“I feel like I’m cheating when I’m defending people I agree with.” — Greg Lukianoff
Three years ago, free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), came on the show to discuss The Canceling of the American Mind. Co-authored with Rikki Schlott, the book argued that the crisis of free speech in America existed mostly on the campus left with students shouting speakers down and administrators doing nothing about it.
Three years is a mighty long time in American politics. Today, as Lukianoff recently argued in the Washington Post, the crisis of free speech has gone off campus and is now being spread by mostly conservative politicians.
FIRE has quantified this new virus of intolerance. It points to over two hundred attempts in the last year to punish the opinions of a scholar, student or speaker. The state of free speech in America has never been worse, Lukianoff asserts, citing the case of a former cop in Tennessee who did thirty-seven days for forwarding a meme of an actual Trump quote.
Greg Lukianoff has an uncute term for this intolerance. Political cooties. It’s the habit of discounting an argument because of who’s making it. A word on cooties for non-Americans. It’s playground slang for an imaginary disease you catch by touching the wrong child. But its etymology is actually more grown-up. British soldiers in World War One invented it to describe body lice. Then the doughboys carried the word (not the lice) back to 1918 America. From real to imaginary vermin in a single generation.
Lukianoff admits he caught the bug himself, once writing off the conservative opinions of Alan Charles Kors, a man who helped found FIRE. So what to do? He thinks identifying today’s epidemic of intolerance is the key. Maybe there’s a book in it. The Shaming of the American Cootie?
ABOUT THE GUEST
Greg Lukianoff is president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which he has led since 2001, and a graduate of Stanford Law School. He is the co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of The Coddling of the American Mind, and, with Rikki Schlott, of The Canceling of the American Mind. He is currently serializing The Academic Filibuster on Substack and writing Reality Test with the neuroscientist Heather Berlin.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:31 — Jacob Weisberg, eight collaborators, and Sian Beilock
02:37 — Why he disagrees about the president of Dartmouth
05:10 — How America funded higher education as stupidly as possible
06:02 — AK: these are privileged institutions. Who cares about free speech?
07:20 — Surveillance plus AI: Iran, China, and Harari’s Nexus
10:28 — The Trump administration is the biggest change
12:30 — Larry Bushart, a meme, and thirty-seven days in jail
16:20 — From the on-campus left to the off-campus right
17:10 — Why hundreds of cases is historically unprecedented
18:38 — A reversion to the historical mean
21:38 — Charles Sanders Peirce and fallibilism
22:20 — Mill’s Trident: wrong, right, or partly both
26:40 — Political cooties, named
28:00 — The Judge Duncan shout-down at Stanford Law
30:58 — Israel, gender, and the sacred cows of the right
33:56 — AK: are we heading for an AI technocracy?
36:50 — Disconfirmation as the way to earn back trust
38:17 — The Skokie lawyers, and what they were really defending
39:22 — AK: is this existential for universities?
40:15 — Closing