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In this episode of Heterodox Out Loud, John Tomasi speaks with Greg Lukianoff, an attorney, New York Times best-selling author, and the President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, Freedom From Speech, and FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus. Most recently, he co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure with Jonathan Haidt, and The Cancelling of The American Mind.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Greg Lukianoff, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Greg Lukianoff: Great to see you, John. Thanks so much for having me on. Big fan of your organization.

John Tomasi: Thank you. It's nice to have you here in the Center for Academic Pluralism. So, we're going to talk today about your new book, The Canceling of the American Mind, which you wrote with Rikki Schlott, which I just finished reading a couple days ago and absolutely loved. It's just fantastic.

Greg Lukianoff: It means a lot for me.

John Tomasi: It's great stuff. And let's just jump right into it.

Greg Lukianoff: Sure.

John Tomasi: Should we do that?

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, absolutely.

John Tomasi: So, The Canceling of the American Mind is about cancel culture.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: And the book sort of follows, the book's in three big chunks. What is cancel culture? A discussion about how it works and other mechanisms. And then a really interesting section at the end, not just in the final third, about, you know, what can be done about it.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: And we're going to cover all three of those, all three of those areas. So, let's start with cancel culture. What is it?

Greg Lukianoff: Sure. I mean, we've spent a lot of time covering, like, other people's definitions of cancel culture. You know, and particularly, I think one of the best other definitions out there is Jonathan Rauch's seven-part definition of cancel culture that he came out with in Constitution of Knowledge.

John Tomasi: It's fantastic.

Greg Lukianoff: It's a very good book. Probably one of my favorite books of that year.

John Tomasi: Should I tell you, by the way, just to interrupt you, that John Haidt and I sometimes talk about Jonathan Rauch's book as being like a Bible and that we would make a little shrine to him around HxA because the idea of epistemology.

Greg Lukianoff: Absolutely.

John Tomasi: It's just so interesting.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, no. I talk about that as well because I was definitely one of the people being the most kind of like, yeah, no, no, because FIRE really got behind Constitution of Knowledge because we were, you know, in the whole kind of first grade age of political correctness, which we're going to talk about a little bit later, the most intellectually satisfying book of that early era is Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Greg Lukianoff: And this is, as a follow-up to that, it was, you know, thrilling for me. And I'm a First Amendment lawyer, so it's all about epistemology. I mean, basically like the history of science, it's what brings freedom of speech and science all together is epistemology. And the idea that they're institutions, they're epistemic institutions, that we need them to tie us to reality as a society.

John Tomasi: Yeah. That's a point that Jonathan Rauch makes so beautifully, I think, and with such power. But let's talk about, so cancel culture, how would you describe it?

Greg Lukianoff: Sure. So what I'm trying to do is actually, since I'm a, like I said, First Amendment lawyer with a very big interest in censorship history, I'm trying to establish it as the name for the era that we're currently in and hopefully will be over sometime soon. Just the same way as we refer to, you know, the various other mass censorship incidents in American history, like the Red Scare, Red Scare One, Red Scare Two, also known as McCarthyism, the Victorian era, the Sedition Act of 1798. And the definition we use is a historical one. It's the uptick of campaigns starting around 2014 and accelerating in 2017 of campaigns to get people fired, deplatformed, expelled, or otherwise punished for speech that would be protected by the First Amendment. Now, in the appendix, so as not to slow the definition down too much, I explained that what I'm working in there is more or less as an analogy to public employee law, where you're assumed to have some rights to speak as a citizen, but the rules, it also brings in a lot of common sense, kind of like, can you, you know, lead a revolt against your boss? No, that's well-established in the law. And then the final part of it is just saying, and the culture of fear that resulted from this uptick in campaigns to get people punished.

John Tomasi: Good. And let me be sure I want one little piece of that. So people speak and people can reply, they can disagree, they can argue, then so on. But cancel culture really is that specific feature that it adds a certain kind of punishment.

Greg Lukianoff: Punitive, yeah.

John Tomasi: Right. Okay, good. And I just want to read something from your book, a line that just picks up what you just said. This is on page 28. You say that cancel culture is happening at such a scale that historians will be studying it in 50 years, in 50 to 100 years, much like we studied the Red Scare and the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. Again, that's kind of a striking point about where we are. And it's definitely the one that people rightfully approach with the greatest skepticism. But meanwhile, I have a piece hopefully coming out in the Atlantic relatively soon, and you just show them the actual studies from the Red Scare. It'd be like, well, actually, it was about 63 professors fired for communist beliefs, about 95 fired for belief overall.

John Tomasi: Wow.

Greg Lukianoff: And right now, we're talking about 100.

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: Sorry, about 200.

John Tomasi: I thought in the book, you talked about 180 on nine or something.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. As of now, we're at 189. But by the end of the year, we're going to be a lot closer to 200, unfortunately. And it's frustrating watching people who don't. There are a lot of people who think they know a lot about the situation for academic freedom on campus, but clearly don't know what the numbers ever look like. So I went to one of the most severe mass censorship incidents, certainly on campus ever, which is McCarthyism. But the next, you know, the period that I started at FIRE was 9-11. And there was an attack on academic freedom after 9-11. But people don't really seem to understand what a bad attack on academic freedom looks like prior to this era. There were 17 attempts to get professors fired. And that's bad, by the way, or punished in some way. 17 attempts in the wake of 9-11. From 2001 to 2006 for 9-11 and Iraq war-related speech.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Greg Lukianoff: And three professors were fired. And all three of those were justified. Things didn't actually really implicate freedom of speech. But three firings is a big deal. When you're talking about more like 200 and people are still saying that's nothing, I'm like, there is no other error you can point to. With the exception of some of the horrifying stuff that happened in the 1930s with professors losing their jobs. You can't really find another error like that. And by the way, prior to 1957, it wasn't even clear that you couldn't fire people, couldn't fire professors for their beliefs. During the Red Scare, for example, a lot of the people who fired communist professors, their argument was, well, they're too doctrinaire. Like, they're going to indoctrinate their students. Obviously, we can fire them for that. And it was only a case called Sweezy v. New Hampshire in 1957. The famous, famous case, academic freedom case. Paul Sweezy that led to, that started establishing the law protecting academic freedom and campus free speech. So it was only-

John Tomasi: Can you say more about that case?

Greg Lukianoff: Sure.

John Tomasi: Only our listeners would love to hear.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, the Paul Sweezy case. This is a case, it's at University of New Hampshire. It was a professor who, you know, advocated for armed overthrow of the government. But he was a famous, you know, a famous communist professor. And the, and he was, you know, they were trying to discipline at University of New Hampshire.

John Tomasi: I think so. You know the details better than I do.

Greg Lukianoff: Well, I think that's right. Unfortunately, I haven't revisited it in a while. And the, one of the things that's also interesting about the Red Scare is that it was one of those situations where a lot of the push to get people fired came from off campus. And in some cases, universities actually were pretty brave in the face of attempts to get their professors fired. And I, and I think that's one of the reasons why not that many professors were fired for 9-11 because, and we're watching this happen right now, by the way, when the force comes from off campus, universities suddenly get very brave and they rediscover their academic freedom. It's when the voices for firing people come from on campus that they tend to be their most cowardly and compliant.

John Tomasi: That's really interesting. And that, and that, and like that, the case from the Red Scare, that's an example where people are being fired in the name of academic freedom. Yes. They're saying you're not, you're not upholding the ideal of a professor who's encouraging their students to think for themselves because you're indoctrinated and you're trying to push an agenda that's pre-established. So those are, that's a scare, that's a wave of firings, a cancellations, let's say.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Based on, defended by academic freedom, at least at the time.

Greg Lukianoff: That's not what I thought, yeah.

John Tomasi: And now it's the opposite.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: But one thing else I wanted to ask you about, when I think about the Red, that analogy you make about the Alien Sedition Act era, the Red Scare era and our current era, when I think about those eras, it's not the numbers that strike me about why it was so bad, those things are so bad. It's the, there was something just bad about that kind of culture occurring, the culture of intolerance. And I just feel like, I'm not sure, are we, are we there yet in our culture? Are we still accepting the moral high ground that these cancellers claim to be, perched upon?

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. Well, I mean, another interesting little, little factoid from that very same massive study that Lazarsfeld and someone else did in the 1950s of the Red Scare was that about 9% of professors said that they were self-censoring or toning down in their papers.

John Tomasi: Nine. Nine is bad, though. Wow.

Greg Lukianoff: Like nine is one in 10, you know, almost. And, and, you know, if you, if you know what the polling generally looks like, you know, nine, 9% is actually pretty bad. But when we compared it to, I mean, it's like four times as many are saying there are self-censoring in papers now. And when it comes to, are you self-censoring period? Are you self-censoring in your, and sometimes people on the, on the Twitters will be kind of like, well, that means just not being rude. It's like, no, the way the question is asked is, are you self-censoring your political opinions and or beliefs generally? And the last study that we looked at, it's like 91% of professors are saying that they're self-censoring. So even though the Red Scare was a much more terrifying time in a lot of ways, and certainly the underappreciated element, the Red Scare that I think everybody should know more about is the Lavender Scare. That was the period in which a lot of gay employees lost their jobs, partially out of the theory that, that if, you know, the communists found out that you were gay, they could blackmail you. This is really well covered in Jamie Kirchick's book, Secret City, which I really, I don't know. It's, it's super interesting. You should have Jamie on. Like it's a, it's a, it's a beautiful book. It's a, actually it's, it's this wonderful kind of like history where it's super interesting, super fun read. It's, it's takes place in DC and I'm a, and I live in DC and I love it.

John Tomasi: Anyway, so I was going to say what's not to like, but then you told me it's in DC. Sorry, I'm sorry. I love New York too.

Greg Lukianoff: I love, I love my city, man, but I'm raising my kids in DC. Anyway, so, and the, the thing that's, and I'm writing about this at my substack, the eternally radical idea on different mass censorship incidents in history. And one of the things that makes cancel culture so weird is it's a mass censorship period that isn't a national security scare. It isn't a major war that generally there are reasons historically why you actually have a lot of people losing their job all at the same time. None of them apply during cancel culture with the possible exception towards the end of COVID was, you know, COVID was a pandemic and I don't think there was, well, now I'm thinking about the Pomerates were kind of at the same time as the Spanish flu. Anyway, sorry.

John Tomasi: So an example of cancel culture, what does it, like a case study you talk about is an incident at Hamline University. Do you want to tell us a bit about that?

Greg Lukianoff: Sure. No, this is a case. Professor Erika López Prater, she had an art history class. She put in the syllabus that they were going to cover Muslim art as well. She told students, if you don't want to be part of this class, you absolutely don't have to be. It was in the syllabus. It was repeated during the class. It was repeated the day before the class. Nobody took advantage of not, of opting out the day that she was going to show the art. So she gave everything that could be described as a trigger warning. And the interesting thing is the painting itself is a 14th century devotional art commissioned by a Muslim prince and painted by a Muslim. And she showed it in her class. And then a student did get upset. And the next thing you know, they've decided that they're not going to renew her contract and very explicitly, not hiding the ball at all. Like, this is why. And she was an adjunct, as many professors are in adjunct positions. Now she wasn't a tenured professor.

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: And of course, you had all the kind of normal and unfortunate cancel culture signatures, like the talk back, you know, incident where it's supposed to, it's framed like it's going to be a dialogue, but it's really more like a diatribe against the professor or the conclusions. Even a professor, like, who stood up and said, this was completely within bounds, was told, you know, like, basically to shut up, more or less. And there's something positive about this case in that even though the professor lost her job, the good news is that the, you know, FIRE, Heterodox, the AAUP, ACLU, like, even one of the local chapters of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, came out and said, no, no, this is, this is not appropriate. And the president, and the pressure was so bad, the president actually announced that she was going to be stepping down early.

John Tomasi: Fayneese Miller.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: I knew her years ago when she was a beginning administrator at Brown.

Greg Lukianoff: What was she like?

John Tomasi: She was very progressive before wokeness was a thing. And when I heard that she was involved in this incident and made some of the claims she did, I'm afraid I wasn't surprised to hear that.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, that's a shame. I don't know her well, but my impression wasn't that strong. Well, and this is, and this is where, like, the fact that my dad's Russian and my mother's British comes out, I start saying things like, Americans, you know, and one thing that I've always found kind of funny, particularly in, like, elite education, was a lot of times Americans think they know a lot about what the rest of the world looks like, but they're kind of parochial. And how often I ran into the idea that kind of like, well, no, well, of course this case happened. All Muslims are offended by devotional art, you know, and it's like, that's just not true. Like, it's a big universe of people out there.

John Tomasi: Another incident you talk about early in the book is about a University of Virginia student, Emma Camp, who wrote an op-ed. Can you tell us a little bit about her experience? I'm not sure it was a cancellation by your definition, but...

Greg Lukianoff: It's not a cancellation by definition.

John Tomasi: Tell us about that.

Greg Lukianoff: So, Bari Weiss at the Free Press did a excerpt from the book, and she actually takes from that chapter that we, it's chapter one, I think, or chapter two, it's the gaslighting of the American mind, because, and the point of that chapter is to say, it's really kind of crazy that for a while there, even saying cancel culture existed was a cancelable offense, or at least something that was like, basically treated like heresy. And we open up by first talking about the, when the New York Times came out and said cancel culture, an editorial that said cancel culture is real, the polling is very clear, threats come from both left and right, and we should take this more seriously. It was a ringing free speech, defensive free speech by the New York Times. And bless it, you know, like I was excited, but also it was citing their own data. And meanwhile, their data was very much in line with all the other polling that had been done on the topic. So it should have been uncontroversial. Or so I thought, the next thing you know, you got Keith Olbermann and all sorts of other people coming out. Alan Davidson saying that they would have quit if they still worked at the New York Times for this. People saying that, oh, this is just the opinion of assorted rich fools. And just really condemning the New York Times for saying this fairly obvious fact. There were some racial elements too. They always said this was white speech for free speech and things like that. There was a lot of that, which was great, because like originally, and Nico Perrino recommended I take this line out because maybe it sounded too snarky, but like all six of the first people we list attacking this were all privileged white men calling everybody else on their privilege. You know, and it's like, OK, Keith Olbermann is kind of the definition of a privileged white man. Hi, Keith. the, so, and the Emma Camp story, we, we sort of go back only about a week earlier. They'd come out with an article by Emma Camp, a UVA student and a, and a former fire intern, now at Reason, a political liberal by, by, by, by every measure.

John Tomasi: I know her personally. I'll kind of say, I'm sure if you noticed, but in the, in our, in the seminar room for the Center for Academic Plurals and behind my desk, I actually have a photograph of Emma I'm giving her a prize, I'm giving her, I'm handing her an award for a opening career award that Heterodox Academy gives, but I love that picture I have of her. I haven't talked to her since I gave her the award actually, but, but she's, but she's lovely. And I thought the piece she wrote was fantastic.

Greg Lukianoff: I got, I got, I got to see her actually this past weekend. and I got to meet her husband, her new husband for the first time. And she's, she's like just one of the sweet, just just one of the sweetest people I know.

John Tomasi: So what happened with her?

Greg Lukianoff: Well, in this case, she wrote an article again, that should not have been controversial where she said, I came to you at UVA expecting to have like these really meaty hearty debates with people. And instead I find people being, being a kind of enforced silence and people not being particularly curious and being afraid to say what they really think. Also something that I feel like if you've been on a college campus in a while, you'd be like, okay, yeah, that's, that sounds plausible. And instead this too was treated as if it was, you know, it, it was treated as if it was blasphemy essentially to make this argument. And they went very hard at Emma herself.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Greg Lukianoff: And the way that they, but, and when we get to this, the idea of the perfect rhetorical fortress, they use stage one of the perfect rhetorical fortress, which is if I can think, you know, declare you a right wing, even if you're nowhere near that, I don't have to think about you anymore. That's right. I don't have to take you seriously anymore. And, and, meanwhile, kind of like I'm trying to like a kind of future said this for like really well, but we could all see this happening. It's like, okay, no, she's actually not a conservative. but then there's this kind of like, and so what if she was like, all these people are trying to like figure out a way that the entire argument hinged on whether or not they could dismiss her as conservative. Cause if they could actually label her that, then they didn't have to think about her anymore. And I was like, this is a childish way to argue. And I was guilty of this myself when I was in law school. I totally, this is something that intellectuals and, and, otherwise educated people do all the time. And it's, and it's utterly foolish, but it's been so effective and people are so scared of this, of this technique. it's being overused and right. And I just read an article that was, you know, calling the ACLU and the New York times, you know, right, right wing rags, essentially. And because worked on everybody else. So why not declare you that?

John Tomasi: So it's a version of ad hominem, but, but you, but deployed in a particular way to, to, to discredit the person's position without, without addressing it all.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: maybe we'll come back to Emma's situation, but I wonder about, thinking about how cancel culture works and you've just referred to the perfect rhetorical fortress. Yeah. Can you just tell us a bit, but that's one of the great concepts in the book. Can you say a bit about the perfect rhetorical fortress?

Greg Lukianoff: This was fun.

John Tomasi: And I, and I have, I love, I love the name for one thing, but then what, what, what is that about?

Greg Lukianoff: I have Haidt to thank for adding the word rhetorical because I started talking about this. I used to just call it the perfect fortress theory. then essentially on, on the left among, in the blue bubble that I live in, there were all sorts of these cheap techniques for not addressing someone's, the substance of someone's actual argument. And that we try to situate, we try to get people to rethink what cancel culture functions as and cancel culture is just the nastiest, meanest way to win arguments without winning arguments by essentially eliminating your opponent, the person you disagree with by scaring them out of disagreeing with you and scaring other people out of disagreeing with you, or just taking them off the field by making sure they don't have a job or they're no longer professor or whatever. But we want to situate this in a larger kind of approach to, as we say, winning arguments without winning arguments, and ways to, dodge argument. and, we first talk about things that the right and the left do. And those are, you know, that includes standard logical fallacies, which we call the obstacle, obstacle course. Then we go to the obstacle, the obstacle course. And then we go to the minefield, which are the kind of ad hominem techniques that both left and right use on social media. And that includes things, like hypocrisy projection, which is a term we made up for the book, which I'm proud of, which is essentially that person on social media who never cares about anything other than their side of the political fence, but thinks everyone else is a hypocrite without having done their homework. Anytime a case, comes up. And what I mean by this is say, like, let's take like the Stop WOKE Act in Florida, how many people we had pop up, and say, and who had never cared about any threat from any other direction on campus, like where is FIRE on the Stop WOKE Act? And having to point out where we're, we're, we defeated it in court. I'm not really sure what more we could do. And by the way, that thing that you've set, you're sending around, we're quoted in the third line that that's, that's actually us. And you, and both, and both left and right do this. The right will do this a lot with us being like, where's, you know, where's FIRE on the case of this right winger. And I got one actually about where, where, where, where were you when, when Ayaan Hirsi Ali got, got, disinvited, from Brandeis back in 2014. I'm like, here's my three part series on it and nothing to post actually. so those are the, the, and also like just, and just accusations of bad faith, like how quickly you know, I have to always say grifters exist, but like how quickly you'll find people who are of impeccable character, like our friend, David French, you know, immediately labeled grifter. If people don't like, you know what they have to say, but the perfect rhetorical fortress is the one is the version of it that is special to the left. And it involves layer after layer of, ad hominem and identity-based ways of dismissing people. And we take the reader through the demographic funnel, essentially talking about first, of course, you can dismiss anybody, for being conservative next. and we give actual examples of dismissing someone if they're white, if they're cis, if they are depending on their, on their sexuality and all the way down. and we actually give the numbers on, on this, on, on, on how, how, how, how many people you eliminate with each additional step numbers based on actual demographics, proportions in the population.

John Tomasi: Yeah, exactly. Wow.

Greg Lukianoff: And we get down to about 0.9% of the population, can pass through the demographic funnel, but then there's a surprise at the end of the funnel, which is surprise. Actually, even if you're in this 0.9%, if you're, if you're a non-white cis person, you're going to get it even worse if you have a non-complying opinion, because then they can do the very old fashioned Marxist trick of saying you have internalized misogyny, right? You have false consciousness. Basically you have, you have internalized transphobia. you have internalized racism as Camille Foster was told. And that's, and that's just on step six. And I think we have eight more steps after that, that you can also be disqualified for. And that's why we call it perfect. Cause there's, if you decide to deploy this, you don't ever have to get to the other side argument at all ever.

John Tomasi: That's right. Yeah. It's one of the most striking parts of the book. I thought for me, it's sort of, when I was reading through that to see the way you dissect each one of these sort of deployed strategies and peeling it away and peeling it away. And as you say, it's a way of not even getting close to the conversation that these conversations are meant to bring us to a better understanding, to, to extend our knowledge, but the perfect rhetorical fortress seems to make it impossible to move, to move at all. You know, one of the things you, one other section that was interesting, you talk about the COVID, the whole COVID COVID experience, the great Barrington declaration. And what you use to, what you use those, that, that, those examples to show is about this, the importance of trust, within a epistemic, a society that's epistemic institutions. So trust and expertise is something that we need if we're going to have, if our institutions are going to tie us to reality, we need to have trust and the expertise to some degree. We need skepticism too. Sure. That's part of the intellectual world, but we need some level of trust and expertise. So can you say something about trust and expertise and what COVID, did COVID, it weakened it, I gather. Yeah. But can you just say more about, about how that happened, that story?

Greg Lukianoff: This is the reason why, even if you're sure you'll never be canceled, and by the way, you shouldn't be, it can happen to even people that don't, don't expect it from directions they don't expect, but still, even if you're pretty sure you'll never be canceled, you are still harmed by cancel culture because it, undermines people's faith and, and expertise. And I, and I explain how, like, but, and, and, I always give the example of Carole Hooven, you know, who's been on your podcast. you know, when she, went, when she was talking about her book, she's an evolutionary biologist. She talked about her book, testosterone. she, she went to promote it and she talked about how we should be, we should be compassionate and thoughtful and use, trans people's pronouns. And she gave a very compassionate pitch, but then also said that we also have to, we can't deny that biological sex isn't, isn't a scientific fact. And immediately a DEI administrator at Harvard started calling her out for it. A graduate student. And immediately the, the, the classic, cancel culture mechanisms take, start taking place. students start signing petitions to get her punished or fired. people refuse, students refuse to work, to, to, to actually TA her class. The administration doesn't stand up for, for Steve Pinker does. Jeffrey Flier does, and, and, and a couple others actually do stand up for her, but for the most part, she's abandoned, even by some friends she'll talk about, like, and they've found this incredibly depressing and she doesn't even count as one of our successful cancellations in our data because she got sufficiently depressed that she, she withdrew voluntarily. and I always talk about that. Yes, that is a very tragic thing. And, and Carol is a wonderful person. So it makes me very sad personally, but it does something else. The public watching this says to themselves when the, when scientific American comes around and says actually gender, biological sex is on the spectrum, just like gender. the public is saying to themselves, but the last person to say anything other than that got canceled even at Harvard. Why should I believe you're being objective and honest with me? And that's if it happens only once. if, we talk about more than a thousand examples, we also make the point that one in six, one in six professors say that they have been either threatened with punishment, for their academic freedom or actually investigated. We actually just finished a study that's that brand new where we found that about nine, about 9% of, students say the same thing. And people who are maybe from this era, that's like, I don't think they understand that when you're talking about one in 10 saying they've actually been threatened with punishment for what they said. Right. I, I, I'm not familiar with an, with, with a, another era that looks, at least in American history, it looks anything like that.

John Tomasi: And so, the COVID, the COVID experience drove down trust and public trust, the mask mandate and the, the, the first announcement of the same, we don't need masks, but we were epistemically arrogant in the way we talked about this stuff. Say more about that.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. well, we give the example in, in, in this case of, of, of, of the masks that essentially how dead certain people were that I knew that mass did no good whatsoever right at the beginning of COVID, because that was the, that was the government line early on and people forget this. And meanwhile, you know, a lot of us were like that can't, but wait, they don't do any good, but you need them from, for personnel, for personnel. Okay. you could have also leveled with us and, and said that we need to keep these for personnel and, and that would have, wouldn't have undermined a trust, but since it felt so transparently, like, oh, well, you're just, you're kind of, you're, this is a, this is a noble lie, but, but at the same time, that's going to, like, if people think the government is going to lie to you for your own good, that is utterly toxic, toxic to trust.

John Tomasi: So Plato talks about the noble lie. This was, this was like a noble, obvious lie.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. Because if you're all like saying, oh, because you need it for something else, together. We couldn't even grasp that. It's like, oh, so you're just trying to say to us, please don't buy this stuff for yourselves because we need them for the other. But I would have been convinced by that. But they didn't say it that way. Yeah. And we talk about the case of Jennifer Sey, for example. and Jennifer Sey was someone, she was a Levi's, Levi's executive. she, you know, she'd been a loud proponent of the rights of kids and of public education. And when they decided to close, to, to close down the, the, do the lockdowns and close down the schools, she was one of the early people saying, you know, that this is going to harm children and it's going to harm disadvantaged kids the most. And this was treated in 2020, like it was blasphemy, like, like it was heresy to say this. And of course it was racist somehow, which seemed very, particularly strange. and that she wanted black children to die. she talks about like being accused of like being supporting genocide somehow. And, and she eventually, stepped down from Levi's. She was offered a severance, but she wouldn't take it because she wanted to, she wanted to tell her story. And meanwhile, of course, what we know now is that most experts look back on this and say, oh yeah, actually I think practically all of them do that the learning loss was devastating, to, to, to young people. She was absolutely right in, in, in, in that accusation, but, and I always try to point out like, even if she'd been wrong, it was still, it was still harm faith in experts because the response with so much certainty that this had to be wrong at a time when any thinking person knew that we simply, there was there, the truth was in 2020, there was a lot of stuff we didn't know. Right. And, and the one thing we could be pretty confident on. So like the, the utterly certain reaction to early people saying the lab leak theory. Now, when I talk about the lab leak theory, I'm not saying cause I know or, that the, it actually was a lab leak. What I'm saying is, has there been a massive investigation of, of Wuhan has, and there certainly hadn't been, everyone knew that hadn't happened in April of 2020, but they would have mean that there had not been a massive investigation. Right. There hadn't been a massive investigation, but the certainty I'd see even from some friends that kind of, well, we know that's not true. I'm like, okay. You can say, we suspect that's not true. we have evidence that it's not true, but the dead certainty, it's not true that some people acted with, you know, I'm like, you know, that destroys trust in your authority right there because everyone knows you don't know that as, as, as, as confidently as you're saying you do.

John Tomasi: Don't, don't you think it's important that that those, those, those incidents are all taking place in the era of Trump's presidency where he was saying certain things. And he'd also have been, kind of a master about throwing in untruths within truths and all that kind of complicated stuff he was doing then. That seemed to affect the way perhaps people interpreted those things.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh yeah. Well, I mean, we are, we have three chapters on, cancel culture from the right and one that's practically all about Trump and in the, and in the chapter about COVID, we talk about how, how much worse, Trump managed to make it by having weird, certain statements, coming out of basically nowhere.

John Tomasi: Another thing I want, another incident you talk about on one of your many just great case studies, there are case studies that are often familiar to us, but then I found when I read your treatment, your, your, you and Rikki's treatment of these things, I read, I thought about the case in better and deeper ways. So that happened to me again and again, as I read your book, but on the Stanford law, Stanford law case, you know, the, the, the case of, Kyle Duncan being invited to, invited to campus, federal appeals court judge. One of my former students from Brown was, first year, at Stanford law in the front row as this was unfolding. Yes. I won't say his name, but he was there and I was hearing from him. Tell us a little bit about, about that case. Remind our listeners what happened and just tell us how you, how you think about it.

Greg Lukianoff: Well, I do want to, since I mentioned her twice, but I really want to emphasize Rikki Schlott, my coauthor, 23 year old genius, you know, who I got to write this with it. It was amazing. We had such a good working relationship and she's such a rising star. Like I feel very like you got to do it right with her.

John Tomasi: Well, I think one of the things I've enjoyed about coming to New York and taking this job is I run into her and many other people, but I run into her at various meetings and things like, Oh, who is this smart person? Yeah. And how is she, how old is this person?

Greg Lukianoff: I remember actually telling Rauch that I was writing my book with the then 20 year old. And he was like, just wait, just wait till you meet her. She's great. And she's, and she's, she's humble and she's like incredibly easy to work with. She was much more mature about writing a book than I was because I, cause I find, I find writing books kind of hell in some ways. And I'm a kind of a, a wreck during the whole process. And she was, she was a rock.

John Tomasi: One of the things, one of the things that you're, you two working together allowed you to do in the book. One of the things I really enjoyed was that you would sometimes say, you know, my generation, I think of it this way and Rikki's generation sees it this way. So you, you kind of gave you as coauthors, like a, not intergenerational, but you know, a gap in years of looking at these things, which threw light on the changes that have happened. I thought that was really helpful.

Greg Lukianoff: Well, one of the things you said when I, since our definition of cancel culture begins in 2014, she always likes to have the caveat. but me being Gen Z, I grew up with this and that essentially the, the 2014 was Gen Z hitting campus in large numbers, but, but a lot of these sort of cancel culture habits were, if they feel like junior high school, it's partially because they were in junior high schools back in 2010. And then, you know, and now we all live in junior high school.

John Tomasi: So tell us about Stanford, your university.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. Stanford law school. you know, I was probably the happiest lawyer, like law student you've ever met.

John Tomasi: I, I, I can imagine that.

Greg Lukianoff: I've mellowed out law school. I loved being out there. I had a ball. I love San Francisco. I actually moved like a lot of the, well, the cool kids do, you move up there and commute down. and, you know, I'm, I'm proud of my alma mater and I was really ashamed of how we handled this situation. And you would think that a conservative judge had never spoken at Stanford law school. That's what it seemed like. It was some strange alien had come dropped out of the, out of the heavens. And I, and I, and I think you will be shocked to know that actually they speak, you know, conservative judges speak at Stanford pretty regularly. and in this case, it's a little worse because he's a fifth circuit judge, which I really have to stress because that's one level below the Supreme court. If it's a fifth circuit judges note is no joke, but he's Kyle Duncan. He is a conservative judge for sure. He doesn't agree with us on a lot of free speech cases lately as well. and he's a Trump appointee, and he has some controversial opinions. and when the opinions are controversial and the, and the Democrat and the left leaning norms on campus. Okay. Yeah. Just want to specify that. Don't we all, the, and when, the federal society invited him to, to come to campus, the immediately, the first attempt was to get him disinvited and get this, so, you know, canceled number one was the classic, just don't invite this person. They're going to be a harm to the community. Then, administrators started meeting with students, for hours on end to figure out like what to do, about this. the students who didn't want Kyle Duncan speaking there put up posters with the faces, of the federal society members there, which is important to remember when people talk about doxing. And of course, when they ask me my opinion about, I don't like this tactic, but can they do it? Sure they can. and then, after, again, after hours of meeting with, with, with the, with many of the DEI staff at the law school, including, Tirien Steinbach, they, there was about a fifth of the class was present, they, to heckle and shout at, Judge Duncan. As he's coming in, you know, two students, you know, tell him, I hope your daughters get raped. Right. you know, and, and there's also lots of things like some guys, you know, shouting out kind of like, I, you know, I, I can find the prostate. Why can't you find the clit? Like all this really profoundly immature kind of stuff as well.

John Tomasi: And can I just, just interrupt to say that, that this is, you know, part of the, the irony or the, the complication of this case is, is that people on the, the, the woke community were often getting their moral, moving up onto the moral high ground by claiming to be the sensitive ones. They're the ones who are more aware of sensitivity. We should be watching our language because we're not sensitive enough. And then occasionally the mask of sensitivity melts from their face at these moments where you see these horrific attacks on their families, nothing sensitive about it at all.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. And, and going particularly at the federal society members who, who, who had, who had invited, Duncan in the first place. So about, you know, about a fifth of the class is there for the shout down part. The shout down, by the way, lasts almost exactly 10 minutes. Then at the end of 10 minutes, Tirien Steinbach gets up. some of the students make a big deal on the fact that he doesn't immediately recognize her as an administrator. Well, of course he didn't recognize her administrator because Kyle Duncan in advance had gotten a promise from the administration that if students did show up to disrupt it, that they would be given one warning and then told to stop and, and, and, and escort it out. and I think they, they tried to take this and run with it by having it. Okay, but we're going to give him 10 minutes before this. So Tirien Steinbach gets up 10 minutes before the first warning, before the first warning. and then, she gets up and she reads a pre-prepared speech, which everyone needs to, needs to listen to because it's this, it's trying to be folksy and it's, and it's talking about like, is the juice worth the squeeze? Yeah. Is the juice of free speech worth, worth the squeeze of the harm you're causing my community? Or is the juice of having a fifth circuit judge talk to future lawyers worth the squeeze of, I don't know again. And it, and it was really funny because like the, it was basically blaming you're causing the pain, you know, like you're causing the difficulty by your presence and therefore a fifth circuit judge shouldn't come and speak here. And it's kind of like, no, again, conservative professors, conservative judges have spoken at Stanford routinely in the past. And it's a seven minute speech. So you're 17 minutes into this guy. I hasn't had a chance to talk yet. he, I think correctly says this is a setup, you know, and pretty much was, and then after that point, they just heckle him, you know, for the remaining 15 minutes of questions. And it's, it's embarrassing. It's immature. It's not, not at all the way you're supposed to handle an incident like, like, like this at all. but we take it as an opportunity to show the perfect rhetorical fortress at work. And one of the later steps of the perfect rhetorical fortress is what we call the donate, get angry step, the don't get angry step. Yeah. That essentially, and you'll watch this tactic that used a lot, that if someone finally snaps and just gets mad at the people who are, who are just acting like this, then that becomes the story. And the San Francisco chronicle like talked about, Oh, Kyle Duncan got exactly what he wanted out of this. And it's like, really? No, I think he wanted to actually give a talk.

John Tomasi: I've read the talk. It was an interesting, a little boring. He fired back at them pretty sharply.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, he did. We did. But at the same time, it's like, these are, these are also people who just said, I hope your daughters get raped.

John Tomasi: And so what would you think, what do you think about the Stanford administration response? Jenny Martinez was involved in some others, but do you?

Greg Lukianoff: Jenny Martinez's first response we thought was so, so. and then because, she had responded somewhat, you know, pointing out that this was not, you know, appropriate for the students to do this immediately, you know, the students turn on her, and making the argument that, counter speech is free speech. And it's kind of like, well, no kidding. Counter speech is free speech, but shouting someone down is not, is none of the above people. and there was enough kind of backlash after that. And, you know, I think probably the experience of being also personally targeted as well led to a much better response from Jenny Martinez.

John Tomasi: Quite striking, I thought.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. And it's like a 10 page, in some ways it's kind of embarrassing that you have to do a remedial sort of explanation of freedom of speech and free inquiry. And also things like, the Kalven Report values of a, being politically neutral as an institution. And it's a, it's a really good statement. And Tirien Steinbach was put on leave. She then wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that was claiming that she was, trying to, like, vindicate free speech and this whole thing. It was, it was a bizarre PR piece to, to, to read that did not reflect the facts at all. and, and one thing that very rarely happens that did happen here that, that, is a somewhat hopeful sign is that Tirien Steinbach has not been invited back, to, to Stanford. And I think, and this is, and this is actually a really important thing that I think I say in the book, but it's worth repeating. Every time there is a shout down at a university or a cancel campaign or a tenured professor is being targeted for losing their job or, you know, the, every university in the country should immediately investigate, did our administrators do anything to stop this or damp it down to actually, you know, argue back, even just say like, listen, they, you know, Carole Hooven, Kyle Duncan, like they're, they, they were invited here for an effort to fill our academic, function. They should make sure to see if they did anything to damp that down. And then they should also be sure that they investigate, did they actually help create this situation? Because one thing I've seen for, cause FIRE will be 25 years old next year.

John Tomasi: Wow.

Greg Lukianoff: And, and how often it is that DEI administrators in particular actually are helping these things come along. They're encouraging it, which is why, when I saw someone talking about attempts to reduce DEI administration, I saw someone who I really respect, but they referred to this as a, imprintment of a public college's, academic freedom. I'm like, no, you have to remember that if you're talking about administrators, that oftentimes those administrators are part of the problem. They're part of the threat to free speech and academic freedom on campus. So you can't actually, it's a missing part of people's understanding what's going on. It's not just, it's not just that people misunderstand that about, me and Haidt's coddling the American mind is we're saying, oh, now the students are bad since 2014. I'm like, no, it's actually this combination of administrators who were already bad. And when it came to academic freedom in too many cases, not all of them to be clear, but, enough of them, and then meeting a more compliant and more, more less, less pro free speech, student cohort. And it's been terrible since.

John Tomasi: I think that that moves us kind of perfectly to the, to the question about Lenin's question, what is to be done? Yeah. But before we go there, I just want to, just want to mention to our listeners that there's so much more in that middle section of the book that we're not covering today. this is discussion, this great discussion of the perfect rhetorical fortress, a lot of just really wonderful, wonderful material. The conformity gauntlet. Do you want to mention a word about that?

Greg Lukianoff: The conformity gauntlet is one, one that we're probably going to be, actually, I would love your feedback on the next draft of it because, we were planning to run it as an excerpt in reason, but now we want to update it with like the latest data about how much worse it is. And we basically take a theoretical, high schooler and try to put them through all the conformity inducing pressures they would experience all the way up to becoming a scientist and then trying to publish and say, nature, human behavior, for example. Right. and point out like how many just hoops you'd have to jump over. And we also make the point that DEI statements, for example, I mean, I think most people don't need, they immediately understand, obviously there's no way to do a DEI statement. The way the question is asked, it isn't a political mistrust, but if you're skeptical, Nate Honeycutt at FIRE, and this was actually before he was at fire, did an experiment to figure out, he got something like 30, almost like 3,500 professors to participate in this to evaluate different DEI statements about whether or not they, would get you past the first hurdle, to get, that in some of these DEI, evaluation, procedures, you, you, you get, you get taken off the top, if they don't like your DEI statement.

John Tomasi: So a whole bunch of people, so the way the structure works, a whole bunch of people apply for a job. The DEI sort of makes it makes their first cut.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: A bunch are removed from competition immediately. Then they go on and they get further cuts as well.

Greg Lukianoff: Well, and, and, and, this is especially interesting. The Heterodox Academy too, is that they, Nate did five different kinds of DEI statements. One that you might call, you know, a woke version of it, like, like Tim Urban's social justice fundamentalist, basically a very doctrinaire or kind of identity-based intersectional, intersectional analysis.

John Tomasi: Sort of naked forced speech.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. And then he did, several others. One was on viewpoint diversity. One was on, socioeconomic diversity. one was on religious diversity. And the only one that would get you through the door, more than 50% of the time, almost, would almost always get you through the door was the one that could be described as the woke one. The viewpoint diversity one was, rejected 52% of the time. so only 48% of people would even make it to the interview, in that it was similar numbers for the religious diversity. The socioeconomic diversity one did slightly better, but not much. It was more like, you know, rejected 40% of the time.

John Tomasi: and that breaks my heart because if there's, is a kind of diversity that's sorely lacking and particularly in elite higher education is socioeconomic diversity.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. So, so we point out that that's, and DEI statements are now required in, in admissions and jobs and even attending some conferences. and that's just one of multiple pressure to conformity inducing devices. When, if you actually want a better marketplace of ideas in higher ed, it's gotta be non-conformity inducing, pressures.

John Tomasi: so we're thinking about Lenin's question, what is to be done? you guys talk about, the idea of having free speech rules and laws, but also the free speech culture. Yeah. Can you say something about the interaction of those two and what, what the differences and why we need both?

Greg Lukianoff: So I've had interesting debates, you know, with our friend, Ken White, for example, over at Reason about free speech, culture and, you know, his argument essentially that free speech culture is kind of an incoherent concept. And, and I, and neither of us understand each other on this one. Cause I'm kind of like, they're not being free speech culture is an incoherent concept to me because it's like, where do you think the first amendment came from? You know, like handed down by God, uncreated creator kind of situation. We're also a common law country. There's no neat, neat, neat and tidy distinction between our culture and our law. Our culture affects our law, both in the legislative process, but also in the way judges interpret the world. And, but the ideal situation that you would have is a strong free speech law, but also strong free speech culture. And I want to spend a lot more time developing, what I mean by free speech culture, but the simplest way to explain it are cultural norms, that put a thumb on the scale for old fashioned idioms, old fashioned kind of ideas that are basic to a small d democratic society. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, to each their own, not my cup of tea. Don't judge a book by its cover. it's a free country, all these little things that we used to say when I was a kid.

John Tomasi: and when you were a kid so much so that they were kind of cliches, but they are actually really good values that remind you to check yourself.

Greg Lukianoff: I'm not the end all be all. I have very limited knowledge. I am prone to judgment. I am deeply flawed and I should not be judging you without no, another one walk a mile in a man's shoes. Like, like the idea of you really have to know, you should check yourself before you think you really understand where someone else is coming from.

John Tomasi: And, so even if you have free speech rules, like you have campuses where FIRE has done its work and they've rolled back those nineties, those 1990s kind of rules that were so, became so prevalent before fire came on the scene and sort of pushing back on these things. Even if universities have these free speech, formal rules, they might not have been, have been encouraging what we call the HxA way that is humility. Make, make a case, be humble, make your case with evidence, take the other person's position seriously, steal man their argument, don't straw man their argument, all those kinds of ways that make the epistemic machinery work better because we're not just yelling and shouting at each other, which your free speech allows us to do that. There's lots of reasons for that. But at the university, there's a special kind of speech we care about, which is, speech directed towards this truth seeking mission. We hope.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: So that's the culture, the special culture of universities that require the free speech requires.

Greg Lukianoff: Which brings us back to probably the biggest sort of meta theme of the book is that cancel culture can never get us towards truth. It wastes time and cognitive energy and the perfect rhetorical fortress will never get you towards truth. the perfect rhetorical fortress will never get you there. And, and what's the alternative to cancel culture? What's the benefit of actually having arguments based on substance, not just because it makes us feel better and more virtuous. It's because it might actually solve really important problems in a way that this nonsense that we're currently doing has literally no hope of.

John Tomasi: That's, that's true. And I sometimes say to people, I'd love to hear your take on this, that FIRE and HxA, you know, we work together in all for a whole bunch of different ways, but I think of fire as being the, the, the lawyers who get the free speech rules passed and are constantly, but not just free speech, but also academic freedom, academic freedom, including all these aspects of, just, just before the law, individuals being treated fairly by proceed and procedural norms. But so far does those sort of legal norms and HxA works on culture where they're, where they're, where the membership organization tries to change the way people talk with one another. Our, our values are viewpoint diversity, open inquiry, and constructive disagreement. Yeah. How we do it. And, you know, do you think that's right about, about, about FIRE and HxA is respectable. We care about the rules too, and you care about the culture too, but do you see the division of labor roughly in those ways?

Greg Lukianoff: yeah. I mean, and definitely sort of like, you know, I, I'm on my big sort of, free speech culture, campaign. We do talk about it with it within the organization about like, when we will get involved in a case, now that we've expanded beyond campus that, no, like it's, so for example, PayPal, was saying that it would fine a user is $2,500 if in their sole, in their sole discretion, people engaged in hate speech, misinformation, disinformation. And we're like, okay, legally, can they probably do this? Probably weirdly sickly enough? Yes. are we confident enough that this is way so far over the line of a free speech culture kind of situation that we would actually, so we do actually, we try to, we try to have some broad parameters.

John Tomasi: That's a great interest. That's a great case. A great example.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. And, and, but yeah, no, and it's one of the ways that we, you know, love working with you guys. And, and we, we're, I do really think we compliment each other.

John Tomasi: I agree. And, but you know, one of the, one of the things the book, really helped me see more deeply is how closely tied those two projects are, the legal project and the cultural project, because as you say, the laws aren't given and the interpretation of the abstract rules written in the constitution are always going to be contested. That's just what it means to live through time and be rebuilding the law all the time. And if you lose, if that free speech culture erodes, the people don't value it or they think it's a bad thing, which is what we're facing often now, then the laws themselves start to become, become in danger.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, no, absolutely. And that's one of the reasons why I ended up saying that in a very real sense, free speech culture for the longterm is probably more important than free speech law, because one won't survive without the other.

John Tomasi: So your book has lots of, warning stories, lots of, great examples, fantastic analysis. I, I, I felt, I felt a hope and I felt a strand of hopefulness through the entire book, despite some, all the difficult on depressing things you talk about.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: And it really came to flower to me in this phrase you use toward the very end of the book about the adulthood of the American mind.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Can you just, let's close by talking a bit about the adulthood of the American mind. What does that mean?

Greg Lukianoff: The adult of the American mind is.

John Tomasi: I love the phrase. It's fabulous.

Greg Lukianoff: It's when we, when, when we start treating our fellow citizens, like we're adults again, who can handle other rigors of being a free citizens, free citizens in a democratic society. And we, and like an example, and we give a lot of examples of what makes us not feel like we're not being currently treated like an adult. and I do think that we see this a lot in news media where they essentially will censor the news for us to protect our virgin ears is not treating your fellow Americans like we're adults that we can't live with or handle. So a news story talks about something that someone said was offensive, but we never actually hear what that thing was. But they never actually say what that thing is. So we can't judge whether it's offensive or not. We're just told X. Thank you, mommy state. Like, what exactly am I supposed to do with that?

John Tomasi: Can you just say a bit more about the positive vision? What would it mean for, for to have an adulthood of the American mind culture? What would that be like?

Greg Lukianoff: to be able to talk to people frankly about real problems in the world without someone jumping on some way to actually exit the argument or win it in some, by using some cheap tactic that gets you nowhere near closer to resolution and understanding. you know, like I think that some of the, best embodiments of like what, an adult of the American mind can look like, you know, are, the, the way we act when we actually solve problems in the real world. We wanted to focus a little bit on this towards the end that I think that, I think that so much of the way people are learning to argue in higher ed, it leads to a kind of hopeless situation. Cause if it's just ideological abstraction, it will always, it, it, it doesn't get you anywhere. But if you're actually being like, how do we make Washington DC 3% safer? How do we make sure that we increase the graduation rates, among, you know, poor residents of the district by 4%, like, like something specific where you're actually trying to figure out something pragmatic in the real world. That's what the adulthood of the American looks like. The childhood, the junior high school of the American mind is the way we're currently arguing.

John Tomasi: That's very nice. I recently gave a talk at the National Governors Association and their theme for this year, you may know is disagree better. Yes, I like that. And, and, and just that, and I, when I, when I read that, that line about the adult of the American mind, I thought about that initiative, that governor's initiative, because their idea is that when we just, if we come to disagree better, we become adults in your term, we start doing reasoning together.

Greg Lukianoff: Yes.

John Tomasi: And there's the possibility, at least of us advancing despite our differences, rather than just being involved camps.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

John Tomasi: So, Greg, it's been really great talking with you.

Greg Lukianoff: Always a pleasure.

John Tomasi: congratulations on the book. It's just, it's fabulous. It's going to be, it's going to be a great read. And thanks for joining me on Heterodox Out Loud.

Greg Lukianoff: Thanks, John.