But it was 2020 that made us decide that we have to become the Foundation for new, individual rights and expression to defend free speech for everybody, even beyond campus, because we also saw one government coercion. But even scarier to us in a lot of ways was a lot of Americans saying, I'm going to get you, it was cancel culture. I wrote a book called Canceling of the American Mind about this to demonstrate with data, you know, that this really happened. And it was insane because there's still people who are claiming that like this didn't happen. And they're like, no, it was a free speech disaster during that time. And we realized that if we have a situation where people really think that you have a right not to be offended, and that it's actually noble to censor what you consider to be bad people, we've really fallen astray. So one of the things that makes fire different is we don't just fight in court, and believe me, we do fight in court. We are also trying to get people to understand the philosophy of freedom of speech, how to live with it, and all the benefits of it as well, because we want to make sure we pass this down to our grandkids. Amen to that. We're talking to Greg Gluciano from Fire. So let's talk a little bit about cancel culture. One of the more interesting conversations I've been following through the last several years is what is quote unquote cancel culture as opposed to the birds of what you say coming home to roost, taking responsibility for what you say. How can you tell if it's quote unquote cancel culture? Cancel culture, the thing that lawyers sound so frustrating about cancel culture is that because it's about a cultural norm, it has to be a little looser. But really kind of like what, and I try to get people to think about this in the aggregate that essentially, yes, can a private company decide to fire someone because they don't like their expression? Absolutely they can. And actually under the first amendment, I'd fight for the right to do that. But I'm always trying to get people to take a deep breath. And if you're, and ask themselves, do you want to live in the kind of country where you can have an opinion or a job but not both? And rethink that because one of the things that really is falling away is this sense of pluralism that essentially it's okay if my pizza boy wants to vote for Trump or Biden. Like that's fine. I think of these old American idioms that we used to say a lot of times when we were kids that have lost favor and kids today don't know as much. They're as simple as everyone's entitled to their opinion, to each their own. Walk on my own, a man's shoes is kind of saying essentially the same thing. It's a free country, which we said all the time, are really important small D democratic values. And I think that if you're seeing a situation in which someone, like, yeah, sure, someone's being unprofessional in their job, there's no question, you can fire them. But for example, there was a case at the Washington Post where there was an opinion reporter. He retweeted one slightly, I mean very slightly edgy joke, retweeted it. And then of course there was this huge backlash to get him suspended or fired. And I was like, listen, if you want to know what cancel culture and free speech culture look like, what free speech culture looks like is to say, do we really want to punish this Washington Post reporter just for retweeting a joke? Right, yeah. Yeah, so it's funny, I wrote down this quote and posted on the studio wall here and I didn't write who said it and God, it could have been you. It might be Peter Bogosian or Jonathan Hyde, I'm not sure. But what they said was political disagreement is increasingly treated as a serious moral offense rather than a simple difference of opinion. When you see the world that way, punishing someone for holding different views, becomes a moral good. That really could be any of us come to think of it. I'm stealing it. I hope you will. Because we want this to catch on because it really is very much with our own lifetime that we have very different attitudes about free speech as a society. And I will say that the role that K-through-PhD has played in that erosion is really shameful. So there was someone who wrote recently on Twitter, and we are absolutely, we fight people all across the spectrum. We were suing the Trump administration. We're in a lawsuit against Trump himself on free speech grounds. We are the most nonpartisan institution in the country. But someone actually wrote to my co-author Ricky Schlatt on Twitter of canceling the American mind. Don't you feel like by comparison, what was happening on college campuses was no big deal or sort of quaint? And I'm like, absolutely not. To the Lord know. We have a situation in which people can, I mean, something like 70% of students think their professors should be reported for offensive speech. And when they actually drilled down into what did they mean by offensive speech, it wasn't for sexually harassing students. It was for saying things like, biological sex is real. Or someone who actually would repeat the data of Roland Friar from Harvard, who basically pointed out there isn't that much evidence that there's wildly disproportionate shootings of unarmed black people versus white people by police. And now to be clear, Roland Friar said, actually, our overall take is that police shoot too many people in the United States. But that ultimately, that disparity isn't there as much. They were basically saying the students themselves were being taught to police. Factual statements that in some cases are probably true. Right. In order to, in order to achieve something to protect their ears or something. Oh yeah. Well, I think it's more than that. And if you don't mind, we need to take a quick break and follow up on that thought and talk about the philosophy that's driving a lot of what the college kids just think is outlawing hate speech and objectionable speech. But Greg Luchianoff of Friar, Greg, great to talk to you. Hang around just a couple of minutes. We'll continue in moments. We are midway through a conversation with Greg Luchianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the author of many fine books and co-author on that topic. Greg, thanks for hanging around. Really appreciate it. Yeah, no, I was happy to. So as I often point out on the show, I Joe Getty, the last thing I am is a conspiracy theorist. I'm somebody who's been studying political systems and political movements since I was literally a teenager. And I did the most fascinating subject on earth. And one thing that has really frustrated me is how few people understand that a lot of what we've been talking about, the censorship on campus, the microaggressions, the banning hate speech, quote unquote. A lot of it is people who've bought the moral moral argument that that's what they should do. But it is driven by and nobody talks about this, the critical theory crowd, the folks who are fans of Michelle Foucault and Franz Fanon, the French philosophers of the mid-20th century and into the 1970s. As I often say, they wrote books. They put their names on the spine. They explained exactly what they wanted to do. And it's exactly what we're witnessing. Any comment, degree, disagree thoughts? Oh, no, absolutely. Although I would actually go after, you know, because I'm not a thinker. I have a lot of respect for Herbert Marcus. Because Herbert Marcus was a Marxist. He had to flee Germany when the Nazis took over. He lived in academia, I think at Brandeis and UCSD, I think, UC San Diego, where and he sort of was trying to sort of like reform Marxism because it turned out the proletariat didn't really like the intellectuals. So he kind of like remodeled it so that essentially would be a combination of the intellectuals he educated in the United States versus with what he very sensitively called ghetto populations against the right. He was incredibly clear that he thought there should be free speech for the left and not for the right. He couldn't have said it more primitively than he did in a essay called Repressive Tolerance. And that view that you can't really be equal if the bad guys who are allowed free speech has taken over in a lot of spaces. Even when I was in school, even I was in law school back in 97, I was running into this argument already. And I was like, I worked at the ACLU. I grew up believing that free speech was like the defining sort of liberal characteristic. But unfortunately, we have this sort of terminological term where you have this kind of like much more typically old European style Frankfurt school left. That is very hostile to free speech, but calls itself liberal. And so I personally think right now the center left and the center right have much more in common with each other than they do with their wings. And when you look at the data, we are the majority and then some. And we believe in freedom of speech. And we have to talk back to these people who don't realize that they're spouting Marquess and Foucault and all these people who, by the way, people in their own lifetimes like Habermas, who just died, did an incredible job of refuting. These weren't, in my opinion, particularly deep thinkers or good historians. But unfortunately, we have a lot of people who think that the morality is on the side of the center. Greg, we only have about two minutes left. What is let's jump to an action plan. Now, I support fire in every way I can, including financially. What's the most important thing everybody listening can do or things they can do to help fight for free speech? You know, please find out more about us. But the most important thing you can do is to make it known that when someone gets in trouble for speech, you personally disagree with, you do not think they should be fired. You do not think they should be arrested. You do not think and stand up for them unapologetically, because that's the thing that got brought people like me into this business, seen the ACLU stand up for the rights of them. I think, you know, Jewish lawyers standing up for it for them. That was the most principled thing I'd ever even heard of in my entire life. And that's the kind of thing that gets people to understand that the free speech belongs to everyone or it belongs to no one. Right. Here, here, you know, I grew up only a few miles from Skokie, Illinois. And, uh, and following that drama as a gosh, a kid, teenager, whatever I was. And, and having my parents explain that principle to me, it gives me chills thinking about it because it was such a formative moment. Yeah. And I'll, my parents were both immigrants and I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of immigrant kids. And the idea that, you know, our, our family's fled countries where they didn't have freedom of speech. And we were finally in a country that was so principled that people would even defend their enemies. Let's not give it up. Greg, looky on off of a fire. We'll have a link so you can find it easily enough in his books and that sort of thing at armstrongandgetty.com. Greg, it's always a pleasure. It's been too long. I hope we can do it again. Absolutely. All right. Thanks. Thanks, Greg. Looky on off. Uh, yeah, I seriously get so fired up about this stuff. I've threatened many times to get a First Amendment tattoo, but I don't want to tattoo it all. So I don't think that's going to happen.
