1216: Greg Lukianoff | Failing Arguments Against Free Speech

23:17And I made a point in my TED talk, like, I've been doing this for a long time, and if there are free speech absolutists, I have not met them. Define what that is, because people do label themselves or others that, and it turns out to never be true when the shoe is, again, when it's directed at them, they're like, this is unconscionable. Remember when you didn't give a crap a month ago when that other thing happened about the guy you didn't like? Yeah. So a free speech absolutist, in theory, is someone who believes that if you do something with words, essentially, it's always protected. And that's not true.

23:47That's an extreme version even of that definition. But for example, a free speech afterlose might not even believe that defamation should be unprotected. And defamation is like saying, even when you know it's untrue, this person molested so-and-so as a child. Something that is clearly trying to destroy someone's career, particularly if you know you're lying and everybody knows you're lying and it's legit harmful to a particular person. All these special protections that apply to defamation. I believe defamation should not be protected. I don't believe incitement shouldn't be protected, which is churches are just about to be late.

24:18You're in front of the mayor's home and you're saying, let's burn down the mayor's home. That's incitement. And then you have other categories like obscenity or obscenity towards minors, which basically means things that allow you to protect kids from, say, hardcore porn, for example. I actually think the exceptions to the First Amendment as established by the Supreme Court, for the most part, make a lot of sense. I think they're well thought out for the most part. But what I am is an opinion absolutist, which basically means I think that there is a value in knowing what people really think full stop.

24:49I think it's a scientific value. I think it's an artistic value. I think it's a democratic value and that you're not safer for knowing less about what people really think. And I think in a situation where people are scared to say what they actually think because they think their job's going to be the line, whether that's cancel culture from the left or pressure from the Trump administration on the right, that's not good for a democratic society. Yeah, that's not good. I mean, that sort of answers my next question here, which is what's more dangerous, bad jokes or a society that can't tolerate bad jokes?

25:17Yeah, definitely the latter. Yeah, like hands down and very obviously for everyone involved. And I mean, hell, we had Don Rickles back in the 80s and we survived. I barely remember him. But yeah, it's crazy because I remember my mom talking about how obscene Rodney Dangerfield was or something. And now she's probably just like, OK, he's still stupid, but I've seen worse. Right. Back to school is a masterpiece. That's going to get us derailed if I go down that road. All right. So apolitical at least. Yeah, there you go. There you have it. People say words are violence. And if that's true, my inbox is a war crime.

25:50Let's take a break from the carnage and hear from the amazing sponsors that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Strawberry.me. So I worked with a Strawberry.me coach recently. I ended that call feeling pretty reinvigorated. That's a good word for it. Way more aligned with where I'm headed and why. It's so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind, but that session reminded me just how powerful it is. Sometimes you just step back, refocus, get clear on where you actually want to go. Coaching is forward-looking. It's not about what's gone wrong. It's about where you want to be and how to actually get there.

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29:04It is non-cringy. It is down-to-earth and very practical. It takes a few minutes a day, and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to that course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again for free at 6minutenetworking.com. Now, back to Greg Lukianoff. It's hard to imagine that anybody's against free speech, but here we are. I mean, you mentioned this in your book, War on Words. Authoritarians are really used to these same arguments, right? They use a lot of the arguments that you mentioned in the book against free speech. Free speech laws are used frequently against the press.

29:37And this is kind of why, as a member of the press, we have to be really vigilant against this kind of stuff. And it seems to me like the latest generation is really a lot less protective of free speech. And I'm not trying to throw Gen Z under the bus because I think they've just had to face harder issues when it comes to free speech than maybe my parents' generation. Look, you're already disagreeing. Tell me why you disagree. My parents, they're relatively educated people. I don't think they could formulate a free speech argument. I think you'd be surprised. Yeah, you might be right. Can I get a sense of like when your parents were born?

30:06Oh, yeah, the 40s. 40s, yeah. You'll be shocked at how good they are actually at formulating free speech argument. I'm going to give that a try tonight at dinner. They were coming up in like the 60s and 70s. That's true. That was one of the major topics of one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, like much more intense than they are today. I think Gen Z is the victim of an educational system, K through PhD, who really tried to explain the downsides of free speech, partially because when you have a monoculture in K through PhD, the incentives change. And suddenly, like, if you're in charge of an institution, then why on earth would you want to limit your power against people's freedom of speech?

30:40Because you understand what right think is. So I do actually think that a lot of these attitudes about free speech really fall on education schools in particular within higher ed, but just the way we educate young people. That's why I did my, you know, again, to come back to my TED talk, I tried to do in 12 minutes like my most basic lesson on what free speech is, what young people are getting wrong about it, what they have. They've been miseducated on it and what's scary and how bad this has gotten. FIRE does the campus free speech ranking and it's this massive undertaking. We pulled about 70 ,000 students this year, the biggest survey of student opinion about free speech in American history.

31:17And we have some really terrible news. For a long time, the students who tended to be more pro-violence in response to free speech, like it's okay in some circumstances, tended to be on the left. This year, the right has caught up. So right now, a little more than one in three students think that under extreme circumstances, speech can be met with violence. And in some schools, I think UC Davis, I think it was like 52 % of students said that. That's terrifying. The answer should be, that should be zero. So explain what that essentially means. That means that if you don't like an opinion that somebody is expressing, you can beat them up.

31:55Is that kind of where we're going with this? The way it's asked is that can you respond to speech with violence? So yeah, like potentially actually physically harm them because we also ask, is it OK to shout down speakers? Is it OK to block entrances? So we're clearly talking about something more extreme than those two options. And when it comes to shout down speakers, we're talking about that's more than like two thirds, I think, overall. And by shouting down, we don't mean heckle. A shout down is when you can't proceed with a speech because students are preventing it from happening. And I always point out that's mob censorship.

32:25That is not freedom of speech. That is the oldest form of censorship literally in the book where basically groups of people get together and like, I don't like this guy and you can't hear him because I don't like them. And that's imposing your will on everybody else. And that this is probably not a brilliant observation or anything, but it seems like that would make actual violence inevitable, because if you can just then go and do that, anything you feel strongly enough about, you can just say like, hey, let's just go throw things at this. guy until he stops talking. And we can just do that for everyone we don't like everywhere.

32:58Yeah. There's a great quote from a Supreme Court case about what's called the Heckler's Veto, which we're describing here, is basically we can't limit speech to just speech that isn't unpopular with bottle throwers. Essentially, it incentivizes violence response to speech once you actually let the violent perpetrator silence. And behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. For 2023 and 2024, those are the two worst years for shoutdowns in U.S. history, as best we can tell, when it comes to campuses, at least. That's what happens if you don't actually say, listen, if you respond to speakers on campus with shoutdowns or, God forbid, respond with violence, which has happened in cases, that's something that should get you punished at minimum, expelled, and in some of these cases, probably arrested.

33:43it. Yeah, look, it makes sense to me. It depends on what you're doing, of course. But there seems to be a lot of not just, hey, I don't want, I don't know, Ben Shapiro to speak at my university, but I don't want Ben Shapiro to speak at my university. And we are going to make it so people can't get in, make it so he can't get out. There was a couple of instances where professors were being false imprisonment is really what it was. They were like, can I go to the bathroom? No, you're going to stay here until you agree to I don't remember what it was. But Well, they did that at Barnard. Right. Yes.

34:11For one. They also did Evergreen State University to the university president. Yeah. Oh, that's what I'm talking about. And then they were like, yeah, the people who wouldn't let you go to the bathroom until you agreed to their demands, but you didn't feel unsafe. OK, sure, pal. He meekly requests if he can go pee and they say no and they laugh at him and it's kind of like, that's not OK. That's not liberalism. Insane. What about the idea that hate speech isn't free speech? I know it's hard to draw a bright line around that. It's a very common misconception, and certainly young people have this belief, but a lot of adults do as well, that hate speech is not protected speech in the United States.

34:46And actually what we have rather than hate speech codes is something called the Bedrock Principle, which comes out of a 1989 case called Texas v. Johnson that said that if the First Amendment means anything, it's that you can't ban speech in this country simply because it's offensive. And I think this is the right rule for a multicultural, diverse society, because like people's idea of what is offensive. I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of immigrants. Mother's British. My dad's Russian. They have wildly different ideas of what is and isn't offensive. Wow. And you grew up during the Cold War.

35:18That must have been an interesting dinner. Neither of my parents much like the Soviets. I suppose that makes sense. So essentially, I think about even just the kids I grew up with. They had all radically different ideas of what you should and shouldn't be allowed to say, at least their parents did. And then as I got to like fancier, more upper class places like Stanford, I was like, the upper class of the United States has some real ideas of what you shouldn't be allowed to say. And campuses, Ivy League campuses certainly have all sorts of quasi-Victorian ideas of what you should and shouldn't be allowed to say.

35:46So the bedrock principle is the right call. You can't ban speech just because it's offensive. And that's kind of the hallmark of hate speech laws. It's essentially like the main thing is that it's offensive. Now, what we don't have any issue with at FIRE are harassment laws, as long as you define harassment as being a pattern of behavior that is severe, persistent, or pervasive, that targets someone for discriminatory intent, that actually, in the case of higher ed, denies them the ability to fully engage in their education. It's a high standard, but it's how you actually prevent someone saying something rude from being harassment.

36:21And believe me, we've seen plenty of, probably thousands of examples of people trying to do that. but you change it into a pattern of harassing behavior. That's the difference between, hey, we don't like this class on Israel and we don't want Jews here or something, which is gross, but hate speech. Which is gross, yeah. As opposed to, we are going to make sure that these five Jewish professors can't ever do anything on campus because they're scared. Yeah, I mean, that would be easily harassment. That'd probably even be stalking. It depends on what you would actually mean by that. Just trying to give people an example so that they're not like, Because it could be a little bit confusing.

36:58Sure. So, for example, like people would ask us if the pro-Palestinian chant from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free, was protected. And the correct answer is if that's all you're doing, then sure, it's protected. I don't like the sentiment. I feel like a lot of people don't even know what river or what sea they're talking about, but they're still chanting it. But if you're doing that and you're like marching towards Jewish students and surrounding them and you're following them around campus, menacing in a way that actually indicates that you are targeting them to make their lives miserable, that can be harassment.

37:28And there was a lot of things that happened on campus that really crossed the line. Take Columbia, for example. Columbia was just a freaking mess on this kind of stuff. They allowed a lot of stuff they shouldn't have allowed. There was one video of this guy who later got kicked out, I think, for death threats against someone. There was an encampment on campus, and these Jewish students were trying to, like, get through their own campus. And the guy shouts out, Zionists have entered the camp! And students lock arms together and start marching towards them to push them out of their own quad, essentially.

38:01And it's, okay, that's harassment for sure. It's probably also assault because like when you're actually getting someone to go because they're reasonably afraid that they're going to be pushed out, that's assault. So campuses, I never want to pretend campuses haven't brought a lot of this on themselves, but that doesn't mean that Trump suddenly magically gets to have all sorts of powers that exceed his rightful powers under the First Amendment. Yeah, that was a scary time. And I understand, I can't imagine being Jewish on campus, openly Jewish, whatever on campus. It's crazy to me. Yeah, I've been saying this for a long time, and apparently there's one Twitter personality who will remain unnamed who basically made it sound like I'm the victim of some kind of Mossad op that suddenly I care about anti-Semitism on campus and believe it's a problem.

38:45And I've always pointed out, dude, I've been saying this since 2014. I've been saying this, pointing out that I do actually think that there is an anti-Semitism problem, both in elite higher ed and in schools in California. I don't know exactly why the latter. but at the same time that doesn't actually create sort of a blank check to just go after speech that you disagree with on Israel-Palestine. Sure exactly so you actually need to let people say some pretty gross racist shit in order to get rid of that type of belief in the long run? Yeah for me my whole point on freedom of speech is we think about freedom of speech wrong that essentially we have a tendency and I think this is part of the K through PhD miseducation practice we consider whether or not we agree with the speech at all, as if that matters.

39:28And we forget that's one, irrelevant. Even bigots have their own freedoms. But almost more importantly, as far as I'm concerned, from an epistemological standpoint, it's valuable to know what people really think. In almost all circumstances, you are not safer for knowing less about what people really think. And if they think horrible things, that's good to know. So if someone is a bigot, it's better that you actually know that they are a bigot. That is crucial information to have about your world. But if you create situations in which people are afraid to say what they really think, that, by the way, has also really demonstrable negative effects.

40:02So I was on the Bill Maher show and we were talking about these hate speech laws in Europe and the rise of anti-Semitism. But there's been laws on the books banning anti-Semitic speech in France, for example, I think since the 90s. But it's gotten way worse. Now, of course, some of that is immigration from countries that are very hostile to Israel in the first place. But also some of it is censorship doesn't change anyone's opinion. It just teaches them to, hey, since you can get in trouble, why don't you just talk to people who already agree with you? And here's the thing. One of the best established phenomena in social science is if you have people talk only to those whom they agree, they get radicalized in the direction of the group.

40:41And as I said, it really simply, of course, anti-Semitism got worse. You told all the anti-Semites that they can only talk to other anti-Semites. That's an interesting point. It's kind of like the Streisand effect. Remember, Barbara Streisand didn't want a photo of her house. I think it was out there in the internet was like, oh, you don't want a photo of your house floating around. So you're going to drop cease and desist letters everywhere. I am going to reap all 18 million people who are trolling right now are going to post this everywhere forever. And thus the Streisand effect and hate mongers.

41:11They love censorship because now it's like, oh, I got deplatformed because they're afraid of what I'm saying. You hear that crap all the time. The Nazis loved it. They love it. Like the literal Nazis. Yes, the literal Nazis. Yes. It's called the Weimar fallacy that essentially there's this argument by the sort of like the people who really want less free speech saying that essentially we had hate speech codes back in the 20s during Weimar Germany, we could have stopped Hitler. And that's stupid to begin with, because even before I knew some of the actual state of the law in the 20s, it's like, so you're saying that would have stopped people for voting one-third of the population voted for Nazis.

41:46That's a hard thing to overcome. But it actually turns out that Weimar Germany did have hate speech laws. They weren't called that, but they were specifically designed to protect people of faith, including Jewish people. Nazis went to jail for saying bad things about Jews. And guess what? They turned these into massive piarkus. that they would have like big parties for people when they got out of jail for saying anti-Semitic things. And they really exploited the fact that Hitler, he got a slap on the wrist for trying to overthrow the German government. Insurrection called the Beer Hall Putsch, in which I believe like at least one, but I think several police officers were killed.

42:26In a, normally in Germany, historically, someone doing that would be hung. But instead he was given a slap on the wrist, but then told he couldn't speak. He couldn't give speeches for several years. and the nazis love this they made big posters of hitler with like tape over his mouth saying out of two billion people in the world of course much smaller world only one cannot speak on a german campus and so they turn these things into coups for them meanwhile if you just let these guys talk at least in a free society they're going to turn more people off than on yeah i find that to be an interesting point you make because i'll hear something where i'm like oh this person makes some decent points.

43:03And then, I don't know, they'll go on Sam Harris. And I'm like, oh, never mind. But if you can't have that conversation, then a bunch of people are just going, oh, you know, I guess Jews did get kicked out of 109 countries, whatever, like the disinformation nonsense is. And it's like, oh, we can't talk about why that's BS because then I'm talking about anti-Semitism and we can't really have the other guy can't show up to the debate because he's going to get arrested for that. So I can't really counter that. And then they're just on whatever the equivalent is of Reddit or Twitter talking about it.

43:32And like you said, they get more and more radicalized because they're having the meeting in the basement somewhere instead of out in the open. That's the whole thing about Holocaust denial. Like when I'm over in Europe, I definitely get that treated as kind of like, OK, Mr. Free Speechy American weirdo. But surely Holocaust denial should be illegal. And I'm always like, why does that need to be illegal? Because here's the thing. The only way you actually are able to maintain that the Holocaust didn't happen is if no serious person ever gets a chance to challenge you because they never knew you were saying it in the first place.

44:03It is the easiest argument in the world to refute. But instead, we turn these Holocaust deniers into heroes. They don't have to go through the process of being like, how do you explain this? I think one of the theories, by the way, for Holocaust denial was something like yellow fever in the camps, which was largely Jewish-specific or something like that. They're not good arguments. They don't stand up unless they are whispered into your ears and you're told no one wants you to know this. I see. Yeah, that's interesting. I looked at Holocaust denial stuff before, not because I believed in it. My family has people who perish.

44:39I wasn't worried. Yeah, I didn't think so. But it's a podcast. You got to say everything or the email you get is I can't believe you toyed with the idea of Holocaust denial. And that's literally not what anybody said. Please listen to more than 10 seconds of an hour and a half long show. But you're right. You hear these arguments like, what was there was a movie about this where the guy was like, I don't believe that this was a thing because the gas chambers were designed so poorly that they couldn't have been gas chambers. And yeah, it's almost like they made them in a hurry and didn't care if the people were comfortable when they were inside.

45:08Is it a craftsmanship argument they're making there? Right. It was literally like, oh, if you really wanted to efficiently gas people, you would have made the hole for the cyclone be less deep or something because it's heavier than air. and it's i don't think they had their finest scientists on the case i think they would like throw this can in there and make it so that nobody can cover it trying to do it like the horrifying thing about it like the more you study it is like how much they were trying to do it on the cheap was whether the major goals because apparently bullets were expensive yeah it was wartime and it's just oh if this would have killed them faster and there's scratch marks on the wall so that can't be it and it's like rooms were stuffed with people and people's lungs were filtering out the poisons You have to make these like really gross arguments to show why they're wrong.

45:48But the arguments are really stupid in the first place. And that's also this is probably just mean. But when you hear these people talk, you go even before they make an argument, you usually go, yeah, this isn't the finest genetic specimen. This is not the most intellectual kind of guy that I would take. The Ubermensch. This is not somebody where I would go, I'm going to take this guy's word. This is an intellectually rigorous person. This is a weird fringe guy who, if he approached me on the road, I'd probably slink away and start running as soon as I increase the gap large enough. And so if you have these people hiding on the Internet, you're like, oh, this is well written and da, da, da, da.

46:26But no, I want them to be in front of a room full of people so I can go along with half the room and then just walk out the back. Yeah. Jonathan Rauch makes this argument. Like, so Jonathan Rauch, he's a famous defender of freedom of speech, brilliant dude, friend of mine, but also gay and married to a man. And like very early on was one of the like the real sort of advocates for gay marriage before almost anyone else was saying it. But he makes the point that, listen, the gay rights movement could have actually been stymied if there was, say, I don't know, like hate speech codes going back to like the 1960s that prevented people from saying, you know, what they actually thought about homosexuality.

47:05because they're like, we benefited from the fact that people could hear how pitiable and how bigoted our critics sounded. We're a numerical minority. We have to convince the majority to be on our side. And that's an uphill battle. And essentially, if you had this kind of forced silence, he doesn't think it would have happened. And it's one of these things, it's just really important that one of the key things about reality is trying to get a solid sense of what reality actually looks like. And you have no chance of doing that whatsoever if you've scared the hell out of everyone from saying what they really think.

47:36And again, it's those troubling beliefs that are oftentimes the most important thing to know. Yeah, I think that's a good argument. I should have brought this up earlier about the idea some people make that speech can lead to violence, hateful, inflammatory speech that can incite real world violence. So it should be restricted to prevent such outcomes. And you, of course, incitement is actually illegal, correct? It is, but it's a tough standard to meet. But in my response on the free press to the Charlie Kirk assassination. That was my point is like, can we finally retire this whole argument that speech is violence or speech can be violence, which is very rhetorically popular on campuses over the last 15 years, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny outside of sort of an echo chamber and an echo chamber.

48:17You can be like, well, that was so offensive. Then your speech was so offensive that my speech is self-defense. And that may make you sound righteous and passionate, but then you're not thinking it through to be like, okay, so that means you can respond with violence to someone else's speech, that means unquestionably they can respond in violence to you. It's still the same downward spiral that we're trying to protect the world against. Yeah, I think it was either you or Sam Harris said something like campuses are supposed to be safe physically, but very dangerous intellectually. That might even be like a Jonathan Hyde thing.

48:45I don't know. One of you smart dudes said that, and I loved it. I wrote it down. It was very fun to do Sam Harris's show. I just, I really liked that idea, but we've, of course, we have lost the plot on that. I mean, say physically dangerous intellectually. Now it's actually inverted. It's actually just dangerous intellectually and dangerous physically, now that I think about it. What about the idea that speech should be limited to prevent disinformation and lies? You know, we talked about the Biden administration limiting or essentially pressuring social media companies to kick people off for COVID stuff.

49:14But I don't know, man, look, devil's advocate, false and misleading statements are harmful. And we got to restrict those to protect public health and elections and trust. And I don't know, you know, you could make that case as long as nobody's fighting against me. It sounds good, right? Yeah. It's one of these things where the libertarians are very right on this. And I feel like otherwise intelligent people miss this fact that sounds almost trivial, but has to be remembered every single time. Laws have to be enforced by people. And people are just as biased as you are, if not more, or maybe less.

49:46They're going to have their own power interests, their own motivations, their own incentives. And you don't want to give power the ability to define what truth is. You don't want to make the president of the United States the arbiter of truth. So the way we actually have figured out how we can tell what the world actually looks like is first to accept the fact that truth is very hard to know. This goes entirely against our own senses and our own intuitions. We assume that what we see and what we assume is true. Of course we do. There are assumptions. But one of the things that was powerful about the enlightenment, I think Harari's characterization of the enlightenment as actually being the discovery of our own ignorance is exactly the way we should talk about it.

50:29Because it was more about being like, wow, if we start testing these things, we're wrong. We're wrong, wrong, wrong on so many of our most sacred assumptions. They just don't fit once you start actually applying scientific method to it. And I think that realization, the truth is that hard to know is something that really people need to understand. So how to figure out what's true, at least provisionally, is something I called structured friction, where essentially scientific methods, part of it, peer review, which doesn't work well at all at this point is part of it, but also things like checks and balances in the U.S.

51:02government or lots of forms of government, things where you have actually separate entities with separate motivations challenging you and preferably poking holes in what we think is actually true. And I believe we don't have nearly enough of this right now. I think that higher education is way too group thinky. Journalism is way too group thinky. Like we need actually to really commit to structures, not just pinky swear to be better, structures that challenge what we think is true in the first place. But the last thing you want is power being in charge of deciding what is and is not true. Yeah, because that's kind of 1984, right?

51:35That's just like the point of that book was largely that they can just decide what the press prints. And if they decide that history needs to change. They just have to reprint all the newspapers or whatever that was back in Reddit a while ago. But that and rats are scary. Politicians can lie on camera and keep their jobs. I mispronounce quinoa once at Whole Foods and I'm socially dead. Not cool. What is cool, however, are the following deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Cup of Justice podcast. Ever feel like you want to understand the legal system better?

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53:14True Sunlight is the intersection of journalism, true crime, and systemic corruption. We continue to shed light on Stephen Smith's case and Alex Murdoch's co-conspirators. But also, we like to take deep dives into other cases around the country. True Sunlight empowers listeners to understand their legal and judicial systems with our unique brand of pesky journalism. Listen to True Sunlight wherever you get your podcasts or visit truesunlight.com to learn more. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate and quinoa eating listeners do, which is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors who make this show possible.

53:54All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, email us, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. We're happy to service codes for you. It's that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Greg Lukianoff. What about the idea that free speech hurts marginalized groups? So now another critique is that, hey, free speech, it just entrenches inequality. It hurts vulnerable communities. If somebody has less social power and they're constantly subjected to slurs and harassment and racism and stuff like that, doesn't unlimited speech just deepen that imbalance?

54:35It's one of those things where if you're talking about actual harassment, like we've talked about before, or things like things like true threats, can you ban that? Yes, absolutely. But when it comes to what is the remedy for minorities, whether they're numerical or racial, just people who are not in the majority, when they are never going to get to the majority vote. And this is the way I explain what I think has happened. It was about 15 years ago, again, I started noticing younger people were coming to fire, thinking that free speech is the argument of the three B's, the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron.

55:08And I have to explain, that's just terrible history. Like the robber baron, as in like the merchant class, like the wealthy people, they do fine because they're rich and powerful. They do fine in almost any society, with some exceptions. And so much of the story of parliaments is the nobility going to the merchant class to ask for money and then getting a say in government. So they do fine. They don't need some special protection for freedom of speech. And when it comes to the bully and the bigot, once you get to democratic societies, they call the shots, even if they are bullies and bigots, if they have 51 percent of the vote or a plurality of the vote, if they have enough.

55:44You literally only need a special protection for free speech, like the First Amendment, for two types of speech, speech that is unpopular with the majority or speech that is unpopular with, and I use this term just saying that people need to understand we have one, everywhere does, an elite or also known as the ruling class. Like essentially the people who are in charge of enforcing the law, the most powerful people in society. You only need it for those two scenarios. So why so many young people today think that this argument is compelling, that essentially the powerless need power to have more power in hopes that we would actually better protect the powerless.

56:21It's because that's what they've been learning in K through PhD, because it is a monoculture. It is a situation within that monoculture when people say to themselves, but I'm in charge of speech now. And they very rarely say I'm power now, but that's what they are. They say this is limiting our power to better protect minorities and the disadvantaged. But guess what? Even when they do this in higher ed time and time again, it works to the interest of, just like you'd expect it for the government, to power and their own interests. And I've been watching this for 25 years so that it's not an accident that John Lewis, Nelson Mandela, Mahabha Gandhi, Frederick Douglass, Ida B.

57:00Wells, Martin Luther King, Frank DePine and the gay rights movement, they were all such strong defenders of freedom of speech because they knew it was one of the only tools they had against the will of the majority and the will of the powerful. Speaking of powerful, our robber barons or whatever you want to call them, I guess our elite, they own a lot of places where discourse happens like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, whatever. What role should free speech principles play when it comes to private companies moderating content? Because their house, their rules. Why should platforms be forced to host speech they don't want?

57:33But that's scary because not only, yes, it's a private company and you can't force them to do stuff or you can if you're the Biden administration or the Trump administration. But then also it's how everyone talks. So is it really? Yes, it's a private company, but it's also public square. I don't know. It's just this weird gray area for me in certain ways. I get it. And I understand the instinct. And we talked a lot about it. Like what happens if one jillionaire owns the public square? And that was a concern I took seriously because you want to avoid outright plutocracy that essentially like rich people get to control or a rich person gets to control everything.

58:07But this was proven to not be true. So people are making this argument, particularly on the right, but also some people on the left were making this argument with regards to Twitter and Facebook, that essentially we have to pass laws that will limit the owners of these social media platforms' ability to kick people off for speech that would be protected. That's what the right was primarily arguing, Texas and Florida. But in California, they were arguing that now these platforms have to police hate speech or heavily imply that they have to police hate speech because they have to report it to the government.

58:40That means they have to police it even if they don't want to. And those are laws that FIRE flat out opposes because it introduces power's role in deciding what these institutions will do rather than letting the free market decide, for example. but there was some real pushback on this saying like oh my god but look like a handful of people own like the entire public square and almost no sooner had this argument been made that elon musk is trying to buy twitter elon musk buys twitter and then everybody runs to blue sky they run to threads which is still a thing believe it or not they run to mastodon and it's proven that this is not a monopoly pretty fast they run to substack which i love substack i have a sub and that essentially it's that competition, that ability to move that actually best protects it.

59:30But as soon as you introduce power's role, the government's role to be like, I now have a regulation that I can hold over all these guys, prepare for it to be abused. And particularly under the current circumstance where it doesn't seem like there's anything holding back the government from utilizing every lever of power it has over every institution it affects, that's a scary possibility. Yeah, no, I definitely agree there. But another counter argument to free speech is that this is the digital age. You got cancel culture. There's deep fakes, viral nature of online outrage and how a lot of people are arguing, hey, free speech, this is a pretty outdated principle, man.

1:00:06We're a long way from somebody printing up something off a printing press and handing it out in the middle of the village or downtown New York or something like that. I mean, come on. So how do you convince skeptics that old principles of free speech are still relevant in the digital age? Yeah. Yeah, if you have an entirely new technology that is not very analogous to anyone that's previously listed, then you have to do some real thinking. But even as we're thinking through AI, like the analogies for the most part are very similar to pre-existing technology. And of course, some of those analogies are with pretty recent technology, like, for example, the Internet.

1:00:41And some of those First Amendment principles, they're perfectly portable to a variety of different settings. So, for example, a very basic one is viewpoint discrimination. And that means that as bad as censorship is, like if you're saying on this platform, nobody should talk about economics. That's not great. But if you actually say on this platform, nobody can advocate anything but, I don't know, free market economics or for that matter, or the other side, Marxist economics. That's something where you'd feel more troubled by it. And that essentially it goes for the principle that if you're allowing discussion at all, you can't simply ban people because of their opinion.

1:01:20So I think a lot of the principles that exist out there. Also, this is where I actually call for more policing of social media. I think social media companies' unwillingness to enforce prohibitions on true threats has undermined a lot of young people's faith in free speech in the first place and falsely caused them to conclude, in many cases, that threats are protected. And that's bad. That essentially, like saying, like, I know where you live. I'm going to come to this address. I'm going to kill you. That's a threat. That would place a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death. But by not actually reporting those to the police or the police actually looking into them, you create this misimpression that it's, oh, if this is a free speech, I don't want it.

1:01:59And then you have to explain it's not protected. There's not a country in the world where threats like that are actually protected, nor should it be. You're not wrong. Not that I was ever under the impression that threats were protected, but I get threats. I get people saying, if I ever see you, I'm going to punch you in the back of the head or hit you with a rock and kill you and no one's going to find out. And it's on Instagram. and I'll report that. And then four months later, they're like, we found that this content does not violate our policies. And I'm like, so this was not automated because it wouldn't have taken four months.

1:02:27So some human ostensibly looked at this and thought, that's fine. You can say that you're going to hit Jordan Harbinger in the back of the head with a rock and kill him. Whatever. They just don't care. I don't know. I have a dear friend who's actually facing some real scary threats. And it was funny because she was basically saying we shouldn't have cancel culture in response to Charlie Kirk and weirdly like a left winger. came after her real of that and really was saying things specifically about knowing where you live and all this kind of stuff. And it's okay. But at least in this case, the police were taking it seriously.

1:02:57Yeah, I didn't report it to the police. I should have because it was from a guy who owns a boxing gym in Chicago. And I'm like, everyone can find you. You just don't have any fear about it. It was like some Israel Palestine thing. It was just like actually crazy. I should probably go ahead and do something about that. But it sort of just blended in with the other death threats I was getting. So I don't know. It didn't stand out that much. I've gotten a fair amount of them over the years. And in the light of the murder of Charlie Kirk, it makes you that much more worried about not taking him seriously.

1:03:22You're absolutely right. If we start eroding free speech, even with the best intentions, what do you think the long term consequences will be? Not just for politics, but for everyday people, because a lot of people are like, I checked out of this political crap. I don't care anymore. Those people should still care. Right. Yeah. And here's the thing that everyone needs to understand. There is not a moment in censorship history where the censor or the advocates for this didn't think they were doing something very good. Oftentimes they thought they were doing something blessed. They thought they were doing something that would save the species, save humanity, save your soul.

1:03:55The most dangerous censors, frankly, are the ones who believe they're saving the world or saving the country. So they always think they're motivated by goodness. Good intentions can't protect you because if you're the kind of person who looked at the history of censorship and said, that all sounds fine to me, then I don't really know what to tell you. Except that actually, I do know what to tell you. It's going to be worse because when you look back to, like, say, Red Scare No. 1 or censorship, the Civil War or the great comic book scare, a real thing of the 1950s, they didn't have the technology to censor you at the scale that we have now and to punish you for speech that we have now.

1:04:31So we need to be even more protective of freedom of speech going into the future. On a personal note, though, what gives you hope that free speech will survive this current wave of skepticism? Because I think depending on how old you are, this seems pretty serious what's going on right now. It is very serious. And the reason why it's so serious is that they used to be able to rely on the civil libertarian aspect of the left, which is the tradition I come from, and a libertarian aspect on the right, which is probably the thing on the right that I've always related the most to. And both of those factors have been badly marginalized on each side.

1:05:06So like the civil libertarian left is very weak. and the libertarian right has been pushed aside largely by populism, which sneers at libertarianism. So the political climate, there isn't a clear constituency for free speech other than older people in the middle who get freedom of speech. So it's a very worrisome time. And it's the kind of thing that once you lose it, it's very hard to get it back. Why do I still have some hope though is one, when you look at the polling, Americans still really value freedom of speech. And I think they could be convinced to do it again, but also because free speech works.

1:05:38Free speech is how you know what problems you have in your society, what problems you have in your community, what problems that are coming your way. Free speech is how you innovate. It's how you actually make money, how you actually know things scientifically. It is huge advantages to have a, for that matter, even just having a company that internally allows freedom of speech and dissent. Huge advantages. And the research, by the way, is getting better on the role of dissent, not worse. Dissent in a cockpit, in the operating room. All of these things actually help improve things. So I'm optimistic that free speech is effective in addition to being morally right.

1:06:14So that's one of the things that gives me hope. Do I, however, think we're currently in a crisis? And I think we're in a crisis not just in the United States, but in the larger world. We are. And this is why I think fire and I were put on this earth is to defend freedom of speech, even in the dark times. You mentioned that it's a problem in the United States. Tell us, can we do like a few minutes on why it's a problem internationally? Because I think a lot of people do view this as an American problem that they don't have to worry about because they live in Europe or they live in Asia or they live in Australia, whatever it is.

1:06:47Oh, you poor deluded Brits. Like how much they think everything's fine there. I'm just kind of like, you got to be kidding me, dude. I did something on the BBC where they got really mad at me because, yeah, we've got issues in the United States. We've got serious issues in the United States. You're arresting like 12 ,000 people a year for speech. That's insane. And you're a fraction of ourselves. They did a whole piece on trying to get a sense of scale. So you're never getting invited back to the BBC. Oh, yeah. They love me. My mom's British. Actually, no, they want to invite me back because I think, what do you think now, Mr.

1:07:16Lukianov? It's even worse now. Scoreboard Lukianov. It got worse since last time I talked to you, but still the scale's not good on your side. But let's take the unfree world first. China, Iran in particular, they have been able to really take the nightmarish potential of AI and use it against its own citizenry in a way that actually makes a situation from worse to worse or worse or worse in Iran and China. Like the extent to which it allows for mass surveillance. Some of the examples is they can turn off your car remotely if you're a woman in Iran driving and your hijab is not done quite right.

1:07:50Yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. Terrifying. And of course, Russia is a mafia state and they don't allow free speech at all. They'll shoot you for it. But the European Union is terrible on free speech. And it's also the place where innovation goes to die at this point. But they have everything from national security laws to hate speech laws that they enforce in ridiculous ways. They have this idea of the right to be forgotten. That means that if I did something pretty terrible five years ago, like I can have that link explaining that I was guilty of domestic abuse removed from Google, essentially.

1:08:20or at least delisted. The kind of thing that Americans, when they come back from a date, take for granted, you can find out, hey, I really like this guy, but. Oh, look, he's a sex offender. Oh, he just got out of prison. That explains the resume gap, right? That kind of. Yeah, exactly. But for five years, he seemed to be doing nothing. But in Britain and the Anglosphere, I mean, like Ireland nearly passed a law that would punish hate speech. Canada was considering just last year a law that would actually give you life in prison for speech crime. And to give you a sense of like how bad 12 ,000 people a year are in Britain, back in 1920, we had the first Red Scare in the United States.

1:08:56Red Scare, by the way, was the result of a massive bombing campaign by Marxists and anarchists and like really scary times in the United States in 1919 as the mass murders were going on during the Bolshevik Revolution. So people had some reason to be freaked out. We arrested about 2 ,000 people a year during the Red Scare. And that's bad, by the way. That is actually really quite bad, even though we were in a genuine crisis and even though the First Amendment didn't really apply in any meaningful way way back then. Only about 1925 that it really had a lot of legal meaning. And also at the time, by the way, the population of the U.S.

1:09:31was twice what Britain's is now. So that's like more like they're arresting 12 ,000 people a year, and that doesn't even include the stuff that involves the national security laws they have or the non-crime hate offenses, which number in the hundreds of thousands overall. So it's a genuine disaster over there. But Brit after Brit, it's kind of like, oh, it's not too bad. And I'm like, I'm willing to bet you're no more than one or two degrees of separation from someone who has had a visit from the police or a run-in for something that they've said. Non-crime hate incidents. That is that if you say something that is considered hateful, you will get a visit from the police to take down that you did this.

1:10:11Or it could be actually considered something that could get you arrested. One example of this was Rishi Sunak was being criticized by fellow East Asians. It was a Pakistani Brit who had a poster of saying, Sunak is a coconut, by which they mean brown on the outside and white on the inside. Insulting. Sure. It was intended to be insulting. And she was arrested for that. And it's like the kind of stuff that we're like no this is completely insane and yeah it's not hard to find videos of this stuff all over the internet people actually taping like why they got arrested and of course the grand linehan thing that happened when this guy he got arrested at the airport with five armed guards showing up because he he made some mean-spirited jokes about trans men in female spaces is that a comedian i don't even know who this person is oh he's the guy who wrote the it crowd, which was pretty well known.

1:11:03He did Father Ted, which was pretty well known. He was one of the best known comedy writers in Britain. Wow. Going after the comedian thing, because that's one of those, I don't know if it's a sacred space, but it certainly is a space where we have decided that you can say crazy stuff and get away with it for the sake of humor, speaking truth to power, social commentary. It's almost like the first line of maybe not defense, but it's certainly a canary in the coal mine when you see somebody like Jimmy Kimmel or whoever, honestly, getting pushed off the air. As a podcaster, it's like, again, I'm not as relevant as Jimmy Kimmel and I never will be, but it's a little bit scary that that's even a thing that can happen.

1:11:37Yeah, that was something that we even did a documentary back in 2015 called Can We Take a Joke, telling young people about the story of Lenny Bruce, you know, as a comedian who was arrested for rude jokes back in the 1960s. He died of an overdose. But one of the things that drove him into drug addiction was the fact that he had to defend himself so often. And it's a very sad story. And we started noticing that comedians were saying that the atmosphere was not so friendly to free speech, particularly on campus. We started being told this by comedians way back in 2012, 2013. Greg Lucchiano, thank you for coming on.

1:12:10Are you now on tour? What are you doing now? I am incredibly excited to be at home for a whole week. Been promoting the book on a lot of podcasts and running around like a crazy person trying to defend free speech from all comers. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show, man. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Excellent. It was fun talking to you. Thank you. Likewise. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show about the warning signs for civil war. There were times when I was writing that I myself started to get terrified. Is this right? Am I getting this right? Because what I'm saying is going to hit people hard.

1:12:49There have been hundreds of studies of civil wars. The group that tends to start these wars are the once dominant groups that are in decline. The group that has been politically, socially, economically dominant since the very beginning of this country, white Christian males for the most part. America is going through this radical demographic transition from a white majority country to a white minority country. White working class men have declined on most social and economic measures that hasn't happened with any other demographic group. And there's a subset of this population that's deeply resentful of that, that's deeply threatened by that, and truly, truly believe that it's their patriotic duty to do something about this.

1:13:37January 6th was so public. It was so obvious. This is part of a far-right, white supremacist, anti-federal government movement here in the United States. We know that some of the far-right militias, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters, actively encouraged members to join the military, to join law enforcement. If you continuously portray this as these are just crazy individuals, then you remain blind to what's actually the cancer that's growing slowly from within. To hear whether we're on the cusp of a civil war here in the United States, check out episode 718 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

1:14:23Thanks to Greg for coming on. All things Greg Lukianoff will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, I'd love to see you there. You guys love hitting reply on these. I love writing them. They're very specific and practical. They'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It really is a good companion to the show.

1:14:52A great one, in fact. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show, it's created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

1:15:22If you know somebody who's interested in free speech, interested in cancel culture, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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