The Bipartisan Assault on Free Speech w/ Greg Lukianoff

24:03Greg Lukianoff:And those are situations in which a student speaker will come and activists show up and make sure to shout it down. Don't allow the speech to go on, chase the person off, for example. And 2023 and 2024 were the two worst years for that. And that was overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian students, you know, who expected their free speech rights protected. Now, to be clear, having clean hands. You're saying they were shouted down.

24:26Coleman Hughes:Who was doing the shouting down in those cases?

24:27Greg Lukianoff:No, no, the pro-Palestinian ones were doing the shouting down. Right. Right. And and at the same time, these same students wanted their free speech rights respected, but they were not respecting the free speech rights of others. That means they still get free speech rights. But every time they did that, they should have been punished because that's mob censorship. That's not protected speech. If you and the administration in many of these cases, you know, like if it had been a right wing group doing this, they probably would have punished the right wing group. But if it's a group that they're highly sympathetic to, it starts looking kind of quasi official, like in the case, for example, at my alma mater, Stanford, where where Judge Duncan tried to speak after hours of talking to DEI administrators at Stanford.

25:12Greg Lukianoff:And then they have this sort of orchestrated shout down followed by a scripted speech, you know, read by Tyrion Steinbach, where you really got to see how a lot of times it is actually not just the students themselves, but this being tolerated or even encouraged or even partially arranged by administrators. Because it starts looking a lot more like formal censorship as well. So when it comes to where the line is, we saw lots of examples of things across the line after October 7th, including outright assault. And I think that people are, for example, at Harvard of Jewish students. I think Harvard alums are right to be mad that that included the students who actually assaulted the Jewish student in one famous video.

25:57Greg Lukianoff:You know, they got awards later from the university, kind of like the students who shouted down Nicholas and Erica Christakis back in 2015 got awards as well. They weren't just not punished. They were, you know, commended to a degree. I think actually, though, I think in the Harvard case they were punished, but then also given an award. So there was lots of examples of things that obviously crossed the line, like outright assault, outright intimidation. There was that famous thing from Colombia, you know, where that activist shouted, you know, Zionists have entered the camp, by which he meant Jews.

26:33Greg Lukianoff:And then they, you know, formed like a human line, sort of like march the Zionists out of the quad, essentially, of Colombia, which they have no right to do. There were certainly threats, famously at Cornell, for example, not protected, nor should it be. And then, of course, what happened at UCLA, that was like particularly horrible where they were, you know, not letting Jewish students pass by that. They were restricting the movement of people, which is also completely not OK. So there. So normally when we see protests, we're asked to call balls and strikes and be like, that's protected. That's protected.

27:12Greg Lukianoff:That's not protected. The spring of 2024 was much more like that's protected. That's protected. they definitely don't have to allow full-time camping they can if they want but you know i don't think they enforce that in a viewpoint neutral way they tend to allow some people to do it and some others and then there are cases where it's like oh no that student should be expelled that student's a threat to academic freedom of speech or that student engaged in violence which is not a you know i always have to point out violence is not an extreme form of speech, it is the antithesis of what free speech is for.

27:46Right.

27:47Coleman Hughes:So let's talk then about how the Trump administration's response to these meltdowns. Where has it been appropriate and where has it overstepped?

28:01Greg Lukianoff:Yeah, I would say one of the more interesting things about this, and the fire doesn't do affirmative action, for example. I think we've always stayed out of it. But I'd say the Trump administration is always on the strongest ground when it's going after racial discrimination in admissions and hiring, because that's I think that on the left, there's a little bit of like post students for fair admissions decision that there's an idea that essentially we were just in the that essentially now after that decision, affirmative action is frowned upon. And I always have to make the point, guys, actually, there was a kind of exception for racial preferences created on the diversity rationale of Bakke that was, by the way, very limited.

28:50Greg Lukianoff:And two cases called Gratz and Crutter. The students for fair admissions case, by the way, showed that they weren't even comporting with those decisions. But once that special sort of like exception to allow some limited sort of like positive racial discrimination was gone, it just goes back to being racial discrimination, which is the heart of darkness as far as the 14th Amendment is concerned. And if that's the case, a lot of these schools that didn't change very much post students for fair admissions. And by the way, we're also doing things beforehand that weren't in line with Gratz or Grutter or Baki.

29:22Greg Lukianoff:You know, they're very vulnerable on those grounds. And I think they know it. So sometimes when people are sort of shocked that some schools cave, I'm like, well, they probably do have them on this thing. I wasn't surprised Columbia, you know, for example, settled because they were the one most likely to actually be dinged for for anti-Semitic for tolerating too much anti-Semitic behavior and then followed followed by Harvard. So I think that some of the reasons why the administration is going after these schools have real legitimate underlying reason. It's just been sometimes kind of almost bizarre to see some of the tactics that they're using against these schools when they have them on something that even if they follow the process, they could very easily be found guilty of.

30:06Greg Lukianoff:And they decide to say, we're immediately going to stop all your grants from NIH, you know, hoping that you will sign this agreement that effectively nationalizes your school. That is going way, way too far. So it's been and it's weird. I think I think that the administration is more OK with arguments that will lose in court than most other administrations. So, for example, like when they tried to use the pressure of banning international students just at Harvard, that was an argument that they tried and got quickly shut down by court. They tried to make the argument that there's national security concerns having particularly, I think they were kind of alluding to sort of potential Chinese students being security threats.

30:53Greg Lukianoff:And that's why they could get rid of the ability of Harvard to admit international students. But they only did it at Harvard. And so that's the kind of thing that doesn't smell right at all to a court because they're kind of like, listen, if you're concerned about national security, there are lots of other schools that this should apply to, not just Harvard. So the legal strategy coming out of the Trump administration is inappropriate in a lot of cases, but it's also confusing. Why would they go through some of these approaches? So I'm very curious to see what we're going to end up with in the Harvard decision, you know, like what it's actually going to look like, what the settlement is actually going to look like.

31:36Greg Lukianoff:I will say anything that's short of full nationalization of Harvard is an improvement from the from the opening position. But we will see. Yeah.

31:46Coleman Hughes:So with Trump's demands on Harvard, some of them make perfect sense given Supreme Court decisions like students for fair admissions. Yeah. Just demanding that schools comply with that makes perfect sense. Sure. But then there are other demands that are things that I personally would like to see, but I don't see how the federal government has any standing to demand it. For example, I would love to see Harvard have more conservative professors. Sure. Right? Because you have, as I've talked about on the show many times, you have whole fields that have basically become fake academic fields because they're so deeply slanted in one direction that ideas never get challenged, right?

32:36Coleman Hughes:Yeah. Like gender studies is a perfectly interesting thing to study. Like, you know, why let's learn everything we can about the differences and similarities and between men and women and how concepts of that have changed over time. But when 99 % of the people doing the studying are all progressive, you end up with just insane theories that, you know, that are totally unbounded by science. Essentially, you get kids being taught that there are just no differences biologically between men and women. And you just get an echo chamber of basically intellectual masturbation that is totally devoid of any facts or reason.

33:21Coleman Hughes:So I would love for colleges to correct that in the interest of having better research and having better classes. And that's part of the reason why I taught this past semester or two semesters ago at the University of Austin, which is trying to embody that mission. However, I don't see on what grounds the federal government can demand that change.

33:43Greg Lukianoff:Yeah, no, we basically had exactly this discussion this morning, is that we'd love to see greater viewpoint diversity in higher ed, but there's serious First Amendment issues. There's serious separation of powers. There's serious, there's all sorts of issues with the government imposing that. And here's one of the frustrating things, though, where I think the critics of when we oppose the Trump administration have a point, which is that I know that Harvard behind the scenes was having discussions that some of these changes needed to happen. And they did make some changes around the edges before the Trump administration.

34:25Greg Lukianoff:But now that the Trump administration got a gun to the head of Harvard, it looks like the only reason they're going to make these changes is because they have a gun to their head. when these are changes that they probably should have made voluntarily all along, including improving viewpoint diversity. So I think Larry Summers, I just did an interview with Larry Summers yesterday, and I think that his point is, you know, we must resist the Trump administration doing things that go well beyond its power, but we also must reform. And that's pretty much exactly where I am. But if it ends up being, you know, viewpoint diversity ends up being imposed by the federal government, that's a problem.

35:05Greg Lukianoff:Right.

35:06Coleman Hughes:What would you say to the argument, though, that realistically, I mean, we've people like you and I have been complaining about college campuses for years and years and years and very little has changed, which was proved and proven by the reaction to October 7th. So that practically speaking, unless they feel the pressure, nothing is going to change.

35:25Greg Lukianoff:And so, yeah, I'm sympathetic to it. You know, I'm sympathetic to it, but there's still, you know, First Amendment restrictions on what they are allowed to do that we must defend. It's one of the reasons why I think a lot of the hope for the future of higher ed is making sure that regulations are such that it's easier to create competing models to higher ed as it currently exists. I hope we lean hard into AI to allow for – I always talk about higher rigor, lower cost, and high prestige approaches where basically – because that's the part that people leave out. They kind of forget that people want to go to Harvard because the networking is amazing and it's extremely prestigious.

36:06Greg Lukianoff:And that's been left out on a lot of the online stuff is that there's no element of networking. There's no element of prestige. So I think that – and sometimes government regulations have been in the way of that for a while there. I also just think when it comes to truth-seeking, we need a lot more friction. We need a lot more checking and rechecking. I think that some of the stuff that Jay Bhattacharya is talking about doing at the NIH makes me extremely happy. And I really want to give him credit because, you know, he's talking about, you know, NIH should be funding replication studies. We should be creating replication journals.

36:49Greg Lukianoff:And we should be basically trying to make sure that the integrity of the knowledge that these institutions are producing is low. And I think, sorry, it's as high as possible. And I think that if you have these counter institutions, these ones who find their job to actually poke holes in knowledge creation as it currently exists, you'll have schools be really freaking embarrassed. You know, and that actually can also that can help with reform. I also, by the way, think it is a scandal that so much scholarship and so much research that is publicly funded is behind paywalls, because I think that if we want this to be something for the common good, which education was supposed to be the idea that and by the way, you can't actually see, you know, what humanities papers actually looks like unless you have a membership or pay$50 per article.

37:40Right.

37:43Coleman Hughes:A lot of places to go from there. I mean, so the replication crisis, this is something I've talked about in the podcast as well. We have all of these PhD graduates that can't get jobs because the market for becoming a professor is just way too competitive. You can go to a great school, do fantastic, and still basically have to move almost to the middle of nowhere to even have a hope of finding a job. And that wasn't the case many decades ago. Why isn't there a center to employ these people in some kind of NIH-funded replication task force?

38:24Greg Lukianoff:Yeah. No, I think about this a lot. And there very well might end up being. Like I've talked a lot about, you know, why doesn't someone buy up one of these old universities and create replication? You know, where every class is co-taught by people who disagree on something within the field where basically you serve for five years and all you do is poke holes on the existing state of knowledge. I think there's so many things that we can do now, but we need desperately to do this now because like right now we're training these godlike technologies on this corpus of supposed knowledge that we all know has a lot of, you know, everything from PHAC to plagiarized, you know, content and extremely biased because academia is overwhelmingly left-leaning.

39:11Greg Lukianoff:And the idea that we're going to create these omnipotent machines, that actually that's their understanding of objective reality. And then that becomes, as Brendan McCord puts, our autocomplete for life is a formula for potential chaos and tyranny.

39:26Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I mean, it's a very tough problem to fix because, as you say, everything that ChatGPT and LLMs in general is trained on is going to have a bit of a left-wing bias for the most part, even as it programs in some kind of deep logic and intelligence that makes it fairer than a lot of institutions. And I do think it does have that going for it, which is it's constrained by logic in a lot of ways. But how do you actually correct that bias at a deep level without being able to train it on more unbiased content?

40:05Greg Lukianoff:I think you have to do a lot of sort of creating higher integrity knowledge base. I think that – but here's the good news. Here's the good news. It's the nature of truth. And the nature of truth, like the extent to which like – and basically there's nothing weird about me talking about this because every First Amendment lawyer is an epistemologist. Like we care about how we know things. And I think that you can't really know things without dissent, without clashing ideas. And also the fact of what people really think is itself, you know, important knowledge. But generally, the way we find out things is by not by getting directly at truth, but by slashing away at falsity.

40:46Greg Lukianoff:And so even though a lot of egos will get crushed, a lot of people will feel really mad if we turn, let's say, a half dozen really well-trained AIs to try to distinguish what is good science from bad science, but also what is plagiarized dogma from stuff that might actually be original. There's an opportunity to slash away at all the stuff that is BS and be left with. We might find papers from, I don't know, 1925 that were like, oh, wow, this person was really on to something like this was a huge sample size. They had an interesting theory. like if we take this, if we take a really aggressive approach to a ruthless approach to truth finding, we could have an opportunity to have a quantum leap in the reliability of our knowledge.

41:40Greg Lukianoff:I'd also know some nerds out there would get mad that I use quantum leap like that.

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42:48Greg Lukianoff:Do you ever gaze longingly at your old NPR tote bag and wish you could call up the Car Talk guys and ask them how to fix the meeting crisis? Do you get AFAB confused with ACAB but are too embarrassed to admit it? Do you long for a social life that was a little more nuanced? Sounds like you might need the Unspeakeasy. The Unspeakeasy offers intimate, off-the-record gatherings with incredible guest speakers, amazing food, and life-changing conversations. This October 19th through 21st will be in New York's Hudson Valley with John McWhorter, Jungian analyst Lisa Marciano, and rising theater star PJ Adzema.

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43:48Coleman Hughes:So getting back to campus issues, I think a lot of Trump's most controversial decisions have revolved around foreign students. What speech rights do foreigners have on American soil if they say have a typical student visa? Yeah.

44:09Greg Lukianoff:So generally, the major distinction is that you can be highly subjective in the granting of visas of any kind and of citizenship and green cards because there's limited spots. You know, essentially like the and I take this is personally me. Both my parents are immigrants. My beard is at full Russian mode at the moment. And I think that, you know, if my anti-communist dad, you know, lost his place to another Russian who wanted to overthrow the government, you know, and wanted to impose their terrible ideas on us, I'd be like, that's ridiculous. I don't like this at all. And I think a lot of the people like, you know, a lot of first generation and immigrant kids who come here, you know, like, are there the ones who are some of the most patriotic people you'd ever see?

44:59Greg Lukianoff:So I think that the idea that you can have you can have vetting is there's a certain amount of like, no kidding, of course you can. But when you're actually here, we don't like the idea of people getting deported for speech that any any American is allowed to do. And so the most egregious example, this was the Ramesa Ozturk case. and this was a student at tufts she'd written an op-ed saying that the university should divest from israel i disagree with it who cares um but it was a uh it wasn't a screed it was a article expressing a fairly popular opinion on most campuses and she was the one who you saw the video of and she's a you know smaller young woman you know being approached suddenly out of the blue by plainclothes i saw or immigration officers and stuffed in a van and then flown to ultimately Louisiana, where she was in jail for like a month, I think.

45:55Greg Lukianoff:And like, that's the kind of thing that is not okay. Also under, by the way, under existing law, there was some great discussion, by the way, Jeb Rudenfeld did some really cool discussion at the free press about some of these issues. But there's some distinctions to be drawn. There's a 1905 case that I can't remember the name of, but that was, and it was a case where you could deport someone citing speech. But that was a case about someone who was here illegally. And basically, you can deport someone who's here illegally for any reason, bad reasons, good reasons, you can deport them. But if you're here legally, there's a case called Bridges v.

46:30Greg Lukianoff:Wixson from 1945, which does indicate that while you're here, at least, you have First Amendment rights. What the full parameters of those remains, you know, there's some question about if it's exactly coextensive with Americans. But at minimum, we can say getting kicked out of school for getting kicked out of the country for an op ed is not something that should fly under the under the First Amendment, even if you're not a full citizen.

46:56Coleman Hughes:What about the case of Mahmoud Khalil? Yeah.

47:00Greg Lukianoff:So the Mahmoud Khalil case was definitely one where given his involvement in the Columbia case and the Columbia protests, I kept on expecting to find out that he did something clearly illegal during that. And so when he was arrested, you know, first of all, of course, the video of him being arrested would look horrible. And then he was also deported to or moved to Louisiana. I was kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. But then the administration really was talking about flyers, a group he was affiliated put out flyers. Again, I disagree with that. They were they were pretty pro Hamas flat out.

47:37Greg Lukianoff:And I think that's contemptible. But at the same time, they only the administration itself only pointed at his speech over and over and over again. And we're like, dude, is this really all you have on this guy? You know, for a long time. So even though I understand why people are not the least sympathetic to him for some of the positions he's taken both before and since, I think that that should not get you deported. Is that the kind of thing that I think will come up if someone is a supporter of a terrorist organization in granting a visa or a green card in the first place? Of course it does.

48:10Greg Lukianoff:And I think it always does. But I do think that that was inappropriate. I do understand why the administration is somewhat frustrated, though, because there were lots of people at particularly Columbia, but other schools that did things that they're here on visas and they did things that should have gotten them kicked out of school. But they Columbia wasn't willing to do that because if they kick them out of school, they knew they'd lose their visas. and I know that that's part of the frustration on the behalf of the administration but it doesn't mean that you can then turn around and then just deport people for protected speech

48:49Coleman Hughes:though I remember in reading about it a couple months ago that there was a statute of regulation which technically allowed the Secretary of State to kick someone out on a visa if they quote provided material or other support to a terrorist group. And the wide reading of that statute seemed to enable anyone who really supported Hamas in terms of organizing and handing out flyers seemed to give them that power. Is that true or was that me misremembering or having learned the wrong thing?

49:24Greg Lukianoff:No, no. There's a provision in the law that gives the Secretary of State the power to deport someone if in his sole discretion they are found to be adverse to foreign policy. We at FIRE think that this allocation of power is just too much. We think that that's too much power to be solely in the hands of the Secretary of State. And by the way, it's been challenged one other time in court, and it was ruled unconstitutional back in the mid-90s by Trump's own sister. Now, she died in 2023. She was a very well-respected judge. And the case was overturned for completely different reasons. But we agree that we think that this provision gives the Secretary of State too much unreviewed power, which is one of the reasons why we're actually suing in this case to get that declared unconstitutional again because we think that that's going too far.

50:25Greg Lukianoff:Yeah.

50:26Coleman Hughes:Okay, let's pivot a little bit and talk about free speech and social media. I think Twitter, now X, is the most important battleground for this. And it's the reason Elon says that he purchased Twitter in the first place, which was partly inspired by the fact that the Babylon Bee, the satirical onion-like newspaper that has more of a, I guess, a right-leaning. I'm not even sure if it necessarily has right-leaning a bias, but it does that kind of satirizing of the left, was locked out of its Twitter account for a while. And Elon says this is why he purchased it, to restore free speech to what has essentially become the public square in his view.

51:13Coleman Hughes:So a few questions. One, is Twitter now X really a public square or is it a private company and, uh, how should, what, what free speech protections should exist on, on that website, if any.

51:28Greg Lukianoff:Yeah. I mean, I, I wrote a letter to, um, an open letter to, to Musk when he was considering buying X and urged him to try to take inspiration, not, not, not necessarily follow strictly, but take inspiration from a lot of the well thought out rules, um, created under the first amendment, because I always talk about, you know, first amendment jurisprudence is the longest meditation on how you have freedom of speech in the real world. And I think there's just a lot of philosophical wisdom in there, a lot of practical wisdom, um, that you, that you can garner. Um, I think, uh, what it's, what's actually happened is it's become, you know, just, uh, it's a, it's a social, it's just another social media company.

52:13Greg Lukianoff:Um, and I think that it, you know, So they pick and choose what content they amplify and what they don't. And once you actually seem to have more of a tilt left or right, that tends to also become a self-reinforcing phenomenon. So I definitely have watched Twitter become, I would say, more conservative, more MAGA. I think there are obviously pluses and minuses to that. I will say one plus is that it did seem for a minute there that all social media was basically sort of like politically homogenous in terms of like what its assumptions were as what was commendable and not commendable. Kind of like you would see in like Europe, for example.

52:57Greg Lukianoff:And that's that's worrisome. I think it's really good to have diverse diversity in terms of like political tilt if you're going to have companies like social media. And I think that the old argument, you know, that made oftentimes by the left and the right that we have to effectively nationalize social media because it is the public square and we have nowhere else to go has been proven to be BS because, you know, people flock to blue sky, you know, for example. And that's where I hear, at least, that replicates a lot of the worst aspects of, say, I don't know, 2018 internet culture, which I don't particularly want to revisit.

53:40Greg Lukianoff:Yeah, sure. So for me as a First Amendment defender, my big concern is, one, making sure that companies get to make these decisions and that it's not the government coercing them to make it. I would like them to not engage in viewpoint discrimination. I think that that's what censorship actually means. At the same time, they're private companies, and I want them to remain private companies. Where I get really concerned, and I'm still mad about this, is in the Missouri v. Biden, later Murthy v. Missouri decision at the Supreme Court. We had a case where I think it was very clear that the but for reason a number of people got kicked off social media was because they were being pressured by the Biden administration or people who work closely with the Biden administration to suppress, for example, COVID misinformation.

54:36Greg Lukianoff:Oftentimes, which later turned out to be not just not misinformation, but sometimes actually even true. and the supreme court punted on this case saying that the people who were involved in the case didn't have standing to challenge the governments coercing the social media giants from engaging in censorship that the government itself can't do and i think that that was a wrongly decided case i think there was enough evidence that those people should have had standing but the even more maddening part as a lawyer, it was Zuckerberg, like, just a couple months later, comes out and is very clear that he wishes he stood up to the government more about the jawboning, which is how it's referred to, of his company.

55:20Greg Lukianoff:And it's like, dude, like, if you'd been part of this litigation, we absolutely would have had standing. And I believe the Supreme Court would have no choice but to say that the government may not coerce social media platforms to engage in censorship that the government is forbidden from engaging in itself. So that's my biggest concern about social media, that it maintains its independence.

55:42Coleman Hughes:How do you view the issue of algorithmically boosted content? Because if I own Twitter, I could easily picture myself saying, well, you know, I believe in the First Amendment, I believe in free speech. So anyone can have a Twitter account. Anyone can tweet whatever they want as long as it's not a threat or not, you know, let's say it's not pornography or something like that. But not every post is going to be subject to the same algorithmic boosting. In other words, if your post contains the N word, I'm not going to take it down, but I'm going to have a rule in my algorithm which says this is not going to show up in people's for you feed if they don't already follow you, right?

56:30Coleman Hughes:Because it seems to me like, and I wonder, I wonder if this is true. Is there any analogy or analog to like algorithmic boosting in the history of First Amendment jurisprudence? Because like, you know, it doesn't seem that there necessarily would be, it seems like that's unique to new technology and would not necessarily have to be subject to neutrality.

56:59Greg Lukianoff:Yeah, it's an interesting argument. I've heard a lot from it. And the people who think that algorithmic policies can be regulated by the government or try to make some version of that argument, they usually rely on the idea that this is the equivalent of sort of publishing and that essentially the algorithmic decisions are the same thing. then the company itself becomes the speaker. And then maybe things like defamation will then be owned by the company itself. Now, once they have that, they also sneak in usually and content that we might think is unfit for children, content that we might think is in other ways, societally harmful, misinformation, disinformation.

57:45Greg Lukianoff:And I get the argument that the power of the various social media companies to algorithmically boost content that fits sort of a narrative that that company might like and to really de-boost stuff that they don't has troubling implications overall depending on what those policies are. But I'm much more frightened of the government having any say in that whatsoever. And I tend to think that if the government of California and the government of Texas and Florida all agree on a way to regulate social media companies, it's almost certainly a terrible idea. So I think that I'm much more concerned about maintaining independence here.

58:28Greg Lukianoff:And I do think that if we started regulating algorithmic decisions of social media companies, we would really regret the government having that power. Right.

58:40Coleman Hughes:Okay, let's pivot again. I know you and fire are focused on America. Yeah. Oh, God. Are you talking about the international situation? Yeah. I mean, because I, you know, I, you read these articles about the United Kingdom, which is, you know, a country that as Americans, we feel, I think most of us feel a kind of similarity to. It's where my mom's from. Yeah. And we read these articles about people getting arrested for Facebook posts. Yeah. All the time. um and i mean it's it's incredible i mean obviously i know the uk doesn't have a first amendment um it doesn't have analogous ironclad speech protections but you'd expect that the the common culture of uh libertarian ethos with respect to um speech issues like obviously the founding fathers got many of the ideas around freedom of speech from a philosophy that was very much in the air in Britain, but also by trying to not replicate the mistakes that had been made in Britain during the civil wars and so forth.

59:52Coleman Hughes:You'd expect that the culture alone would be sufficient to prevent a situation where the police are knocking on grandma's door because she made a you know, a Facebook post. Yeah. And yet that's happening, it would seem. So how closely are you following what's going on there? And what do you make of it as a free speech defender?

1:00:10Greg Lukianoff:Well, one of my big goals actually for this year for fire was, well, one, to do more in higher education reform, two, to do more in tech, because I don't want the same people who messed up knowledge creation in higher ed to be in charge of objective reality and AI for the rest of existence. But the third one was to make people more aware of how bad the global situation has become for freedom of speech. And not just in the unfree world, and I always make the point too, by the way, though, but the nightmarish things that Iran, for example, in China has been able to do with AI-assisted surveillance and social control is terrifying.

1:00:47Greg Lukianoff:But watching this just absolutely collapse in the European Union and in the Anglosphere has been horrifying. And what's going on in Britain right now is a full free speech crisis. There was a number, and I remember there was some people questioning whether or not 30 people a day are really being arrested for speech in Britain. That was something that was reported by, I think, the Free Speech League, or Free Speech Union, but also by The Economist, I think. But, you know, according to our numbers just for this past month, when we looked at the number of people being arrested for protesting, for example, we're like, yeah, no, that's probably wrong.

1:01:22Greg Lukianoff:It's probably worse because because they arrested about 10 ,000 people this past month. It's bad. And it's weird to watch kind of like the establishing sort of like surveillance state in the name of sort of punishing, stopping fascism. You know, stopping because it's like, well, I don't I don't know how different this actually looks, guys. So I'm very worried about Britain. And when I was over there, by the way, last October for the and the the situation for people getting arrested had already accelerated, but it's getting worse still. I remember talking to a lot of Brits who were nominally pro free speech, but like, yeah, sure.

1:02:01Greg Lukianoff:People get arrested sometimes for like silently praying. But, you know, it's like, no, no, no. There's and I went on a show on GB and I was like, you guys are insane. You have Stockholm syndrome. Like people are getting arrested just for being rude on the Internet or sometimes, you know, saying things and most overwhelmingly saying things that would be absolutely 100 percent protected by the government. And oftentimes to be just, you know, to be totally palms up, sometimes it's about complaining about immigration and crime. And it's like you have the right to do that. It's not a democracy if you're not allowed to complain about the about these kind of things.

1:02:39Greg Lukianoff:and so we and we see similar uh things going on in germany you know uh if if you can stomach it you know people should watch the 60 minutes piece on what's going on in germany you know morning raids of people for and this is this one blew me away for calling a politician a penis you know like the idea of like and and you know with with the german voices and being like yes this is you know that's even worse you know like the you have to respect our politicians And it's like, oh, my God. So we're in a we're in an international free speech crisis right now. America is kind of unique and holding the line, but it's hard to be the only one that really is respecting this, particularly when we have this rot from within coming out of a very free speech skeptical, essentially ruling class.

1:03:30Greg Lukianoff:OK, final question. That was that was sunny.

1:03:34Coleman Hughes:Final question.

1:03:36Greg Lukianoff:Why don't hate speech laws work? Oh, my God. Where do I even start?

1:04:08Greg Lukianoff:pretty quickly, as we've also, by the way, seen in Europe. But there's another subtler reason for why they don't work. And I said this when I did the Bill Maher show. You'll notice that in the United States, for example, we didn't pass laws banning anti-Semitic speech, whereas in several countries in Europe, they pass laws that did this essentially way back in the 90s. And even though part of the shift is a demographic, a lot of immigrants from the Middle East, but you'll also notice that all of these countries that have passed these laws, anti-Semitism has gotten much, much worse. And certainly part of that is that group polarization takes over.

1:04:48Greg Lukianoff:And group polarization is one of the best proven things in social science, where essentially if you get people to only talk to people they agree with, they become more radical in the direction of the group. Talking to people they disagree with has a moderating effect, but only talking to people on your tribe makes you more tribal. Censorship doesn't stop anyone from thinking anything. It just encourages them to talk to people who are safe to talk to, which means in this case, people who agree with you. And I'm like, well, no wonder antisemitism has gotten so bad in Europe. You've told the antisemites that they can only and exclusively talk to other antisemites.

1:05:24Greg Lukianoff:This is going to have a spiraling away effect. And that's exactly what we're seeing. So I do actually think that it's not just that these things don't work. I think they make the problem much worse. And as I say a lot, if you're battling people who believes there's a conspiracy to shut them up, do nothing that looks like a conspiracy to shut them up. And Europe is following the exact opposite. And it's it's gonna it's gonna blow up.

1:05:48Coleman Hughes:All right, Greg Lukianov, thanks so much for your time. The book once again is The War on Words, 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail. Thanks, Thanks, Greg. And please support fire. Absolutely.

1:06:01Greg Lukianoff:Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills. But it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms.