Lukianoff, Greg

First Amendment attorney; president and CEO of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression; co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind and The Canceling of the American Mind

Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech

Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 24, 2023

• Greg Lukianoff
• cancel culture
• free speech and First Amendment
• FIRE college rankings
• deplatforming
• whataboutism and rhetorical fortresses
• DEI and diversity statements
• hate speech and censorship
• viewpoint diversity in academia
• depression and mental health

Core ideas

Lukianoff defines cancel culture specifically as the post-2014 uptick in successful campaigns to get people fired, expelled, or deplatformed for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment (even where the First Amendment doesn't technically apply, e.g., private employment), plus the broader climate of fear this produces. He traces a clear historical arc: campus free-speech norms held up reasonably well from the 1960s Free Speech Movement through the early 2010s (with students, in his account, historically the strongest pro-free-speech constituency), but inverted sharply starting around 2014, with attacks on professors accelerating further in 2017. He roots part of the intellectual lineage in Herbert Marcuse's 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance," which argued the political left should extend free speech to itself but not to those it deemed regressive — a position Lukianoff calls historically fringe until it gained real institutional traction on campus. He distinguishes First Amendment law (government-specific) from the broader philosophical/cultural principle of free speech, arguing law without a supporting culture of valuing free expression eventually erodes (illustrated by his concern over law schools graduating students who see shouting down opponents as legitimate), and frames "viewpoint discrimination" — restricting not just topics but specific opinions within an otherwise open forum — as the core sin First Amendment doctrine identifies.

He presents original FIRE research as evidence of the scale of the phenomenon: FIRE's tracking finds a historic level of scholar-cancellation attempts (over 1,000 attempts to get professors fired or punished between 2014 and mid-2023, roughly two-thirds resulting in some punishment, and around 190 resulting in firing) which he explicitly compares to the McCarthy-era Red Scare (1947–1957, roughly 60–100 professors fired), arguing the current era is comparably or more severe by the numbers despite widespread claims that "this isn't even happening." He cites FIRE faculty surveys finding roughly 90% of professors report self-censoring in some form (versus 9% during the Red Scare, per contemporary research) and notes cancel-culture attempts come from both the left (dominant on campus generally, especially among students and increasingly among fellow faculty reporting colleagues) and the right (roughly a third of successful attempts against professors, often originating off-campus, plus state-level actions like Florida's "Stop WOKE Act," which FIRE sued over and won, and which Florida is reportedly attempting again in a different form). He also discusses FIRE's annual College Free Speech Rankings (Michigan Technological University and Auburn ranked highest one year; Harvard scored the only "abysmal" negative score, driven by an 81%+ deplatforming success rate among the bottom five schools), and recounts a specific case — a "Passion of the Musical" satirical play at University of Washington — where administrators were documented buying tickets for students specifically instructed to disrupt the performance, which he treats as rare hard evidence of the administrative coordination he believes underlies many shout-downs.

A substantial portion of the conversation covers the rhetorical taxonomy from The Canceling of the American Mind: a shared "obstacle course" of dodges used across the spectrum (whataboutism — deflecting from a criticism by pointing to the other side's wrongdoing; straw-manning versus "steel-manning" versus a colleague's coined "star-manning," treating an opponent's view as revealing something universally, typically unflattering, about human nature rather than engaging its substance; and "hypocrisy projection," accusing an opponent of inconsistency without checking); a "perfect rhetorical fortress" he attributes more to the left (a cascading set of dismissals — dismiss someone as conservative, then as white, straight, or male, and even after exhausting demographic categories, dismiss a Black, gay, or otherwise "intersectional" dissenter as somehow not authentically representing their identity group, which he illustrates via Black conservative and moderate commentators like John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes being told they're "not really Black"); and an "efficient rhetorical fortress" he attributes more to the right (dismiss anyone labeled liberal, then any expert, then any journalist, with an added MAGA-specific layer dismissing anyone not pro-Trump). He argues both fortresses function primarily to save time and produce outrage/superiority rather than move discourse toward truth, and that they were essentially invented for, and are maximally effective on, social media.

On DEI specifically, Lukianoff distinguishes the stated compassionate intent (which he attributes in good faith to DEI practitioners he knows personally) from what he calls empirically demonstrated effects that often increase division rather than "common humanity" cohesion, tying this partly to critical race theory's intellectual origins (which he says explicitly sought to create a new, unprotected legal category of "hate speech," a project he traces to CRT co-founders Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda). He describes a FIRE-commissioned experiment (led by Nate Honeycutt) testing how ~3,000 professors evaluated different styles of DEI statements as hiring criteria, finding statements emphasizing "viewpoint diversity" or religious diversity were rejected by large shares of reviewers as illegitimate, while conventional intersectionality-style statements passed easily — which he presents as empirical proof that DEI statements function as an ideological/political litmus test, which he considers especially dangerous layered atop already-low campus viewpoint diversity (citing figures like ~3% conservative faculty at Harvard, and some elite humanities departments with literally zero). He states his own preference is for far more attention to socioeconomic diversity in elite higher education (citing Evan Mandery's book Poison Ivy on how elite schools disproportionately serve the wealthy) as a healthier axis than current DEI frameworks.

On hate speech and free speech theory, Lukianoff rejects hate-speech restrictions on First Amendment and epistemic grounds, articulating what he calls a "Pure Informational Theory" of free speech (or "The Lab and the Looking Glass"): since the goal of human knowledge is understanding the world as it actually is, suppressing speech deprives society of accurate knowledge of what people actually think, producing "preference falsification" (a term he credits to Timur Kuran) — people don't change their minds under censorship, they simply stop sharing views with people who might punish them and retreat into ideologically homogeneous enclaves, accelerating group polarization; he cites research that driving people off mainstream platforms (e.g., to Gab) measurably increased their radicalization. He extends this to controversial or even repugnant speakers (citing Daryl Davis's deradicalization of Klan members through sustained personal engagement, and a documentary his team produced on former ACLU head Ira Glasser covering the 1970s Skokie Nazi-march case, where he argues allowing the march to proceed visibly deflated the movement rather than legitimizing it) — while conceding, in response to Lex's own reflection on the ethical weight of platforming controversial guests, that doing so well requires deep contextual and historical preparation rather than either blanket refusal or naive amplification.

On COVID as a case study, he presents Jennifer Sey's ouster from Levi's (over her public school-reopening advocacy, which she says cost her a likely presidency and a seven-figure severance she declined so she could keep speaking) as illustrating how cancel culture damaged public trust in expertise generally, and separately laments that vindication rarely restores a canceled person's reputation once the original controversy is forgotten and only reputational damage remains. He closes on a personal register, disclosing for the first time publicly (in The Canceling of the American Mind) a 2007 suicide attempt and subsequent 9-month recovery through cognitive behavioral therapy, connecting his professional recognition of "cognitive distortions" (catastrophizing, mind-reading, overgeneralization) directly to his later diagnosis of campus culture as one where administrators "sell" similar distortions to increasingly receptive students — and discloses that writing the cancel-culture book triggered a renewed depressive episode, worsened by the suicide of a friend and fellow "canceled" academic he hadn't checked in on in time, which he says was eased mainly by confiding in his own staff and finding cross-ideological solidarity at an off-the-record gathering (Dialogue, run by Auren Hoffman). He ends with cautious optimism that people are "sick" of inauthenticity under censorship, and floats alternative, low-cost, rigorous credentialing mechanisms (outside elite university gatekeeping) as a structural remedy to the class-reinforcing role elite education plays in the culture he describes.

Excerpts