Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech | Lex Fridman Podcast #397

Lukianoff defines cancel culture as the post-2014 uptick in successful campaigns to fire, expel, or de-platform people for normally protected speech, plus the climate of fear it creates. He traces the connection between free speech and the pursuit of knowledge, walks through FIRE's college free speech rankings, and dissects the 'rhetorical fortresses' the left and right each use to dodge arguments. The conversation covers DEI statements as ideological litmus tests, hate speech doctrine, the printing press as a historical parallel to social media's disruption, and how to interview extremists responsibly. Lukianoff also shares his personal history with depression, a 2007 suicide attempt, and how cognitive behavioral therapy reshaped his thinking and seeded The Coddling of the American Mind.

• Harvard scored a negative 10.69 (rounded to zero), the only school to receive an 'abysmal' rating in FIRE's free speech rankings.
  00:31:49
• About 190 professors have been fired over roughly nine years of cancel culture versus around 100 during the entire 11-year Red Scare.
  01:13:57
• Around 90% of professors report self-censoring today, compared to 9% during the Red Scare.
  01:23:17
• Lukianoff reveals he attempted suicide in 2007, calling 911 after buying hardware to ensure it would work.
  02:15:41
• A friend who had been canceled shot himself a week after Lukianoff last spoke with him.
  02:20:50
• FIRE obtained documentation of administrators buying tickets for angry students and training them to shout down a campus play.
  00:38:34
• Lukianoff argues the very founders of critical race theory invented 'hate speech' as a category to get banned.
  01:36:20

• Michigan Technological University ranked #1 for free speech; the bottom five included Penn, Georgetown, Fordham, USC and Harvard.
  00:30:14
• At Stanford, a fifth of the law school class showed up to shout down a Fifth Circuit judge, with a DEI administrator joining in.
  00:35:27
• Lukianoff, an atheist with deep interest in religion, read the entire Bible and the Quran in one year and plans to tackle the Book of Mormon.
  00:22:28
• Daryl Davis, a Black man, de-radicalized multiple KKK members simply by befriending them.
  01:42:33
• Letting Nazis march in Skokie made them look like fools and dissolved the movement, illustrating speech as its own antidote.
  01:50:20
• Prior restraint dates to Henry VIII, who in the 1530s required printers to be Crown-approved to suppress heretical work.
  01:58:36
• Lukianoff was nearly in fist fights with people on the right for defending those who joked about 9/11.
  02:18:14
• Every prominent Black conservative FIRE interviewed had been told they were 'not really black' for holding a dissenting opinion.
  01:29:32

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