We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emilijashinsky, culture
editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show at
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Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and if you'd like to
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and sign up to join the Federalist Community for an ad free website experience and
access to exclusive content you don't want to miss. All right, Today's guest
is Greg Lukianoff. He's the co author of the wonderful new book and it's
actually physically a beautiful new book. It's called The Canceling of the American Mind.
He wrote that with the wonderful writer Ricky Schlott, who has an interesting
story in and of herself. But I just want to give a shout out
to Greg before we get started, because this is a recording of a conversation
that we had last week. So I think it was last Wednesday, and
my laptop was having the worst day of its life. So Greg, in
the midst of his very busy schedule as he has this important new book out
actually was putting up with my laptop continuing to mysteriously die. And then after
my laptop died the final time, Greg stayed on the recording and recorded his
full final last answer just for the heck of it in case it was still
recording. It looked like it was still recording, so it ended up on
the cloud, which was amazing because I could use it and we got a
full podcast despite my laptop continuing to die time after time after time. So
we are so grateful to Greg. Hopefully you won't notice anything at all in
this I just wanted to give him a shout out because he made that possible
by taking the extra time to record his final answer after my laptop died and
hung in the entire time. And Greg, if you're not familiar with the
work that they do over at Fire, has been at the forefront of this
conversation about speech, about this conversation, of this conversation about expression, and
even this conversation about social media, the conversation that we have often here and
we have had for years here about how social media itself is shaping so many
of these problems and influencing so many of these problems and to some extent,
maybe causing so many of these problems. So it was a wonderful conversation.
I was really looking forward to talking to Greg about this new book, so
I definitely recommend that you check it out. Highly recommend that you check it
out. And again, just thank you for listening. Thank you to Greg
for coming on the podcast, for recording that final answer, whether or not
he knew if it was going into the void, it was just awesome.
And shout out to everybody for sending so many thoughtful emails recently. We really
appreciate it, try to respond to all of them, try to read all
of them at the very least, and just again, we really appreciate it.
We're so grateful to everyone for continuing to listen to the show, and
I really hope you enjoyed this discussion that I got to have with Greg Lukianov.
We're joined today by the one and only Greg Lukianov has of course,
from fire the important organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education now and
expression. Oh my gosh, Greg, I'm so sorry about that. Of
course, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, that's actually a really good
place to start though, and maybe we should just start there because fires change
from an education to expression is completely salient to the book that Greg just wrote
with his wonderful co author, Ricky Schlott. It's called The Canceling of the
American Mind. It's a very important book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
So, Greg, why don't we actually just start right there because it's
completely relevant. Absolutely. Yeah. So we're founded in ninety ninety nine as
a Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, and we changed in on June sixth,
twenty twenty two, to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression artially because
things got so bad in the country in twenty twenty We realized that we couldn't
know all younger save campuses if we didn't work to save the rest of the
country. And that also, frankly, if we didn't save the rest of
the country, we couldn't actually save the save campuses. So we expanded beyond
that. We have a you know, we have much more litigation off campus
now than we used to do, and we try to teach people just like
and the book is one of the ways we do. Is Canceling of the
American Mind is in part, you know, us trying to teach people about
what a culture of free speech is, which is part of part of the
mission is to educate people not just on free speech law, but on speech
valleys. Greg amidst all of the tragedy and suffering in the Middle East right
now and in Israel, my friend Jason Willick, the former fire intern.
By the way, I didn't know that about Jason. Well, this is
perfect then, So Jason Willick wrote an excellent column in the Washington Post,
really directed at people who are looking at the outpouring of outright support for hamas
we've seen the paragliders and all of that iconography kind of being used already in
college campuses, and they're kind of looking and asking what the heck happened?
You know, Jason reminds people that this is the symptom of this is a
symptom of something much deeper. So Greg, I wanted to start with you
on that point. In a sad way, it's kind of perfect timing for
the book to come out for everyone, you know, maybe the people on
the left who are looking around now at college campuses in the wake of what's
happened in the last couple of weeks. Do you agree, Greg, you
talk about this so much that this is a symptom of something so much deeper.
And I mean and so donors, and I want donors to not just
focus on this one. It's like this one horrifying thing. You don't get
to a point where university presidents who believe that the Umbas attacks were monstrous and
support Israel are afraid to publicly say so because they're afraid that they'll, you
know, at least their lives will be really unpleasant if not, you know,
be canceled for taking the unpopular position, particularly an elite campuses in particularly
campuses by the way, in California. So the weird behavior was the product
of cancel culture. It's also one of the reasons why Harvard students could actually
think that they could write something saying watching this horror show and say this is
entirely Israel's fault. Why they actually could believe that that would be something that
would be relatively well accepted is that they exist in an environment where everybody's too
scared to talk about this issue from anything other than the pro Palestinian perspective.
So cancel culture resulted in this group think. It resulted in an atmosphere university
presences are afraid to say what they think. And in some ways, thank
goodness for donors. Now, listen, donors were coming in and saying,
you have to take a position you don't believe, or I will draw my
money, or for that matter, you have to fire somebody, or you
have to expel somebody for their freedom of speech. Well fire would come in
in that case. But if they're actually saying, you cowards, say what
you really think. You're too afraid of your own students. And how on
earth did we get to an environment where this is the view that is considered
so sacred that you're risking your career to challenge it. Cold turkey great on
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ten percent off your order today. So interesting. You know, I saw
another commentary I think this was from Chris Rufo, sort of looking at what
happened in the twentieth century, looking at communism and this paradigm that you're between
right and wrong, that if you are not morally with us, you are
against us, comparing that kind of to a campus mindset now and as that
has you become more and more powerful, it's sort of left the universities and
it has gone out into the broader culture. Gregor wanted to ask you if
you also see maybe these parallels between that ideological formulation between what you're seeing right
now and then in the twentieth century. Well. Yeah, And one thing
that I have to point out in the book is that cancel culture is actually
worse than Macarthyism by a number of statistics. Probably the way in which cancel
culture was macarthurs was way worse was actually what's now known as the Lavender scale
scare on something that Jamie Kertrick wrote about like the you know, under sort
of you know, the belief that gay employees could be easily blackmailed. You
know. I think thousands of gay employees were fired, you know, in
the nineteen fifties, and that's something that people should should know more about.
But the way in which cancel culture is actually worse than the McCarthyism is in
the numbers. So, first of all, there was a real threat in
the nineteen fifties. There were actual American and British spies who helped to as
a Russian American I got the person I refer to is a super Hitler Stalin
actually get the bomb. There was reason to be freaked out in the nineteen
fifties because the most the thing that could end civilization was given to someone up
there with Hitler and Mao in terms of his murder counts. So people there
was some reason to be freaked out. It wasn't just bad speech. It
was I'm afraid some of these people are disloyal, and some of them actually
were, so I always have to clarify that. And that's more normal for
the situation for mass censorship events. Cancel culture, which we defined, is
the uptick of campaigns to get people fired for what would be their first amendment
of protected beliefs, starting around twenty fifteen and really accelerating in twenty seventeen.
Isn't happening during a massive security crisis. It's not happening because of a global
war. So it's weird on a lot of levels. But when we looked
at it, you know, and we know this is a massive undergound because
like one out of ten students say something like that, and our newest research
indicate that they've been investigated for their speech, which is insane. I think
the younger people don't understand how completely nuts that is. What a one out
of six professors have said they've even been threatened with investigation or actually investigated for
their academic freedom and free speech, which is also crazy. And for the
case and so we know that there's a huge number of cases that will never
make it to the light of day because there are secret hearings, are bias
related incident programs there. Then there really are like that that sounds conspiratorial,
but an Apple Bama loaurer Chidnus writes about this and they are real and we
and even despite all that, despite the fact there's no viewpoint diversity in many
departments, like literally no conservatives in many departments, and cancel culture is much
worse. In the top ten schools in the country. We still have found,
you know, over a thousand attempts to get professors fired since twenty fourteen,
about two thirds of them result in some fired or punished. To be
clear, they don't specifically mention firing. Someone pointed out to me, like
about three hundred of the student petition do specifically mentioned firing. But okay,
sure, that's a huge difference anyway, but two thirds of them are actually
punished in some way, investigated, etc. But almost two hundred of them,
and I suspect by the end of the year it's going to be over
two hundred of them have actually been fired. And by the way, like
at the time of McCarthyism, there was something like sixty two or sixty three
professors who in the best research that was done in the fifties about this,
that were fired for communist beliefs, about ninety for beliefs overall, oftentimes round
up two hundred. I think with hindsight we can tell that the numbers were
somewhat bigger, maybe one hundred, Somewhere between hundred hundred and fifty. We're
talking about two hundred professors being fired here. And here's the big difference.
The law wasn't clear that you couldn't do that until nineteen fifty seven to nineteen
seventy three. Like they actually thought, Okay, we're firing these communist professors
because they're two doctrine there. They're going to doctrinate their kids. And you
know, obviously I stand by either free speech rights as established by the nineteen
fifty seven case, but now the law couldn't be clearer viewpoint, diversity couldn't
be lower in higher education. There are a million different mechanisms they can use
to induce conformity from K through twelve on up to get people to fall into
line. We have a whole chapter called the Conformity Gauntlet talking about all the
different pressures to actually make you reform your to engage in thought reform. And
still they're able to find this many heretics to burn, and it's just it's
amazing to be gas lit by people are saying, oh, this isn't even
happening, and like, so, I guess you're saying that the Sedition Acts
of seventeen ninety eight, which only dealt with between fifty and a dozen prosecutions,
I think only ten prosecutions was nothing, or mccartheism or something like.
You can't find another since law was established. It's anywhere vaguely in the ballpark
of what's been going on today, But still you have to deal with people
saying it's not happening at all. This week. On the Word of the
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the argument, of course is they'll say it's accountability culture. As you well
know, they like to say it's accountability culture. And I want to ask
in the again, in the context of the last few weeks, there have
been some conservatives or people on the right talking about punishing students for writing or
for signing letters anything like that. But this is just kind of a I
think as a strong man. I mean, there are people on the right
who were ever saying that we should have a culture where there's no such things
as shame. That's, you know, sort of a silly argument. There's
nobody who's ever been out saying that there should be no boundaries, there should
be no shame in the culture. But I do want to ask Greg if
this is something you think is you know, it's definitely not my top priority.
But if you think this is something that's potent on the right, that's
something that really has traction to be dangerous. Oh. To be clear,
the book takes on the right and the left. Cancel culture being more pronounced
in corporations and journalism and in academia of course is more left leaning like overall,
and a lot of times the cancelers on the right think they're actually trying
to cancel cancel culture. But they shouldn't actually cancel cancel culture. They shouldn't
actually cancel people, or else they look like hypocrites. But meanwhile, and
it's been really funny watching a lot of the book is about this absolutely lame
andmbursing way we argue that's tolerated unbelievably on campus. And because that came out
of social media, all these the silly little tricks we use to not have
to actually engage with each other. And one thing we talk about is we
call hypocrisy projection, which is and you see this all the time on Twitter,
it's like where is fire on this case? And we're like, we're
quoted in the third inch of this of this article, which this is a
fire case because there is this assumption that everybody else And it's so funny because
it usually comes from people who only care about one side of the political spectrum,
but they think everybody else is a hypocrite, which is like almost comical.
So when it comes to, you know, cancel culture on the right,
when they when they've pointed out kind of like, well, aren't you
saying that people being put on blacklists for what they say on campus? You're
not saying that's cancel culture. I'm like I said it on Sprikantish, like
I said on National TV, like like last week, Like I've said it
on podcasts, I've said it, like We've been all over the place making
making the point. Now. Of course, when you're talking about a cultural
and I always have to be clear, companies can hire whoever they want.
What we want people to do is consider well, like it was happening in
twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, which was every widget factory was deciding that
they're also a political shop. And if you had something critical to say of
say like for example, like BLM, you know your job might be in
trouble. Now, yes, they have a First Amendment right. Companies have
a first right to fire people on the basis of their opinion. And I
think, and by the way, I think, I don't want the government
stepping in and demanding that they don't. But consider the country you want to
live in. If you have First Amendment rights but you can't actually hold down
a job and actually authentically say your opinion, that's not a healthy democratic republic.
And one bigger thing, it's really valuable to know what people really think.
And this is one of the things I think is funny when people are
responding. And by the way, not that many people are responding demanding censorship
on campus right now. I was here for nine to eleven, so many
more professors were punished for saying in some cases insensitive things, you know,
saying the attacks were justified, or cracking jokes them, or for that matter,
saying that there should be a ferocious response to these attacks, like a
lot of professors and students got in trouble after nine to eleven. We're not
seeing that scale, at least not yet on campus, but we you know,
we will. We are investing investigating some cases. But so far,
you know, but I do think that you know, cancel culture on the
right, you know, it can't it can be real, and it shouldn't
be the response to cancel culture. But so here is one thing though,
that I really wish would happen that's not happening so far, but needs to.
All these people who argued accountability cancel cultures and cultures accountability culture, and
then you have all these cases of people, you know, think in some
cases where people are losing their jobs for saying prohomas things and they're like,
their first response is you're hypocrites. You know, It's like, are you
reevaluating whether or not you think accountability culture and cancel culture are so swell when
it's being used against you, Like, is there any self reflection going on
at this moment? And I'm sure there are for some people, but in
the culture war, like the culture war seems to be particularly for the people
who are superpartisan like the whole thing about the culture war is like I love
the culture to work because I never have to say I was wrong about anything.
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is only the Beginning rated pg. Thirteen. Your friend Jonathan height wrote a
beautiful forward to this book, and obviously Jonathan Highten, he writes about your
own sort of experience and experiences with cognitive behavioral therapy, and I think some
of this explains why the left and the right are susceptible to cancelation impulses.
You know, apart from being comprised of human beings, there's something right now
about the way our minds are being conditioned to engage in argumentation that Jonathan hight
has written and studied very closely as have you. It's in this book,
and you know, of course folks should go out and buy the book to
get the full answer to this question. But I really wanted to ask Greg.
I think this is at the core of the conversation. It always should
be, to what extent is social media causing some of these problems of the
canceling of the American mind. Social media sped things up. I sped up
a lot of existing trends like polarization and you know, partisanship and the ability
to attack. But it also create new avenues. It created entirely new phenomena.
And I know people are kind of sick of hearing about social media,
and sometimes they even kind of roll their eyes about, like you know when
we point out, like how big of a shift it is. But you
got to understand, like I used to study the printing press. The printing
press brought millions of additional people into the European conversation, and it was devastating
in the short term. It led to an uptick in the witch trials,
It led to religious wars, it led to civil wars. By the time
you're getting to Henry, the aight's trying to put the genie back in the
bottle in the fifteen twenties and fifteen the thirties, you know, like he's
like, he's like, this was not this was probably not worth it.
I'm sure he was thinking quite a bit. This technology is too disruptive,
and of course over the long term it became one of the most important things
for the development of human thought, but in the short term didn't eem worth
it. We just added billion or billions of people to the global conversation.
There's literally no way. Once that's happened, that is unparalleled, and people
get used to this kind of stuff and it's like no, no, no,
there's never literally never been something like where you get to see people's instant
reactions to things in real time. I talk about it. It's like seeing
the collective mind of the entire species. And sometimes you're pretty horrified by what
you see. But we should exercise some curiosity. Now, social media has
made a lot of these trends worse. It also creates the possibility for cancel
culture to thrive. Because back when you wanted to get that you know,
journalist fired, you know, you had to send a letter to the editor
you know, and it ends up in a in a drawers somewhere, nothing
ever happens. Meanwhile, today what people realized was, hey, you know,
it feels great, you know, right, righteous indignation, and I
have all these political enemies and they say, they say things, and I
can figure out sometimes they actually will do offense archaeology, which is looking back
into what people said in the past to try to get someone they dislike,
you know, canceled for some other reason. We talk about the intricacies of
this. We actually have a lot of fun talking about the various rhetorical fortresses
and all the forgive the expression bs techniques that people used to actually not address
at each other's arguments. But now when one of the you know, a
columnist says something that someone doesn't like, they can you get them and their
friends and sometimes theirir sock puppet accounts to make it look like there's an army
of people to today are demanding that you fire this person, and to their
shame, a lot of higher education and a lot of companies actually, you
know, would actually oblige them sometimes thinking that there was this massive movement.
Meanwhile, one of the things that we always say, one thing that can
really diffuse this is tell people, Okay, you've got a complaint. We
have a policy of waiting three weeks after these things to investigate them, and
that would make the stuff die down because in so many cases they're just moving
on to the next, the next target. But yeah, social media has
fundamentally changed the world, and I know people are tired of hearing it,
but you really got to consider, like how strange this transformation of society actually
is. Just said something earlier about hypocrisy, and that made me think the
kind of hypocrisy call out type culture on social media. That made me think
of actually the kind of memification of our politics and our discourse and whether maybe
people are rethinking their positions on accountability culture in the midst of all of this.
And it strikes me that some of this, and I want to ask
again, you've been doing this for a very long time. Can some of
this maybe be attributed to the fact that people are the reality that people young
people don't have as well thought out positions or beliefs when it comes to free
expression as they would have had maybe twenty years ago. Oh. Absolutely,
I think that the lack of I mean, part of the problem is that
we literally live in more isolated neighborhoods from people who don't share our politics than
we used to. We're very segregated by cloud ass And one of the big
things that people don't want to talk about why higher education is elite. Higher
education is so weird. It's because it has a lot of the the typical
ailments of rich people of the one percent. I make the point that when
people make this argument that cancel culture is just the powerless taking their power back,
and I'm just like, please, cancel culture is most prevalent in the
top ten schools in the country, in the most elite schools in the country,
which, by the way, you know, schools like Harvard, Stanford,
et cetera, educate more people from the one percent than they do from
the bottom fifty percent of the social economic they are they recreate class privilege to
a degree, and I think sometimes actually feeling so guilty about that is they
think they can make up to society for it, my hand, especially radical
politics, which is just I watched Stanford like all the time, I did
actual public service. I come from a poor back and my friends who went
to and I actually went to go take a huge pay cut to go to
go wor work in a place like Fire as its first legal director. But
my friends who did like corporate law, they're super radical in their hearts,
partially because partially because they you know, they feel guilty about a lot of
us. This is Molly Hemingway encouraging you to listen to my favorite podcast,
Issues, et cetera. Every day you get in depth interviews with host Todd
Wilkin, asking expert guests substantive, thought provoking questions on all of the important
news and issues of our day. The expert guests are in culture, law,
ethics, philosophy, theology, and apologetics. Expert guests expansive topics,
always extolling christ issues, et cetera. So the postliberals, the Patrick Dennes,
actually Michael Noles wrote a whole book called Speechless. It's a great book,
but they look at the liberal project, the small l liberal project,
and you say, this cannot work. A system of constitutional republicanism cannot work
unless there are some basic tenets to which we all agree, and free speech
and expression are obviously one of them, and the version of it that you
know Michael puts forward and speechless is probably one of those things. To which
or that does actually expose some of these fundamental disagreements within the liberal project itself.
So, Greg, I actually want to ask you, do you see
this as a sign that the liberal project cannot work, that the sort of
fabric of the liberal project in the United States is or in the West is
crumbling, or is this something that you just kind of are necessarily it's necessarily
a necessary bug of the system, but it's one that you know can can
be overcome ultimately. Yeah. I mean, I consider myself a liberal and
I'm left of center, but I'm not a progressive. And I think that
some of the things that Patrick denim that I don't there's a looking at is
actually they're looking at progressives, and they're thinking about people who themselves are incredibly
hostile to liberalism, and even if sometimes some of them know it and say
it, some of who don't actually realize that being hostile and you know,
basically thinking that we'd be better ruled by it and lightened elite, and the
free speech shouldn't be protected and that selectively people should have rights. That's not
liberalism by any definition. Now, to be clear, I tend to use
the more kind of textbook definition Yasha Mounk kind of idea that basically, it
seemed like up until fairly recently, all Americans kind of agreed on like,
or at least most you know, that essentially people should have celebrities, and
people should have freedom of speech, and democracy is good and all this kind
of stuff that we didn't we hoped wasn't going anywhere. I would actually like
those of us who believe in those values to actually collect together. I think
there are enough people in the center left and center right who could actually push
back against this. I just hope that our book helps open their eyes about
how crazy things have gotten in some of these institutions, like a particular elite
higher education. They need massive reform. But giving up on freedom of speech,
even just out of self interest, even just out of self interest for
conservatives, is a terrible idea because guess who's going to be enforcing those new
speech codes. It probably won't be someone on the right. In many cases,
it definitely will not be someone on the right in higher education. So
I think sometimes, you know, I sometimes see like movement on the right
to get rid of Section two thirty, and I'm like, who do you
think would be harm the most if they got rid of two thirty, who
do you think these companies in Silicon Valley, you know, are going to
kick off their platforms first. So I think that some of the thinking around
rethinking freedom of speech, for example, would actually, if it were to
actually to exist in the real world, would definitely harm conservatives. Now,
of course I'd oppose it to my dying breath, because I believe in these
as values. But I share the concern that there is a generation being educated
right now that's coming off college campuses that I think freedom of speech is part
of the problem that enlightened censorship is swell. They look at you know,
there were like something like we point this out in the book, there were
something like three thousand, four thousand arrests during the pomer Raids in the first
red Scare over two years of the pomer Raids. I think it is around
three thousand and four thousand. They're around almost four thousand people arrested for offensive
comments on social media in Britain in twenty sixteen. I think, and when
I hear, you know, people like on the left saying like, oh,
we should be like Europe, I'm like, you want massive policing of
what people say on social media. And now meanwhile, kind of like you're
seeing, actually what's happening in Europe where there there were in some cases like
France maybe is banning Palestinian flags, the people are actually going to jail in
some cases for some of their speech around this. And what I wish would
happen. Would people go, oh, oh no, actually, maybe I
was wrong about thinking about this enlightened censorship in Europe. But people are so
in there, they have their warheads on so tight, they don't seem to
be doing this reevaluation that maybe we were super wrong about this stuff. And
by the way, you were. Something that I love about this book is
so fascinating as you kind of anatomize the rise of cancel culture, and obviously
you were studying that from the very beginning. But that's really daunting in the
context of everything we just talked about of social media and all of that.
So can you just tell us a little bit greg about your prescription moving forward,
your path for the future. Well, first thing I want readers to
understand is that we don't think fixing it is easy. We spend a third
of the book talking about it because we don't think it's easy. And by
the way, we're just starting on some of these suggestions. Basically, I
would characterize the last third of it as what might be a good start,
And we have some pretty radical ideas in there as well. Like the most
radical idea that I talk about is, I wish there was a test that
was incredibly difficult to pass that would basically test your knowledge of everything, say
Humanity's Harvard student would have studied like the in like the nineteen fifties, you
know, like every single book. You'd have to understand all of them.
But if you could pass that, you get a BA, you know,
like you get a super prestigious BA because maybe one out of ten thousand people
can pass this thing. Why do I think that's good? Because right now,
and how badly elite higher education actually distorts the whole country. It is
a major theme. But right now, let's take Harvard. Harvard, by
the way, finished dead last in our campus free speech ranking, which is
not our opinion. It's based on thirteen different factors, the largest study of
student opinion ever done, four different databases on professor cancelations, student cancelations,
deplatforming, and speech codes. And they finished dead last. They actually got
a negative score that we rounded up to a zero. And meanwhile, at
Harvard, I think the statistic is something like forty five percent of white students
are either legacies kids or professors or athletes. And the average GPA at Harvard
is a three point eight, which is insane like that, that's basically a
perfect, perfect grade point average. So that means you could be getting an
incredibly hard working, absolutely brilliant kid if you hire from Harvard, or you
might be getting this kid who phoned it in got a three point six.
You know, and as the son of is a fourth generation legacy and the
kid of a major donor. If we had something like this test, you
know, it would actually start scaring elite colleges where it matters the most.
Besides, you know, alumni donations that they might not be one of the
best indicators for who the best, brightest and hardest working are. By the
way, they never were, but they thought they had a good argument for
them being. But it's getting worse and worse by the year. Meanwhile,
another major harm of hiring from elite colleges is those students might show up and
be canceleds themselves. How many of the corporate things, and how often I've
heard this and this, this, this one gets under my skin. Greg
and Greg and John Hyde. Hi. You know, I'm an I'm a
big employer. I've noticed that my predictingly my elite college graduates, but you
know, from other schools as well. They show up and they're they're destroying
my corporation. Like they're basically saying, I have to fire everyone who disagrees.
We have to make statements on every political thing, and it has to
be pretty pretty hard left. It's dysfunctional, and so I'm not hiring from
there anymore. And I always I'm like, okay, can you tell the
world that I'm like, no, I have to keep this private, and
it's like no, please please tell the world this. This would this would
actually help people understand that how how how bad it's gotten. I'm thankful to
Ryan Grimm at The Intercept for writing an article called the Elephant in the Zoom,
which points out how dysfunctional this has been when it hit social justice fundamentalism
is my preferred term to wokeism when that hit the nonprofit world, and I
really appreciate him for shining a light on it. So if we had some
kind of like crazy test you know that was incredibly difficult to pass. Well
one you don't know if you can be relatively confident you're probably not getting some
thoughtless ideologue. You might be getting the genuinely hardworking, smart person who's a
self starter. Meanwhile, you know you hire from Harvard or Yale, you
might end up not only with someone who doesn't is not actually as good as
they look on paper by a mile. There might be someone who shows up
and sinks your corporation because they actually are demanding that all of your eccentric,
interesting people have to go because they're not sufficiently doctrinaire. Hey, y'all,
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Com promo code Sarah. My last question, Greg, you're so busy and
I know you got to run, is to return a bit to Chris Rufo
because he writes extensively about how this oppressor versus oppress see dichotomy is es central
to a lot of the leftism that you see on campuses that maybe the objectionable
excess of leftism that people look at and see on campuses. And I asked
that because you know, in Ryan's article actually touches on some of this.
But the first of the way I first became familiar with Fire was when I
was interning for Christina Hoff Summer Back in Summer's Back in twenty twelve twenty fourteen.
I talk about it on the show a lot, but it was very
formative for me, and that language bubbled to the surface in those early days
of cancel culture when you were one of the few people really studying this and
really aware of it. I really just want to ask, is that that
dichotomy, that colonizer versus colonized type of paradigm that know Rufo has written about
and other people have written about in different ways and maybe have different takes on
what it is, is that fundamentally a threat to free speech. The thing
about Chris Truffo's book is, you know, even though Chris Ruffo and Fire
butts heads on a number of issues, particularly the stop Okay in Florida,
I actually thought the book was really quite impressive. Like I was, I
thought it had a pointed it shaw a light on some really important issues,
and I think it's important, for example, that everybody know that Marcus,
in addition to being Herbert Marcuse, one of the fathers of enlightened censorship,
was not just completely dead wrong and in my opinion, sort of like a
simplistic thinker on freedom of speech was he believed MAO was still good in the
nineteen seventies. I mean, and I think it's important the younger readers understand
that, even though they might not understand how MAW is unfortunately. So there's
a lot there's a lot that I like about the book, and I think
that it really points out and one thing that I really want people to know
is that when it comes to critical race theory, that yeah, you're you're
allowed to teach it, you can assign that stuff, and we'll post that
if you're saying that this is something these are ideas that can't be you know,
talked about on campus. But the very first thing that the founders of
Critical Race Theory did when they got together was make an argument for less free
speech. The words that wound, you know, was something I think when
the final version of it came out in the nineties. I think Crensha Delgado,
Mary Matsuda, a lot of the founders of the movement were on that
actual actually were co authors on that book. But also you know, the
original words when I Think, I Think, which was nineteen eighty came out
and it started the speech ghost movement. So like the critical race theory theory,
you know, which is explicitly explicitly anti liberal to be clear, like
they think that liberalism they day too, like the Patrick I mean right,
think liberalism has failed and that it was fundamentally you know, anti free speech
when it to the oppressed versus oppressor dichotomy. A lot of the sort of
you know, using identity and using oppression to squash speech. It's it's something
we never should have taken seriously in the first place, because there's nothing about
being, you know, in the opinion of hire Ed a good person that
means you're right, and there's nothing about being a bad person that means you're
wrong. And we talk about this actually is a fourth grade unfruth in the
book. You'll have to read it to figure out what I'm talking about.
There. Another big thanks to Greg lukianof co author of the new book The
Canceling of the American Mind, which he wrote with Ricky Schlott, and a
big thanks to Greg for putting up with my computer troubles. It was just
fantastic to be able to have that conversation with him. I want to give
everyone a reminder that if they'd like to support our work at the Federalists,
go to the Federalist dot com sign up to join the Federalist community for an
ad free version of the website which is awesome, and also exclusive access to
content that you don't want to miss, so make sure to go to Federalist
dot com for that. I'm Emili Jaschinski, culture editor here at the Federalist.
Thank you very much for listening. We will be back soon with more.
Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the Fray