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can live without, the wow! is there for customers. speed, reliability, value, and choice. now more than ever it all starts with great internet . wow! along with these television companies support cspan 2 as a public service. it's been five years since you cowrote "the coddling of the american mind." since then you, there have been quite a number of books that have come out talk about free speech the rise of the liberalism in places where free speech is supposed to rain on campus, journalism companies, et cetera. what motivated you to write this five years later, and how is the canceling of the american mind different than what else we see out there? >> you know, i have been defending free speech on college campuses for 22 years. i am a first amendment specialized attorney who is

also specialized in academic freedom for years now. i had an opportunity to write a follow-up to "coddling the american mind that could be really interesting, because we discovered this amazingly brilliant 20-year-old named ricky schlaht. she is a young woman. she actually is and huge fan of "coddling the american mind," and she said listen i dropped out of school during covid because i thought all the problems that you are talking about, and i wanted to write about the themes, so she was such a great writer. we immediately made her a fire fellow. and after a year of working with her was so impressed, we should write a follow-up to "coddling the american mind. we will add the perspectives of a gen z young woman, but i was seeing people really sticking their entire reputations on the idea that cancel culture was a

hoax or didn't even happen, and i can tell you from working on campuses this long, i didn't just happen. this is the kind of thing they will be studying in 50 to 100 years just like we study the red scare today. i'm like that's it i've had it. i'm going to put this all in one book. i'm going to make three primary points. one, cancel culture israel. it is happening on an historic scale, and by the way we take on both left and right which is very important to a lot of people. the middle part is basically about reconceptualizing how you think about cancel culture. to think about it is only the most extreme way of winning arguments without winning arguments that essentially rather than persuade somebody, we've learned this very high school like tactic, which by the way i argue it in some ways comes from junior high school, but i can get into that later, to just scare people out of disagreeing with you or ruin their lives if they do. the third part is us beginning the process of trying to find a way out of this madness, and trying to really make people

understand that cancel culture isn't just about, you know, the more than 1000 professors have been targeted, for example. it is about what it does to trust in expertise. if you see that for example, carol hooven at harvard, who was starting to be forced out initially by adi administrator for going on to fox news to talk about her book, and she said she made the point that we should be kind to transgender people. we should be, we should use their pronouns, but as the author of a book on testosterone and evolutionary biology, we have to recognize that biological sex is real, and it matters scientifically. that led to a whole campaign against her at harvard, and she got extremely depressed and she is now leaving harvard. now, that is sad all by itself. that is cancel culture. that is a liberal all by itself. but what does that do to people's faith and expertise on this topic? the public isn't stupid. looking at a situation, even at

harvard someone is making a modest point and nobody disagreed with up until very recently can be targeted and forced out of their job? why should i believe anybody on this topic anymore, because i now know to say anything other than the approved line can get you canceled even at harvard. i think people really need to get that cancel culture is much more devastating to our shared world of facts than people understand. >> we are saddled with that term "cancel culture," which you acknowledge and everyone else acknowledges is just there for lack of a better term. let's realize it and talk about it. what is your working definition of it, and explain briefly perhaps to those skeptics, those people who've been as you say in the book gas lighted about cancel culture that it exists. what is the document terry evidence, perhaps with comparatives to the aforementioned red scare and such. >> absolutely. our definition is a historical one. we are trying to make an

argument for thinking of cancel culture as a specific historical era, and that's partially from the fact that as a first amendment lawyer interested in the history of censorship that moments of what i call "mass censorship incidents" all-eight. the sedition act of 1978 is the easiest one. the victorian age probably the longest one. the first red scare, only a couple of years, and red scare two which is 11 years and also known as mccarthyism. we have all of these terms to describe moments when lots of people start losing their jobs or otherwise are targeted for their speech. and part of our definition is for speech that would be protected under the first amendment. what we mean by that which we ask plane in an appendix because we don't want about the book down too much is that as an analogy to public employee law, a way to bring in a great deal of nuance and common sense to a definition about when we think it is not canceling to fire somebody and when we believe it very much is, and we also talk about cancel culture

being the culture of fear that resulted from this situation of people losing their jobs for their opinions. when it comes to the data, as i just mentioned, we know we are only seeing a tiny fraction of this, and i will give a point of comparison. i started my job around 9/11. actually i landed in philadelphia to find an apartment to start my new job at fire at 9:10 a.m. on 9/11. all of my first cases were defending professors who said things about the attacks, including the very first letter i ever bought was in defense of a professor that joke that anyone who can blow up the pentagon has my vote. this was considered to be a very bad attack on academic freedom. at the time it certainly felt like it was, and i defended more left-leaning professors and more right-leaning professors in different cases who got in trouble for kind of different things. there was another professor, mike adams, and we talked about in the book, who got in trouble

for criticizing a student to set america had the attacks coming on a giant list serve on campus. so looking at the data, there were 17 professors targeted. that's bad. that is a large number of professors in a normal historical year, certainly since the law was established between 1957 and 1973. this is considered an historic moment. three professors of our fired, all three of which were fired for reasons of which don't implicate academic freedom. church hill, he was fired for gross academic's conduct, which was real. valerian, my first time defending him was on tv. he was eventually fired not for his speech but for ties to international terrorism, and the third one was for not actually teaching her class, rather giving an extended lecture on something completely unrelated to it, which is something they can fire you for it. so, three firings considered a big deal over the course of years. i am now talking about an era

in which, we know for a fact, we know the numbers are much larger than this, there have been 1000 targeting so professors with about two thirds of them resulting in some kind of punishment. two thirds, and nearly 200 of them at least through last july were fired with i think 40+ tenured professors being fired. the standard number from mccarthyism, before the law existed, by the way, before people knew you could not fire communist professors for being excessively ideological, that didn't happen until 1957. mccarthyism is 1947 to 1957. the standard at the time, the biggest study that they did of mccarthyism at the time, and of course we are still in cancel culture, was a fan something like 62 or 63 professors fired for communist beliefs, about 90 professors fired four beliefs overall, and it is usually rounded up to about 100 being the standard estimate. i think with time we can now say that there were probably more than that, but still, we

should not be counting the accounting we did of the time because we are still in the middle of this thing. you are talking about three times as many communists that they believe were fired. you were talking about twice as many as the standard evidence of mccarthyism, and we also know that this is an underhand, because one in six because i really want to stress this, one in six professors say that they have been threatened with investigation for their academic freedom, or actually investigated, and about 9% of students say that they have been investigated. one more detail. about 9%, during mccarthyism, this same study talked to thousands of professors and they found that about 9% of them were saying that they were self censoring. that is really bad to be clear. one in 10 people self censoring on campus is really bad. and we did her own polling on

this. these aren't exact comparisons because we also asked them to self censor on social media, which did not exist at the time, but we found the number was closer to 90% today. i think that at this point if you are saying that cancel culture doesn't exist you are being willfully blind. i have watched, this is kind of my big ideological test. when i mentioned the fast -- fact that one third of those punishments initially start from activism on the right, sometimes turning point usa and conservative organizations that have something called the professor watchlist, sometimes fox news, for example, one third of those punishments initially come from the right. that suddenly makes people take this issue more seriously, i immediately take them less seriously, because i am politically left of center myself, but you have to care about people you don't agree with getting censored, not because it could be you next, but because it is wrong. >> we are talking about academia here, and a fire, which is the foundation for individual rights and expression, only recently

rebranded to expression before it was education. you have worked on campus issues for a long time and in many ways this begins, the laboratory is the campus and then it jumps the banks and goes into journalism. it goes into science. he goes into psychotherapy which hopefully will talk about a little bit later which is crazy. >> it's the most depressing chapter to research. >> let's stay with academia for the moment before we go onto the other ones. what is your working theory for why it exploded so much in 2014 in academia, and what were the sort of mechanisms with which or by which it exploded? >> why 2014 is the question we get a lot. one reason why we did not spend too much time trying to answer that in canceling his we spent the entire book, my book with the jonathan height, "coddling of the american mind," explaining why we think the students who were hitting campus or in 2014 were so different. by the way that is partially

the answer, is that gen z started hitting campus, and if you follow cancel culture, you saw a lot of professors getting in trouble , a lot of students getting in trouble, demand for new speech codes in 2014, and it wasn't subtle. it was something very noticeable at the time. and then you start seeing sort of corporate cancel culture as the students start graduating and moving on into jobs. that is one of the reasons why it was so hopeful to write with a 23-year-old, the brilliant ricky schlaht. she pointed out, you know, that, you know, we talk about cancel culture beginning in 2014 , but i grew up with this. this was the way we fought in junior high school. like i mentioned before. the thing that really changed the social dynamic, which we talk a lot about in "coddling the american mind," and i know that people are tired of hearing that social media changed the world, but i try to get in his article expedition on my you have to take this seriously as a major shift -- i'm going to say it, for the

species. here is why. as a first amendment lawyer, and this is how much of a nerd i am for this stuff, i took every class at stanford offered at on the first amendment, and that when i ran out of gas as i took six classes on censorship during the tutor danish d the reason why there was this explosion of censorship under the tudor dynasty was because of the original disruptive technology, the printing press. people, we think about all the benefits the printing press gave us, and over the long term it absolutely did. it was transformative. there could've been no scientific revolution without it. it could've been no american or french revolution without it. in the short term it led to an increase in the witch trials, because the bestseller was a book about how to identify a witch. it led to, you know, of course, gross civil unrest. it led to religious wars. it has a lot of blood on its hands, and in the 1520s and 1530s my henry viii tried to

put the genie back in the bottle camino, to make this thing more or less go away, and spoiler, he failed. that was just a situation in which you introduce several million people into the global conversation. social media has done something that's never even, we have never even come vaguely close to. we added at least an extra billion people into the global conversation, and there is no way to escape that without it being incredibly disruptive. so, the way it actually turned into cancel culture in some ways is tumbler, or actually, tumbler plays a role as well, not to make a joke there, but a lot of these norms for how you frankly kind of bully each other or fight it out in junior high school, the were things that were refined on smaller social media platforms, and then they were kind of a normal part of gen z life by the time they actually got to higher education. social media is ultimately the

reason why a lot of these trends sped up, and it also created new trends, like i just said, tumbler, or the right- wing version of it, all of these kind of nasty environments where people battle it out for social status using words alone, but white was higher ed so vulnerable to this? the reason why higher ed was so vulnerable to this is because both natural forces, more or less, that essentially is higher ed became, had less and less viewpoint diversity, as it became more monolithically left- leaning, and that applies to both professors and even more so by the way to the rates of administrators over the past several decades, as they, as viewpoint diversity went down, that it shouldn't be a surprise that when people are in power, they start seeing free speech as part of the problem. if there's going to be censorship, is going to be them doing it. there's a very normal temptation of power to become pro-censorship once you are in

power, but that is the natural fact that essentially if you don't have enough heterogeneity in your group, there is a tendency, as my co-author likes to say, to treat them very much like religious beliefs and to protect them, but that's the unintentional part. i want to be very clear, though. there has been a very intentional plan to turn academia, and even the left against free speech going back to 1965. we point at herbert recluse to be the pioneer of this, as a marxist, at the same time pinnacle of marxism, but wanted to follow the vision. he was a big fan of mao in 1970 . he wrote an article, and he was considered the guru of the new left, a very influential guy. he wrote an article in 1965

called "repressive tolerance," which is very explicit on the idea that he believes to have a truly free and equal society we need to repress the bad guys. who are the bad guys? the so-called right-wing, the so-called conservatives. i have to go back and read it to remember it is very much a call for we should have free speech, the good guys, which basically means his illiberal version of the left as opposed to my more libertarian version of the left. they should have free speech, but they need in order to make their utopia dictatorial powers to punish the speech of people who are, that they deem regressive and right-wing. so in this, the torch was picked up on this by people like richard delgado, mary matt suda, the original people who started the school of critical theory and law schools, and this led very quickly, just 20 years after the beginning of the free speech movement in 1964, it led to speech codes being passed on college campuses , which really started to come into their own in 1985. by 1985 yuri have universities

adopting speech codes, and it is very intentional limitations on freedom of speech. the article came out in 1980, and it was by 1989 you start having legal challenges to it, and from 1989 to 1995, all of these codes are defeated in court. everybody thinks, you know, political correctness was this crazy thing and it's gone away, and you know, thank goodness, because the professors and the students got less enamored with enlightened censorship. i think a lot more kids of the boomers started hitting college, and they were pretty good on free speech. the problem was that it didn't, there wasn't any serious reform that took place after 1995. there was just a sense of the problem had somehow taken care of itself, and what happened after that, and i wrote about this in a magazine, the first great age of political correctness, which is 1985 to 1995, since it was what met

with public scorn and the speech codes were defeated, people thought think goodness that is over. what actually happened is the administrative class in universities hung onto these idea. by the time i started at f.i.r.e. in 2001, something like 79% of colleges have red light speech codes. even though they were refuted in court, we found that schools all over the country had speech codes that were identical to the ones defeated between 1985 in 1995. so i felt like i spent a lot of my career trying to warn people that there is something bad coming here. there are really troubling attitudes about freedom of speech that exist in higher ed among administrators that are, you know, also filtering down to k-12 through schools, and we are eventually going to be paying for this. i thought when i wrote my short book on freedom of speech in

2014 that payback might be in the distant future and i've been only shocked to discover it happened a lot faster than i ever expected. higher and was uniquely primed for cancel culture. i think it has done a really poor job of teaching people how to argue fairly or how to win arguments by actually persuasion for example. it is not a shock that things got much worse their first. what is a little shocking is how bad it got in the last six years. >> you referenced eei or diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in academia, which also go pretty heavily down through k-12. cues that is a way to get into other areas of science, of journalism, even covid, if that applies, how did eei has been part of the story of spreading cancel culture. >> i mean, it's one of these things rate is a great marketing coup to have diversity equity, and inclusion in your name. people including me are inclined to like that.

it sounds as well -- swell. unfortunately the way it's interpreted and meant on campus is actually a bundle of very specific assumptions about human nature, about group identity, all of these kinds of things. it is something that we have seen dei administrators come up in case after case that we have seen at f.i.r.e. , including i was the person who videotaped when nicholas chris hackett is was surrounded by angry students and being shouted at at yale, and i videotaped it to show that he held himself incredibly calmly, because i knew at that point from having enough experience on campus that if it actually turned into a he said-she said between him and the student group, he would be out of a job. i needed to show that at the time. but i didn't know was that there are three dei administrators in that group,

that weren't shouting, but they were there and not raining the students in. the carol hooven case, started by a dei administrator. the case at hanford law school which embarrassed me to death, it has a whole chapter devoted to it. this is a case where a fifth circuit judge, a conservative fifth circuit judge to be clear, trump appointee, was invited to speak at stanford law school. i want to stress here, there is nothing weird about conservative judges speaking at stanford. it happens all the time. but in this case, administrators met with angry students about kyle duncan speaking at stanford, met with him for hours, and then suddenly when he shows up, there is an angry mob. before he talks, someone shouts to him, " i hope your daughters get raped ." and there is a shutdown, precisely a 10 minute shutdown for he talks, and then this administrator gets up, and

she reads from a prepared speech. she has a prepared speech, a seven minute long speech about whether or not the juice of free speech is worth the squeeze. i know it sounds weird. she also makes the point that she sort of targets the professor, the judge as well, saying, you know, think of all the pain you have caused by being here. is the juice of that pain worth the squeeze of having you here. it's like, this is a law school and this is a fifth circuit judge. he is one step below the supreme court. that is kind of a big deal, and then as soon as she leaves and turns into nonstop heckling, but they let him get some words and in response. it is generally just a very ugly situation over all. we cover it, we give it its own entire chapter to illustrator larger point that cancel culture is just one way of winning arguments without winning arguments. we point out all these other very academic tactics to never

actually address the meaning of what somebody says. the most disturbing thing to come out of the dei movement on campus are dei statements requiring dei statements to be admitted to school in the first place , in order to be admitted to graduate school, in order to attend conferences at this point, in order to camino, participate in any number of things that scholars have always anticipated in. you actually need to do your dei statement. last time i checked, something like 50% of large schools do this and it's heading more to 75%. here is why you should be concerned. we have a chapter called the conformity gauntlet, that if you are going to read one chapter that is when you should read, because most of you, let's say this. i don't think i have to convince you that there is no way to make something like a dei not a political litmus test, that basically is asking you to state your politics and

see if we approve of this. for those of you who are skeptical, nate honeycutt, back while he was at a college but has since become a f.i.r.e. fellow did an experiment where he tried different kinds of dei statements. he found something like 3500 professors to evaluate these five different kinds of dei statements. they evaluated one that was about class, lack of class diversity in hiring, something very dear to my heart, something i take seriously and what i think is the most serious diversity lacking particularly in elite higher ed. they talk about religious diversity, viewpoint diversity, and the final one could be one described as, and i don't really love this term, woke, basically saying all of the things, the rigid ideas of identity and what they mean an intersection analogy, and the only one that would've actually gotten you admitted by the standards of this experiment was of course the one that was

parroting the exact ideology they wanted to hear. all these other ones that claim you can say anything you want in a dei statement, no you can't . the viewpoint diversity one would not have gotten you in . the religious one definitely would not have. and even the socioeconomic one, which did a little bit better, just a tiny bit, was still not considered the right answer. the idea that you have this little viewpoint diversity in higher ed to begin with, and then you add political litmus test on top of it is crazy. >> we have spent some time talking about kind of left of center or left directed censorious nests. you talked in your discussion about the culture of free speech, broadly, two different types of rhetorical fortresses in your view. the efficient rhetorical fortress coming from the right, and the perfect rhetorical fortress coming from the left. i'm going to invite you to maybe talk about the efficient

a little bit, but first is just a set up, what do the two have in common? what are they doing, and therefore we are all doing regardless of whether we haven't set foot on a college campus since 1990. what are we all kind of witnessing or taking part of in the way that we just have normal arguments and debates? >> yeah. this was actually something, to the extent of which i was writing a book about a lot of depressing examples, the part i at least got to have some fun was to talk about my observations of the way we argue and how dysfunctional it is. so we start out with the tactics that both sides use, and the first one, the obstacle course, which are standard logical fallacies. things that everyone does more or less just to win arguments cheaply. including for example accusations of bad faith, which is calling someone a grifter,

for example. we call that the obstacle course. then you go to the minefield, which are also tactics that the right and left use. the one that has become the most relevant lately is what we dubbed hypocrisy projection. this is something we see all the time at f.i.r.e. . someone who only cares about censorship when it is directed at the left or the right when they see us take a case on the left or the right and announce it on twitter. immediately, sometimes in all caps, where is f.i.r.e. on this case. it is always someone who only cares about one side , but they expect you to be hypocritical and only defend decide they don't like. it is projecting their own hypocrisy, but the funny thing about this is time and time again it is someone who doesn't realize that we were on that case sometimes weeks before. i remember, actually, probably my favorite example of this was someone asking where is f.i.r.e. on this case for which he assumed we would not be involved in, but the thing he was linking to was a f.i.r.e. document that was only made

public because of f.i.r.e.. we've had people do this. dude, the thing you are linking to, we are quoted 3 inches down. we are in it already. hypocrisy is everywhere, and the right and left do it. we have this, this case, like right now, involving whether or not you can recognize students for justice and palestine. the argument against students for justice in palestine is made in florida and by brandeis university is that they are materially supporting terrorism. if they can prove that students for justice and palestine is materially supporting terrorism , by all means that is a felony, and people would be and indeed probably should be arrested for that. given that they are mostly pointing to language and this policies of students for justice and palestine that encourages members to think of themselves as part of the pro- palestinian resistance, the language, that's not enough to match the very, very serious

claim of material support for terrorism. someone wrote something immediately from the right, being very angry, where were you when -- got disinvited from brandeis. what's funny about that, that was 2014. that was a long time ago. for most other people it would've been, like, i was in junior high school, but i'm an old man, so i was like here is the article i wrote in "the huffington post" about that in 2014. i'm probably one of the reasons you know about that incident. >> you referenced florida. governor ron desantis who is running for president has made fighting back against woke and fighting back against kind of the preponderance of university , academia based censorious nests and dei policies central to some of his national ambitions and he has been part of passing and signing into

laws there people who support him and sometimes he himself will say look, you kind of have to fight fire with fire, to use a terrible term given who we are talking to hear, but we are showing the left, we are using the left's tools against them because what choice do we have, there is only one conservative four 5 trillion left of center academic administrators. >> that's a precise number by the way. >> i think so. i saw it in appendix d of your book. but when you say to that argument? it's on the rise and particularly on the rise post october 7, the massacre in israel, where there has been a lot of tumble on college campuses, including the palestinian student organizations. the overall approach, where is it wrong, or is it? >> i have lots of responses to that, and one of them is that i take a backseat to no one on advocating for hire and reform. i've been doing that for 22

years, probably more, even before i started at f.i.r.e.. i've written about this and recently the national review. i've written about it on my sub stack, the eternally radical idea, but big ideas. higher ed has gotten way too expensive. given that fact alone, like, how much, the idea that they try to argue with a straight face that it costs $70,000 for tuition, but that only covers half of the cost of educating a single student. if you are saying that we can't educate students for less than $140,000 per year we've done something terribly wrong, and that for you get to the little ologies, the lack of viewpoint diversity, the lack of due process and free speech. but, when i look at the attempts to rein in higher ed, some of them i have no issue with. there have been, some of them saying, there was a lot in north carolina basically saying you can't compel people to say things they don't believe, and

that is a great first amendment value that is well-established. there have been other ones that have tried to decrease the number of dei administrators or administrators overall , and even though people have objected to that, i'm saying you need to understand that in some cases, not all of course, but in some cases dei administrators are a threat to free speech and academic freedom on campus. i gave three examples before and there are countless more. but if you are going to go after the curriculum in higher ed, then we have a problem, because that is unconstitutional, and you don't want the government actually deciding for higher ed but their curriculum needs to be. when this law came up, and just to also address the stereotype that sometimes i see on the left, is there is an idea that there has been this massive curricular attack on higher ed. there has been one law passed, the stop woke act in florida that threatens curriculum on campus.

f.i.r.e. and the aclu, separate lawsuits, we challenged it and defeated it and we gave perfect warning before it is saying this is unconstitutional. i actually went so far to say this is laughably unconstitutional. if you care about higher ed reform , the first thing you have to do is pass something legal, so we sued for it, defeated it. they rewrote the stop woke act a little bit. it still unconstitutional and we will challenge it again. here is the challenge and problem. sent back the reform movement, and have basically people are trying to paint everything with the brush that it is trying to do the stop woke act. there has been one law and that's really bad, but so far for now it has been defeated. i think actually that effort has set back much-needed reform that could otherwise already be happening. >> talk about how cancel culture, or just the bad way we now argue, has affected psychology of all things. >> this one really gets to me. so, we wrote about trends in psychology, and you know, the

thing that led me to write " coddling the american mind" is i have depression. because of that, everybody who fights this stuff, who pays a psychological cost, contacts me to tell me how exhausting they find this stuff. practically everyone i know needs either, either needs therapy or is getting it in some way. having some context, contacts who are in psychology programs and meeting more through the f.i.r.e. student conference, which is something we do in philadelphia every summer, which is amazing. we learned that in clinical psychology programs, they are really telling psychologists, psychotherapists to intervene when they hear wrong think from their patients. i don't know if this is everywhere, but i've heard it enough. it shouldn't be anywhere, essentially. i've heard also that students

are painting at length about what to do if it turns out god for bid they should treat someone who turns out to be a republican, or even worse a trump supporter. their beliefs. and so with the idea that what should l a psychologist or psychotherapist do when they find out their patient is actually more conservative? they should treat them compassionately and try to help them, not correct their beliefs. so, that was one of the most disturbing chapters that we wrote. as far as something that could be an incredibly present follow- up to canceling the american xh mind, that could easily be expanded into its own book all by itself, because i think about what would have happened to me if in 2000 seven -- one wh of the reasons i got so depressed was because of the culture war, and it was exhausting. my left-leaning girlfriend hated me when i took cases on the right, and my right-leaning

folks i would meet at a bar would want to punch me, i literally got in two fights, because i said insensitive stuff directed at the right, and it was exhausting. and if i had showed up when i was actually contemplating suicide and my shrink actually tried to collect my beliefs about the world, to tell me it didn't actually look that way i don't know if i would still be here point >> talk to me a little bit about what happens to trust when supposedly or aspiration only neutral people, institutions especially, are seeming to weigh in very heavily on one side of this and use some of these tactics that you talk about and criticize the book. >> yeah, we have a whole chapter on what covid did to trust and expertise. and in that case, we give many examples, but one of the most vivid examples is jennifer say. and she was an executive at levis, she was potentially going to be like -- was in line

to potentially be the future president of levis. and she was well known as an advocate for the rights of k-12 students, particularly minority k-12 students, kids who were biracial. and when the lockdowns happened in 2020, she made this argument: this is going to be really bad for kids. this is really going to harm kids and it is going to harm the most vulnerable kids the most. and for this, it was treated as if she had said something blasphemous. and remember like how the t ideology that i believe was already there just felt so, so tense in 2020. and so, there was a whole campaign to get her to apologize, to take it back, to acknowledge her privilege, and eventually,ev they offered her severance package, which she didn't take because she wanted to be able to tell her story. now, it is a bad story for

someone to be forced out for saying something that is just their opinion, period, even if they happen to be wrong, but now, it is pretty much the consensus that, yeah, regardless of anything else, there were serious harms to kids, particularly minority kids, for not having face-to- face schooling for such a long time. and every time when people act like we know way more than we actually do, and in this case, there was this kind of dead certainty that lockdowns were good and if you think they could be harmful to kids, don't say that at all, or face the possibility of getting canceled, just like jennifer say did. when you create that kind of environment of certainty, people kind of call your bluff. i thought the same thing that happened early on in covid, the first couple people who started saying, you know, there is a virology lab in wuhan that is about respiratory viruses, maybe this was a lab leak. and the problem is i don't know

if the lab leak is true, nobody knows if the lab leak is true, but what i do know is that my friends, my highly educated friends, who suddenly came in and said, that is ridiculous, we know that it came from a wet market, were deluding themselves. is because it is like, what, there has been some massive investigation? how did the chinese government let us do that? that's amazing, wow, i guess we finally know this. but people aren't stupid, they look at that and go, i don't know if this is true, but i e know that you don't know if this is true and you shouldn't be going after people's careers with this level of certainty. so, i think a lot of the covid mistakes came from not leveling with the public about what is known and unknown, but instead acting like we had a much greater level of knowledge that we did is devastating to trust in expertise, and we need experts we can trust. >> the flipside of that, as you documented in the book, it becomes very, very easy for those who are antiestablishment or who bang the drum about the

untrustworthiness of those supposedly in neutral institutions to dismiss all swats of people. talk about that dynamic a little bit and how it relates to donald trump. >> sure, yeah, yeah. we talk about the two different fortresses, they are the styless about winning arguments that are specific to the left and er right. i talked about the ones that are both sides. the perfect is byzantine and wonderful because it is kind of a structure of beauty because it was more developed in academia. we call the efficient rhetorical fortress on the t right, because it is just very simple and straightforward, it is more of a talk radio kind of idea. you don't have to listen to anybody liberal or woke, you don't have to listen to anybody who is a journalist even if they are conservative.l you don't have to listen to experts but at we make a point that the experts sometimes

don't do themselves any favors, but if you make a general rule about never listening to experts, that is a problem. and for the most aggressive on the right, anybody who dismisses donald trump point i think people will be surprised to find out that we got more hate mail by orders of magnitude from people who thought we were not fair to donald trump and our explanation of charlottesville. we have a whole response to this point. and on the right, it can be dismissive to people that way. that chapter was very interesting because we listed a lot of times that trump wanted to get particular journalists fired. one of the most fun cases, though, and i just did her show as well -- most fun, by that i mean interesting, megyn kelly was lucky enough to be canceled by the right for being too hard on trump, and by the left for saying when she was a kid, people putting on blackface for halloween was normal. so,ec we have three chapters on book challenges, book bans, we have another chapter on -- t those are legislative attempts,

so not technically cancel culture, but we thought important enough to cover. then we talk about attacks on the media and we give a lot of examples of that coming from trump, but we also talked about this movement you mentioned earlier on on the right, that is not a libertarian right, but more a common good -- not common good -- common good politics? i forget exactly what they call it. but this idea that essentially -- free speech, a lot of these small liberal ideas are actually part of the problem and that essentially, a much stronger hand is what is needed, but a more explicitly conservative governmental hands. and that scares me. i actually think i am with a lot of americans in the centerleft and center-right, i like liberalism, small level liberalism, i like the boat, i like democracy, i like diversity. and i think some of the trends that i am on the right, in response in many cases to some

of the things they see on the left, this is what we call a polarization spiral. there is no pile politics in a vacuum. the right does something, a off the left, the left gets more extreme, rinse, repeat. we talked a little bit about coddling as well. one of the things we are trying to do in the book, that is perhaps a more ambitious than could ever be realized, but it is to call out these lousy ways of arguing, just in hopes that we can use this extra billion eyes on these problems, to solve problems rather than cancel people and repost cat videos. >> let's apply some of your frameworks and insight analysis to events that have taken place since the book has been published or at least since you haven't been able to correct anything. most notably is october 7th, the massacre there, one thing we have seen a lot of his

posters being put up, college t campuses around town, new york city, elsewhere, and then torn down. and then people are filming some of the people tearing down the posters and saying, well, and then the people tearing down the posters saying you can't fill me. help us think about this through the terms of cancel culture. >> yeah, this one is tough, because there is a case involving, i think his name is michael eisen, who retweeted an article from the onion, and the satire was that, you know, it was regretful that dying palestinians last boys wasn't condemning hamas. it was a very sharp edge criticism of the way we talk about what is going on in israel since the attacks. and that was the final straw s that led him to be fired. that is absolutely within our definition of cancel culture.

and people since have argued, there were more reasons than that. they always say there are more reasons than that, there very well might have been, but if the straw that broke the camels back was retweeted in the onion, that is cancel culture absolutely. when it comes to tearing down the posters of kidnapped children and elderly people and friends and family, that is something that is tough partially because it is itself a liberalism, it is intolerance itself. so, you can't say there is some kind of special free-speech value and tearing down other people's posters, that is mob censorship, private censorship trying to limit the spread of true facts. so, i have very limited sympathy for the people who tear down the posters point the only sympathy that i do have, and it can only be patronizing to some degree, which is, okay, they grew up in environments where, you know, being a pro- palestinian was so automatic that essentially, they don't

want to even have to look at something that problem entices that issue. and the other part of the sympathy i have is once you actually put someone on video, you can start getting, i mean, l unfortunately, it is something that all of us who are in the public view, i get them, you get death threats. if you are a woman, you tend to get raped threats, it is truly awful. but here is something very strange that is coming from campus that i would like to call out. there is this idea that students, particularly in higher ed, i have a kind of quasi-right not to be videoed or not to be shown or not to have their names out there but it is a special kind of bubble idea of a right to higher education that i think is -- one thing, it is not doxing. doxing, by the way, has no meaningful legal definition. but generally, it is revealing someone's home address, which by the way is illegal, but i do

think it is not something you should do, or revealing someone's private phone number. once again, legal, but something i think is worthy of criticism. but just showing someone's face is unavoidable. this actually happened in the stanford case, this happened at yale. there was this argument that essentially, because the response to this bad behavior is going to be so bad, we can't actually show the students, and that is the special exception that nobody else gets. and oftentimes, the students doing the shouting are oftentimes the ones would be very happy to reveal everybody they are opposed to. so, does this mean i am being callous about the threats against them? absolutely not. as a first amendment lawyer, sometimes people think that as a first amendment lawyer, you think there should be no exceptions to the first amendment. i think that is nonsensical, there is no such thing as a true beach absolutist. i think the exceptions we have in the law make a great deal of

sense including threats. and i think we have done the first amendment no favors by not actually investigating true threats of harm or death on social media, for example, because it leads people to think, wow, free-speech sucks, because i can be targeted, people can threaten to rape me people can threaten to rape me that is protected. i am here to say that is not protected, nor should it be, and it should be investigated and punished. so, when it comes to the potential downstream harm for having your face out there doing something more labor approachable, then you have to focus on the people doing the threatening, you have to focus on the people doing the harassing and the stocking, but it can't be the answer that you can't put up pictures of people that are doing things themselves that are extremely illiberal. >> what do you say to -- there has been quite a trend of big figure donors to harvard, to

the university of pennsylvania in particular, but other places as well, since october 7th, saying we don't want to send our money to these little anti- somatic hate factories. and in one case, at the university of pennsylvania, they were referring specifically to the unsavory w invitees to palestinian writers festival. how is that looked out through the prism of cancel culture? if i am not going to stroke that $50 million check to penn because -- that's on the one hand, donors can do whatever they want with their money. on the other, if they are demanding that programming can be stopped or faculty or students get punished for predicted speech as opposed to threats or harassment, et cetera, we have a problem with that and we will object to that loudly. and once the student or faculty member gets punished, that is very much a fire case. on the other hand, i can't say that it would be the worst thing in the world if a lot of

these major donors stopped giving huge amounts of money to these incredibly wealthy and powerful institutions. i mean, harvard has $50 billion to one side. that is just it's a rainy day fund. and the idea that people keep giving these huge grants to it, it enables cancel culture. it is one of the reasons why universities can not really care about public pressure, like harvard -- by the way, until harvard ranked dead last t in our campus free-speech ranking, which is based on 13 different factors, not something that we -- we didn't have any say in where they ended up in the end. harvard always ignored us, no matter how bad the case we were fighting, they suddenly started taking us seriously. but i do think if donors start saying, look, i am walking entirely and i am giving my money to the campus free-speech rating or the university of austin, you know, the new

experimental liberal arts college, i think we would be living in a healthier country. i also have some sympathy for this scenario: after the hamas attacks, i know a lot of these university presidents, knowing what they actually think, are pro-israel, and they were horrified, like all of us were, by the brutality of the hamas terrorist attacks. and i know a lot of them t actually would have said something very condemning if they weren't afraid of their own students, faculty, and administrators. and that is cancel culture itself. john write about something pointing out that some of the distortions of the weirdness resting on campus is coming from cancel culture itself. it is also one of the reasons why some students on the harvard level were so sure it wouldn't be that controversial due on the day the attacks are still happening to state this is entirely israel's fault. so, when donors are saying say something you don't believe as a public statement, i have an issue with that, i think that is an inappropriate use of power. but when they are saying say

something you actually believe, you coward, i do have some sympathy for that. but i really do think the best thing that can come out of this is people be aware that harvard, penn, yale, these are all schools that do terribly in our free-speech ranking, and i think that the only way they are going to learn is if people stop applying and stop giving massive amounts of money to it. in that same survey, biggest survey ever conducted, by the way, 55,000 students polled for professor cancellations, student cancellations, speech codes, anti-platforming, the elite colleges did abysmally. actually, we used abysmally as a term. only harvard ranked technically abysmally. but uva and university of chicago did pretty well. but i think taking your money, putting it in more experimental ways to do higher education, cheaper ways of doing higher education, is a good way to go, and i think that also being aware of these lesser-known,

usually technological colleges that usually have great records on free speech, where students say you can disagree productively, sending your kids there, instead of them just expecting to be the 16th generation of harvard graduate,f i think that would be a good outcome for all of us. that's one of the interesting things about your coauthor is she is from gen z, and gen z turns out to be, at least preliminarily, surprisingly resilient when it comes to free speech and cancel culture, a little bit different than the millennial's about them. talk about that in the waning two or three minutes we have here. >> one of the interesting things to learn is that the ee population that hates cancel culture the most, it's not boomers, it's not gen x, the best generation of course, and it is definitely not millennial's. millennial's have the biggest -- unfortunately that stereotype is true, as far as anti-speech views, millennial's do the worst by any group, by far.

but gen z hates cancel culture the most. they grew up with it, they are sick of it, they don't like it, they don't want this to keep going, and that does give me at least a little bit of hope. >> give us a few tools, greg, if you will, as we are walking out the door here, how do we train ourselves to be better at arguing and to not fall for the kind of rhetorical traps and shortcuts, attempts to sort of waive away entire swaths of people, so as to not have to argue with them. >> we have a lot of suggestions on the fire.org. but the most basic principles, h the good news is they are ones americans already know, and are reflected in idioms that were very popular when the two of us were kids, but ricky, my coauthor i basically never heard, she had heard of them may be in passing, to each their own, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, don't judge a book by its cover. these are all small democratic ideals that should be back in

circulation as a way of checking yourself, to say who am i to cancel this present when i know that in the grand scheme of things, i'm just someone with an opinion that might ultimately be wrong. >> of the book is the canceling of the american mind, the author is greg and ricky. greg, thank you very much. >> thanks for having me.