and five years since you co-wrote with jonathan hite the coddling of the american mind and since then there's been a quite a number of books to come out talking about free speech, the rise of illiberalism in places where free speech is supposed to reign on campus journalism companies and etc. 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? yeah. so, you know, i've been defending free speech on college campuses for 22 years. i'm a first amendment specialized attorney who's also specialized in academic freedom

for years now. and i had an opportunity to write a follow up to coddling the american mind. that could be really interesting, because we had we discovered this amazingly brilliant, you know, 20 year old named ricky slot. she's a gen z young woman. she actually is a huge fan of coddling of the american mind. and she came to both me and hate to say, listen, i dropped out of school during covid because i saw all the problems that you were talking about. and i wanted to write about the things and coddling. so she was such a great writer. we immediately made her a fire fellow and when we were after i was a year of working with, i was so impressed. i'm like, you know, we should write a follow up to calling the american mind because and it will add the insights of a gen z young woman, which is great because coddling the american mind was so much about gen z young woman. but as we were getting ready, i couldn't believe that i was still seeing people really staking 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, it didn't just happen. it's the kind of thing they're going to be studying in 50 to 100 years, just like we study the red scare today. so i felt like, okay, that's it. i've had it like i'm going to put this all in one book. i'm going to make three, three primary points. one, cancel culture is real. it's happening on our on a historic scale. and by the way, we take on both left and right, which is very important to do. a lot of people, the middle part is basically about re conception, realizing how you think about cancel culture to think about it as only the most extreme way of winning arguments without winning arguments that essentially, rather than persuade somebody we've learned this very junior high school like tactic, which, by the way, i argue that it does in some ways come from junior high school, but i can get on that later to just scare people out of disagreeing with you or ruin their lives if they do. and 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 the you know, the more than a thousand professors who have been targeted for example. it's about what it does to trust and expertise because if you see that, for example, carol hoover at harvard, who was started to be forced out by initially by a dea administrator for going on fox news to talk about her book. and she said she made the point that we should be kind transgender people, we should be we should use their pronouns. but as the author of a book on testosterone in evolutionary biologist, we have to recognize that biological sex is real and it matters scientifically. and that led to a whole campaign against her at harvard. now. and she she got extremely depressed and she's now leaving harvard now, that's sad all by itself. that's that's cancel culture. that's illiberal all by itself. but what does that do to people's faith and experts views on this topic? because the public isn't stupid

and looking at a situation like even at harvard, someone's making, you know, a very modest point that 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 that just to say anything other than the approved line could get you canceled even at harvard. so 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. so let's 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 have been, as you say in the book, gaslighting about cancel culture, that it exists. what's the documentary evidence, perhaps with comparatives to aforementioned red scare and such? sure. absolutely. so our definition is a historical one. we're 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 who's very interested in the history of censorship, the moments of what i call mass censorship incidents, all have names, you know, the sedition act of 1798, of course, is the easiest one, the victorian age, probably the longest one, the first red scare, which is actually 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 we talk about and part of our definition is for speech that would be protected under the first amendment. what we mean by that which we explain in an appendix, because we don't want to bog the book down too much, is as an analogy to public employee law, a way to bring in a great deal of nuance and common sense to a definition about one. when we think it's 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. now, when it comes to the data, i mean, the as i just mentioned, we know we're only seeing a tiny fraction of this. and i'll give a point of comparison. i started my job around 911, actually. i landed in philadelphia to find an air, to find an apartment, to start my new job at fire on 9:10 a.m. on 911. so all of my first cases were defending professors who said things about the attacks, including the very first letter i ever wrote was a defense of a professor who joked that anyone who can blow up the pentagon has my vote. there was and this was considered to be a very bad attack on academic freedom. and 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, who we talk about in the book who got in trouble for actually criticizing a student

who said america has had the attacks coming on a on a giant listserv on campus. so looking at the data, there were about 17 professors targeted. that's bad. that that's a large number of professors in a normal historical year. certainly since the law was established between 1957 and 1973, this is considered a historic moment. and three professors were fired, all three of which, by the way, of whom were fired for reasons that don't actually implicate academic freedom or churchill, a name you might remember. he was fired for gross academic misconduct, which was real. sami al-arian, who was 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 they can frankly fire you for. so three three firings considered a big deal over the over the course of years. i'm now talking about an era in

which there have been we know for a fact we know that the numbers are much larger than this. there have been a thousand targeting of of 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 plus tenured professors being fired. that's the standard number for mccarthyism before the law existed, by the way. but before people knew you couldn't actually just fire communist professors for being excessive ideological, that didn't happen until 1957. so mccarthyism was 1947 to 1957. the standard at the time, the biggest study that they did of mccarthyism at the time and of course, we're still in cancel culture was they found something like 62 or 63 professors fired for communist beliefs. about 90 professors fired for beliefs overall and usually is rounded up to about 100 are being being the standard estimate. i think with time we can now say

that there are probably more than that. but again, we're still we should be counting the counting that they did at the time because we're still in the middle of this thing. so you're talking about three times as many communist as they believe were fired. you're talking about twice as many as the standard evidence of mccarthyism. and we also know this is an undercount because one in six and i really want to stress this, one in six professors say that they have been either threatened with investigation for their academic freedom or actually or actually investigated. and about 9% of students say that they've been investigated. cited. and one more one more detail. about 9% of during mccarthy's the same study talked to thousands of professors and they found that about 9% of them were saying that they were self-censor. and that's really bad. to be clear, one in ten people's self-censoring on campus is really bad. and when we did our own polling on this and these aren't exact

comparisons because we also asked them like, do you self-censor on social media, which didn't exist at the time? but we found that the number was closer to 90% today. so i think that at this point, if you're saying that cancel culture doesn't exist, you're being willfully blind. and i've watched and this this is kind of like my big ideological text test when i mentioned the fact that one third of those punishments initially start from activism on the right, sometimes turning point usa, a conservative organization that has something called the professor watch list, sometimes fox news, for example, that about one third of those punishments initially come from the right. and if that suddenly makes people take this issue more seriously, i immediately take them less seriously because i'm 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's wrong. we're talking about academia here and fire, which is the foundation for individual rights

and expression, only recently rebranded to expression before it was education. so you 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, goes into psychotherapy, which hopefully we'll talk about a little bit later, which is crazy. that was the most depressing chapter to research. but what is your working theory? let's stay with academia just for the moment before we go on to the other ones. what is your working theory for why it exploded so much in 2014? in academia? and what were that sort of mechanisms with which or by which it exploded? yeah, why? 2014 is a question. we get a lot. and one reason why we didn't spend too much time trying to answer that in canceling is we spent the entire book, my book with jonathan hight, a coddling of the american mind, explaining why we think the students who are hitting campus around 2014 were so different. and by the way, that's partially

the answer, is that gen z started hitting campus. and if you follow sort of 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 it was something that was very noticeable at the time. and then you start seeing sort of corporate cancel culture as these students start graduating and moving on into jobs. and that's when the reason why it was so helpful to write with a 23 year old, this really risky slot she pointed out 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. this is the way, like i mentioned before. and the thing that really changed the social dynamic, which we talk a lot about in coddling the american mind, but takes somewhat for granted in canceling of the american mind is social media. and i know that people are tired of hearing that social media changed the world. but i try to give a sort of historical explanation of why you can't you have to take this

seriously as a major shift for the pope. and i will say it, the species. and here's why. as a first amendment lawyer and this is how much of a nerd i am for this stuff. i took every class stanford offered on first amendment. i interned at the aclu of northern california and then when i ran out of classes, i did six credits on censorship during the tudor dynasty and the reason why there was there was this explosion of censorship under tudor dynasty is because of the original disruptive technology, the printing press and and people you know, we think about all the benefits, the printing press gave us. and over the long term, it absolutely did. it was transformative. there could have been no scientific revolution without it. there could have been no american or french revolution without it. but in the short term, it led to an increase in the witch trials because the bestseller was the book about how to identify which it led to. you know, of course. gross civil unrest that led to religious wars. you know, it has a lot of blood on his hands and in the 1520s

and thirties, henry the eighth tried to put the genie back in the bottle bite, you know, to make this thing more or less go away and spoiler. he failed. now, 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've 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 humbler in the sense that we're actually tumbler to plays a role as well. and not to make a joke there, but that a lot of these norms for how you frankly kind of bully each other or fight it out in junior high school, they were things that were refined find on smaller social media platforms. and then there were kind of a normal part of gen-z life by the time they actually got to to

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

censorship once you are in power. but that's the natural fact that essentially, if you have if you don't have enough heterogeneity in your group, there's a tendency, as my coauthor, jonathan haidt, likes to say, to sake, realize your beliefs 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's been a very intentional plan to turn academe, media and even the left against free speech going back to 1965. and we point at herbert marcuse as being kind of the pioneer of this as a marxist criminal, the same time critical of marxism, but wanted to follow the vision. he was still a big fan of mao, for example, in 1974. just not saying a great thing. he wrote an article and he was considered the guru of the new left, a very influential guy. he wrote a 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 hard right wing, the so-called conservatives. so i had to go back and read it to remember it's very much a call for we should have free speech. the good guys, which basically means like his, his illiberal version of the left as opposed to my, you know, more libertarian version of the left. they should have free speech, but they need in order to make their utopia, a dictatorial powers to punish the speech of people who are who they deem regressive and right wing. so in this, the torch was picked up on this by people like richard delgado, mary matt pseudo, the original the original people who started the school of critical theory in law schools and this led very quickly, just 20 years after the beginning of the free speech movement in 1964. it led to the speech codes being passed on college campuses, which really started to come

into their own in 1985. so by 1985, you already have universities adopting speech codes, and that's very intentional to limitations on freedom of speech. the words that wounds 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 a lesson hammered with enlightened censorship. i think a lot more kids of the boomers started hitting college and they were actually pretty, pretty good on free speech. but the problem was that it didn't there wasn't any serious reform that took place after 1995. there was just a sense that the problem had somehow taken care of itself. and what happened after that, and i wrote about this in reason magazine, the first great age of political correctness, which is

1985 to 1995 since it was met with public scorn and since the speech codes were defeated, people thought, oh, thank goodness that's over. but what actually happened was the administrative class in universities hung on to these ideas. and by the time i started at fire in 2001 about something like 79% of colleges had what we call red light speech codes. so even though they're defeated in court, we found that schools all over the country had speech codes that were identical to the ones defeated between 1995 and 1985 and 1995. so i felt like i spent a lot of my career trying to warn people that there's something bad coming here. there are really troubling attitudes about freedom of speech that exist in higher ed among administrators and that are, you know, also filtering down to k through 12 through education schools and that were eventually going to be, you know, paying for this. i to be honest, i thought when i wrote my short book, freedom from speech in 2014, that that a payback might be in the distant future. and i've been only shocked to

discover that it happened a lot faster than i ever expected. so i think that higher ed was uniquely primed for cancel culture. i think it's done a really poor job of teaching people how to argue fairly or how to win arguments by actually persuasion for example. and so it's not a shock that things got much worse. their first what is a little shocking is how bad it got in, say, like the last six years you referenced ai or diversity, equity and inclusion and practices in academia, which also go pretty heavily down to k through 12. i use that as a way to get into other areas of science, of journalism, of even covid. if, if that applies, how do ai has been part of the story of spreading cancel culture? yeah. and i mean, it's one of these things where it's a great marketing coup to have diversity, equity and inclusion in your name and people, you

know, including me, are inclined to like that. that's that sounds swell. but unfortunately, the way ideas interpreted and the way it's often meant on campus is actually a bundle of very specific assumptions about human nature, about group identity. all of these kind of things. and and something that we've seen administrators come up in case after case that we've seen it fire, including, you know, i was the person who videotaped the when nicholas christakis was surrounded by angry students and being shouted at at yale and i videotaped it to show that he 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 between christakis and the student group, he'd be out of a job. so i needed to show that. at the time what i didn't know was there were three administrators in that group

that weren't shouting. but there were. but they were. they're not actually rating the students. in fact, that carol, who've in case started by the administrator the the case at stanford law school which just 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, a trump appointee, was invited to speak at stanford law school. now, i want to stress here, there's 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. they met with them for hours, then suddenly when they shows up, when he shows up, there's an angry mob there right before he talks, you know, someone shouts to him, i hope your daughters get raped. and there's a ten minute shout down. and by the way, precisely ten minute shout down before he talks. and then this administrator who

hadn't introduced herself before, terry and steinbock gets up, she and she reads from a prepared speech. she is prepared a speech, a seven minute long speech about whether or not the use of free speech is worth the squeeze. i know that sounds weird, but she repeats the is the juice worth the squeeze? she also makes the point that, like, she sort of targets the professor, the judge as well, saying, you know, think of all the pain you've caused by being here and it's the juice of that pain worth the squeeze of having you here. and it's like, this is a law school and this is a fifth circuit judge, like that. he's kind of he's one step below the supreme court that that's kind of a big deal. and then as soon as she leaves, it turns into just nonstop heckling. but they let him get some words in and response. it's generally just a very, you know, ugly situation overall. we cover it. we give it its own entire chapter to illustrate our larger point that cancel culture is just one way of winning arguments about winning arguments, because we point out

all these other very academic tactics to never actually address the meaning of what somebody says. now, the most disturbing thing that's to come out of the eye movement on campus, rda statements requiring dii statements to be admitted to school in the first place to get in order to be admitted to graduate school, in order to attend conferences at this point to in order to in order to to participate in any number of of things that scholars have always participated in. you need to actually do your statement. and last time i checked, something like 50% of large schools already do this. and it's heading more towards like 75%. and here's why you should be concerned. we have a chapter called the conformity gantlet that i'd like i'd like you know, that if you read just one chapter, that's probably the one you should read, because most of you listening to this, i don't think i have to convince you that there's no way to make something like this statement, not a political litmus test, but basically that is asking you to

state your politics and then to see if if we if we approve of this. but for those of you who are skeptical and need convincing, nate honeycutt, who what back. well, he was out of college but now has since become a fire fellow did an experiment where he tried different kinds of dui statements he found something like like 3500 professors who do to evaluate these these five different kinds of statements they evaluated one that was about class, a lack of class diversity in higher ed, something very dear to my heart, something i take very seriously and i think is actually the most serious diversity lacking and particularly in elite higher ed, they talked about religious diversity, viewpoint diversity and the final one would be one that could be described as and i don't really love this term woke but basically saying all the things that the very rigid ideas of identity and what they mean and intersection reality and the only one that would have 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 sometimes they claim is, oh, you can say whatever you want in a diversity, equity and the statement, no, you can't. and the viewpoint diversity one wouldn't have got you in the the religious one definitely one of and even the socio economic one which did a little bit better just a tiny bit, was still not considered the right answer. so the idea that you have this little viewpoint diversity in higher ed to begin with and then you had a political litmus test on top of it, is that crazy? we've spent some time talking about kind of left of center or left directed and sensoria snus. you talk in your discussion about the culture of free speech broadly two different types of rhetorical fortresses. yes. in your in your view, the efficient rhetorical fortress coming from the right and the perfect rhetorical fortress coming from the left.

i would invite you to maybe talk about the efficient a little first, but first as just a set up. what did 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 either witnessing or taking part of in the way that we just have normal arguments and debates? yeah, i am. this was actually something, you know, to the extent to which i was writing a book about a lot of depressing examples, the part where i got to have at least some fun was to talk about my observations and my intricate observations of the way we argue and how dysfunctional it is. so we start out with the tactics that both sides use, and we dubbed the first one the obstacle course, which are standard logical fallacies, you know, things that you know, every everyone does more or less just to win arguments cheaply, including, for example, accusations of bad faith, which is, you know, calling someone a grifter, for example, in the and

we call that the obstacle course. then you go to the minefield, which are the which are also tactics that right and left use and the one that's become the most relevant lately is what is what we dubbed hypocrisy projection. and this is something we see all the time at fire. someone who only cares about censorship when it's 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, you know, where is fire on this case? and it's always someone who only cares about one side, but they expect you to be hypocritical and only defend the side they don't like. so it's projecting their own hypocrisy is what we mean by it. 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. and i remember actually my probably my favorite example of this was someone asking, where is fire on this case that they assumed we wouldn't be involved in? and the thing he was linking to was actually a fire document

that was only made public because of fire. we've had people do this when it's kind of like, dude, the finger linking to we're quoted three inches down like like like we're in that already. so hypocrisy projection when you start looking for it is everywhere and the right and left do it. you know we have this palestine this case like right now involving whether or not you can recognize students for justice in palestine. and of course, the argument against students for justice in palestine is made in florida and by brandeis university is that they're materially supporting terrorism. now, if they can prove that students for justice in palestine is materially supporting terrorism, by all means, like that's that's a felony. and people would be would be and indeed probably should be arrested for that. but given that they're mostly pointing to auditory language in the in the policies of students just in palestine, that encourages members to think of themselves as part of the pro-palestinian resistance, just auditory language, that that's

not enough to match the very, very serious claim of of material support for terrorism. and someone, you know, wrote something immediately from the right being very angry. that was like, where were you when i and hirsi ali got a disinvited from from brandeis? now, what's funny about that is that was 2014. you know, like i said, was a long time ago. so for most other people would have been like, oh, i was in junior high school, but i'm an old man. so i was like, here's the article i wrote in the huffington post about that in 2014, you know, and one of the reasons probably why, you know, about that incident you referenced, florida governor ron desantis is running for president, has made fighting back against woke and fighting back against kind of the preponderance of university academia based censorious ness and i policies are kind of central to at least some of his national political ambitions.

and he's been part of passing and signing into laws there. people who support him, and sometimes he himself will say, look, you know, we kind of have to fight fire with fire to use a terrible term given who we're talking to here. but we're showing the left or using the left's own tools against them, because what choice do we have? there's only one conservative for 5 trillion left of center academic administrators. the precise number, by the way. i think so. i saw that in the appendix d in your book. but what do you say to that argument? because it is on the rise and it's particularly on the rise, i think post october seventh, the hamas massacre in israel, where there's been a lot of tumult on college campuses, including the student, palestinian student organizations. so what do you say to that overall approach? where is it wrong or is it wrong? yeah, i mean, i have lots of responses to that and one of them is that i take a backseat to no one on advocating for

higher ed reform. i've been doing that for 22 years, probably more since even before i started fire. i've written about this and that recently in the national review. i've written about it in on my substack the eternally radical idea about big ideas because i think higher ed has just gotten way too expensive. like even that fact alone. like how much the idea that they try to argue with a straight face that it cost $70,000 for tuition, but that only covers half the cost of educating a single student. if you're saying that we can't educate students for less than $140,000 a year, we've done something terribly wrong. and that's even before you get to the ideology, the lack of viewpoint, diversity, the the lack of due process and free speech. but if but when i look at the attempts to rein in higher ed, some of them some of them i don't i have no issue with. and there have been some of them saying, look, there was a law in north carolina basically saying you can't compel people to say things they don't believe. and that's actually a great

first amendment value. that's actually well-established. there's been other ones that try to decrease the number of d i administer orders or administrators overall and i make the point that even though people have objected to that, i'm saying you need to understand that some in some cases not all, of course, but in some cases the administrators are a threat to free speech and academic freedom on campus. you know, i gave three examples before and there's countless more. but if you're going to go after the curriculum in higher ed, then we have a problem because that's unconstitutional. and you don't want the government actually deciding for higher ed like what their curriculum needs to be. and so when this law came out and just to also address a stereotype that sometimes i see on the left is there is an idea that there's been this massive curricular attack on higher ed. there has been one law passed the stop work act in florida that threatens the curriculum on campus fire and the aclu in separate lawsuits. we challenged it. we defeated it. and by the way, gave perfect

warning to florida, saying this is unconstitutional. actually, i went so far as to say this is laughably unconstitutional or, you know, if you care about higher ed reform, first thing you got to do is pass something, for goodness sakes. so we sued. we sued for it. we defeated it. they've rewritten the stop work act a little bit. it's still unconstitutional and we will be challenging it again. but here's the problem. it set back the reform movement tremendously. it took huge energy from it. and now basically people are are kind of trying to paint everything with the brush that it's trying to be the stop work act. again, like i said, there's been one law and that's that's really bad. but so far, for now, it's actually been defeated. so i think actually that effort is set back much needed reform that could otherwise already be happening. talk about how cancel culture or or just the bad way we now argue has affected psychology of all -- things. oh, man, this one really gets to me. so we about trends in

psychology. and you know, the thing that led me to writing coddling the american mind, where was my own struggles with depression? i was i was hospitalized as a danger to myself in 2007. and and because of that, everybody who fights this stuff pays who pays a psychological cost, you know, contacts me to tell them, like how exhausting they find this stuff. so, like, practically everyone i know, like, needs either have either needs therapy or is getting it in some way and having some contacts who are actually in psychology programs and meeting more through the, you know, the fire student conference, which which is something we do in philadelphia every summer, which is amazing we learned that in clinical psychology programs, they're really telling psychologists to psychotherapist to intervene when they hear wrong thing from their patients and i don't know if this is everywhere, but i've heard it enough.

it shouldn't be anywhere. eventually. and i've heard also that students are painting at length about what to do if it turns out, god forbid, they should treat someone who turns out to be a republican or even worse, a trump supporter. i'm a democrat myself, but the idea that a what should a psychologist do is like a 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. and so that was one of the most disturbing chapters that we wrote as far as something that could be an incredibly depressing follow up to cancer of the american mind that could easily be expanded into its own book all by itself, because because i think about what would have happened to me if in 2007 i had, since i was part of one of the reasons i got so depressed was because of the culture war. and it was exhausting. and my, my, my left leaning girlfriend hated me when i took cases on the right and, you know, my right leaning folks

that i would meet at a bar would want to punch me literally. like i nearly got into fights because i defended people who who said insensitive stuff. you know, directed to the right. and it was exhausting. and if i had showed up when i was getting close to when i was actually contemplating suicide and my shrink actually tried to correct my beliefs about the world to tell me it didn't really look that way. i don't know if i'd still be here. talk little bit about what happens to trust when supposedly you're aspirationally neutral people, institutions, especially early, are seen to weigh in very heavily on one side of this. and use some of these tactics that you talk about and criticize in the book. yeah, we have a whole chapter on what covid did to trust and expertise. and in that case, we give the example. we give actually many examples, but one of the most vivid examples is jennifer say, and she was an executive at levi's. she was, you know, potentially

going to be like a was in line, potentially be the future president of levi's and she was a well-known as an advocate for the rights of k through 12 students, particularly minority k through 12 students. but both their kids, i believe, were biracial and when the lockdowns happened in 2020, she made this argument, this is going to be really bad for kids, whatever it's result for, for the spread. this is really going to harm kids and it's 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 how the ideology that i believe was already there just felt so, so intense in 2020. and so there was a whole campaign to get her to apologize, to take it back, to acknowledge your privilege. and eventually they they offered her a severance package, which she didn't take because she wanted to be able to tell her

story. now, it's a bad story for someone to be forced out for saying something that's just their opinion, period. even if they happened to be wrong. but now pretty much the consensus that yeah, regardless of anything else, there was serious harms to young kids, particularly minority kids, for that, for not having face to face schooling, for such a long time. so and every time. so 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 they couldn't. and if you think they could be harmful to kids, don't say that at all. or, you know, face the possibility 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. i'm early on in covid. the first couple of people who started saying, you know, there's a virology lab in wuhan that's about respiratory viruses. maybe this was a lab leak. and the problem is, i don't know

if the lab leak 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, well, that's ridiculous. we know that it came from a wet market, were diluting themselves because it's like, what there's been some massive investigation of wuhan. how did the chinese government let us do that? that's amazing. wow. i guess we finally know this. but again, people aren't stupid and they look at that going, listen, i don't know if this is true, but i know you don't know this is true and you shouldn't be actually going after people's careers with this level of certainty. so i think that the 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 than we did. is devastating to trust and expertise. and we need experts. we can trust. the flip side of that is, as you document in the book, is that it becomes very, very easy for those who are anti-establishment

or who bang the drum about the untrue just worthiness of those supposedly neutral institutions to dismiss this whole swaths of people talk about that dynamic a little bit and how it relates to donald, frankly. sure. yeah, yeah. so we talk about the two different rhetorical fortresses and they're the styles for winning arguments. well, winning arguments are specific to the left. on the right. i talked about the ones that were both sides, but the perfect is byzantine and wonderful because it's kind of a structure of beauty, because it was more developed in academia. so a lot more twists and turns we call the efficient rhetorical fortress on the right because it's just very simple and straightforward. it's more of a talk radio kind of idea. you don't have to listen to anybody. you can double liberal or you don't have to listen to anybody who is a journalist, even if they're conservative, you don't have to listen to experts. and i you know, we make a point that sometimes the experts don't do themselves any favors. but if you have a general rule about never listening to experts, that's a problem. and of course, for the most

aggressive on the right, anybody who dismisses donald trump, i think people will be surprised to find out that we get more hate mail from coddling the american mind by orders of magnitude from people who thought we were not fair to donald trump. in our explanation of charlottesville, we actually hiten, i wrote like whole response to this about like, why now? actually, we were right on this and on the right it can be incredibly easy to dismiss people that way. and that chapter very interesting because we listed a lot the times that trump wanted to get particular journalists fired. one of the most fun cases and i just did her show as well. most fun, of course, like by that i mean interesting. you know, meghan kelly was lucky enough to actually be canceled by the right for being too hard on trump and by the left for saying that when she was when she was a kid, you know, people putting on blackface for halloween was comparatively normal. so we have three chapters on on book challenges slash book bans. we have another chapter on those

are legislative attempts. so not not technically our definition cancel culture. but we thought it important enough to cover and then we talk about attacks on the media and we give a lot of examples of that coming from trump. but we also talk about this movement that you mentioned earlier on the right that is not a libertarian right, but a more common good that that common good, common good politics. and i forget exactly what they call it. yeah, but but this idea that essentially free speech, a lot of these small l liberal ideas are actually part of the problem. and that essentially a much stronger governmental hand is what's needed, but a more explicitly conservative governmental hand. and that that scares me. i actually i think i'm with with a lot of americans, particularly in the center left and center right. i like liberalism and small l liberalism. i like, you know, no vote. i like democracy, like diversity. and i think some of the trends that i'm seeing on the right largely and to be fair in

response in many cases to some of the stuff they see in the left, this is always a what i what we call it is a polarization spiral that there's no politics in a vacuum. you know, the the the right does something. it -- off the left. the left gets more extreme. rinse, repeat as we talked a little bit about and and coddling as well. and one of the things that we're trying to do in the book that is perhaps more ambitious than could ever be realized, but is to call out these lousy ways of arguing just in hopes that we could 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 this or anything. most notably is postdoc two over seven thumb massacre. there. one thing that we've seen a lot

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

definition of cancel culture and and, of course, people since have argued, well, there were more reasons than that. i'm like they always say they're more reasons that they're very well might have been. but if the straw that broke the camel's back was retweeting the onion, that's cancel culture. absolutely. when it comes to the tearing down of posters of kidnaped children and elderly people and friends and family, that's something that is partially because it is itself a liberalism. it is intolerance itself. so you can't say that there's some kind of special free speech value in tearing down other people's posters. that's mob censors that that's private censorship, trying to actually literally limit the spread of of of true facts. so i don't have i have very limited sympathy for the people who who who tear down the posters. the only sympathy that i do have is and it can only be patronize to some degree, which is okay. you know, they they grew up in an environment where you know, being pro-palestinian was so

automatic that essentially they they don't they don't to even have to look at something that that that problematize that issue. and the other part of sympathy that i have is that once you actually put someone on video, you can start getting i mean, unfortunately, it's something that we all of us who are in the public view, i get them. you get death threats. and if you're a woman, you tend to get rape threats. it's truly awful. but here is something very strange that's coming from campus that i, i would like to call out. there's this idea that students, particularly in higher ed, have a kind of quasi right not to be videotaped or not to be shown to have their names out there. it's a special kind of like bubble idea of of over, right, in higher education that i think is not one thing it's not doxing doxing, by the way has no meaningful legal no meaningful legal definition. but generally, you know, it's

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

that we have in the law make a great deal of sense, including threats, doctrine. and i actually think that we've done the first amendment no favors by not actually investigating a true threats of harm or death on social media for example, because it leads people to think, wow, free speech sucks because can be targeted. i can even be people can threaten to rape me and terrify me. and apparently that's protected. well, i'm here to say that's not protected and nor nor should it be. and it should be investigated and punished. so when it comes to the potential downstream harm of having your face out there, for doing something that's, you know, morally approachable, then you have to focus on the people doing the threatening. you have to focus on the people doing the harassing and doing the stalking. but it can't be the answer that you simply can't put up pictures of people doing things that are themselves extremely illiberal. what say you to, for example, there's been quite a trend of big figure donors to harvard, to

the university of pennsylvania in particular, but other places as well. since october seventh, saying we don't want to send our money to these little anti-semitic hate factories in one case in the university of pennsylvania, they were referring specifically to the unsavory, from their point of view, invites to a palestinian writer's festival. how is that looked at? through the prism of cancel culture. if i am not going to stroke that $50 million check to penn because they are platforming palestinians. so on the one hand, donors can do whatever they want with their money on the other, if they're demanding that programing be stopped or faculty or students get punished for typically or clearly protected speech as opposed to threats or discriminatory harassment, etc., we have a problem with that and we will object to that loudly. and once the student or faculty member, you know, gets punished, then that's very much a fear case. on the other hand, the 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 and incredibly wealthy and powerful institution. and i mean, harvard has $50 billion to one side. it's that's its rainy day fund. and the idea that people keep giving these huge grants to it in enables cancel culture. it's one of the reasons why universities can not really care about public pressure and not completely like harvard until by the way, until harvard ranked dead last and our campus free speech ranking which is a which is based on 13 different factors not something that we put you know we didn't have any say in where they ended and add up in the end they harvard always ignored us. no matter how bad the case that we were fighting, they suddenly started taking us seriously. but i do think if donors start saying, listen, walking entirely and i'm giving my money to the campus free speech rating, you know what, fire or the or the university of austin, you know, the new experimental liberal

arts college. i think we'd be living in a healthier 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 actually would have said something very condemning if they weren't afraid of their own students, faculty and administrate orders. and that's cancel culture itself. john hite wrote something pointing out that some of the some of the weirdness you're seeing on campus is coming from cancel culture itself. it also, i think, is one of the reasons why some of the students on the harvard letter were so sure that it wouldn't be that controversial, too, on the day that the attacks are still happening. to say this is entirely israel's fault. so when donors are actually saying say something, you don't believe as a public statement, i have an issue with that. i think that's an inappropriate use of power. but when they're saying say something, you actually believe, you coward. i do have some sympathy for

that, but i really do think that the best thing that can come out of this is people be aware that harvard, penn and harvard, penn, yale these are all schools that do terribly early in our in our free speech ranking. and i think that the only way they're going to learn is if people stop applying and start giving stop giving massive amounts of money to it in that same survey, the biggest survey ever conducted, by the way, 55,000 students polled for biggest databases on student cancellations. professor cancellations, speech codes and de-platforming that elite colleges did abysmally, actually only technically we rated we actually used abysmally as a terms only fire only harvard technically abysmally, but no, but but uva and the 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 actually great records on free speech where students say can disagree productively, sending your kids there instead of just expecting them to be the 16th generation of harvard graduate. i think that would be a good outcome for all of us. one of the interesting things about your coauthor, rikki shallot, is that she's from gen z and gen z turns out to be at least preliminary, surprisingly resilient when it comes to free speech and. cancel culture a little bit different than the millennials above them. talk about that in the waning two or 3 minutes we have here. yeah. one of the interesting things to learn is that the population that hates cancel culture the most. it's not boomers, it's not gen x, the best generation, of course, and it's definitely millennials. millennials have the biggest, unfortunately, that stereotype is true as far as like anti free speech views, millennials do the worst of any any group by far but gen z hates cancel culture the most.

they grew up with it. they're 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're 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, though attempts to sort of wave away entire swaths of people so as not to have to argue with them. what we have a lot of suggestions on the fire dot org we are also on the eternal radical idea of my substack, but the most basic principles. the good news is they're ones that americans already know and they are reflected in idioms that were very popular when the two of us were kids. but ricky, my coauthor, had basically heard i mean, she'd heard of them maybe in passing to each their own, everyone's entitled to their own opinion. walk a mile in a man's shoes. don't judge a book by its cover. these are all small, liberal ideas. small d, democratic ideals that

should be back in circulation as a way of checking yourself to say who am i to cancel this person when i know that i that in the grand scheme of things, i'm just someone with an opinion that might ultimately be wrong. the is the canceling of the american mind. the authors greg lukianoff on off and ricky slide. greg, thank y