← After Party with Emily Jashinsky
After Party with Emily Jashinsky
Karmelo Anthony Fallout, Belfast Burns, Shock Gen Z Stat, PLUS Another Sorkin Fairytale
01:32:21
Emily Jashinsky is joined by Steve Krakauer, Executive Producer of “The Megyn Kelly Show” and AM Update and author of “Uncovered.” They open with a discussion about the Karmelo Anthony verdict and reaction to it including stunning comments from Anthony’s family and Rep Jasmine Crockett. The conversation then turns to Dana Loesch's advice on political disagreements and why they would take a different approach, they discuss why Joe Rogan resonates with audiences, the split on the right following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and James Talarico’s chances of winning a U.S. Senate seat. Then Emily is joined by Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and a “New York Times” best-selling author. They discuss the recent riots in Belfast, how censorship actually backfires, and lessons America can learn from Europe. They also dive into recent polling that shows a significant shift in how young people view speech, research on college professors, w...
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- [00:02]
Steve Krakauer
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- [00:30]
Greg Lukianoff
You know, recommendations can be great. Maybe someone recommended this podcast and here you are. But home projects are different. If a podcast isn't your thing, you lose a few minutes. If you hire your cousin's neighbor to mount your tv, you might end up with a lopsided screen and wall damage. Maybe I know a guy.
- [00:47]
Emily
Just isn't enough for your home.
- [00:48]
Greg Lukianoff
That's why thumbtack works. It matches you with top rated local pros with photos, reviews and credentials all in one place. For your next home project, try thumbtack. Hire the right pro today.
- [01:07]
Emily
Hello, everyone and welcome to afterparty. Thank you for joining us tonight. Our guests are Greg Lukianoff of the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Steve Krakauer. We're going to get to Steve in just one moment. I pre recorded with Greg earlier in the day and it was a fascinating interview. Kind of taking stock of where we are right now with when it comes to free speech and political correctness here in the United States. About a year and a half into the Trump administration, which was of course elected partially on an anti censorship, anti suppression, anti PC platform. There's a lot to get to on that front, as you know, especially actually as we consider the west more broadly. We've been looking at images all day of Belfast in Northern Ireland basically up in flames as people continue reacting and, and in some horrifying ways, I should mention. We'll show you that in just one moment. But in some horrifying ways to the horrifying crime committed by a Sudanese national who tried to saw off the head. Really? If you've seen the video, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, don't watch it. If you probably haven't seen it at this point, you might not want to see it. Basically trying to saw the head off of a man in the middle of the street. Of course, as you can imagine, European censors, regulators, are already chirping at the social media companies. So we will have much to discuss with Greg Keanoff. Steve is going to maybe get himself into some trouble. We'll see. He's gonna join us in just one moment, but as a reminder, please do subscribe on YouTube. It's the best way to help the show. If you haven't subscribed yet, help us by doing so. It's, it's of course free. It's super useful on our end. Helps us in the algorithm, like comment. All that stuff is great. Thank you so much to everybody who supported us. I've mentioned this just over the last few weeks, but we're coming up on the one year anniversary here of Afterparty, which by the way, Steve was instrumental in helping us get started. So it's great to have Steve here around the one year anniversary. We're going to get to him in a moment, as I mentioned. But just another reminder, please do subscribe, subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We do a special edition of the show where I answer all of your emails on Fridays. And by the way, when I say answer all of your emails, I really mean like basically all of the emails that you send me. So if you subscribe on the podcast feed, that's where you can get the Friday edition of the show that we call Happy Hour. So, uh, we're going to have Steve on the other part on the other side of this break with some quick reaction to the Carmelo Anthony verdict. Guilty verdict fallout that has just been rippling across the country honestly over the past 24 hours, but has really kicked up just over the last several hours here tonight. Much to discuss on that front. And I'm going to bring you the Social Reckoning trailer. It's described as a companion piece to the Social Network which many of people remember very fondly. I don't know that we'll have as fond memories as fond of memories when it comes to this new Social Reckoning, which is a real Sorkin production, if you are catching my drift. So we'll be back with Steve Krakauer in just one moment on the other side of this break. Stick around. We talk about this on the show all the time. But for years, legacy media, government and big data companies coaxed us into surrendering our digital freedom and giving lip service to privacy while leaving digital back doors wide open for their own purposes. And sometimes we know this, they're blatant in conveying the idea that encryption is only for criminals or that if you want privacy, you must have something to hide. They love those lines. How did we get here from cherishing our fourth Amendment rights to giving them up so readily for the sake of convenience? This was engineered. Powerful people discovered that with the right incentives and people willingly surrender their data and who profits? It's the same government agencies, platforms and media companies that want you exposed and compliant. Well, Unplugged set out to do something about it. The upphone by Unplugged is the smartphone designed to restore your rights when it comes to blocking third party trackers from shadowy data brokers. The UPPhone by Unplugged outshines every device on the market. There's even a battery disconnect switch so that off really means off. And all of this is independently verified and tested so you can be confident in knowing your upphone is the most private smartphone that you can buy. Check out upphone from unplugged@unplugged.com Emily that's unplugged.com Emily I should say I'm taking a trip out of the country soon and I will have my upphone with me.
- [05:34]
Greg Lukianoff
In the red corner, the undisputed undefeated we meet Wacker Guy, champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere. And in the blue corner, the challenger, extra strength Hanaday eye drops that work
- [05:50]
Emily
all day to prevent the release of
- [05:52]
Greg Lukianoff
histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes. And the winner by knockout is Pataday Hattiday. Bring it on.
- [06:04]
Emily
At dsw, we ask the important questions like what shoes are you going to we Whether you're prepping for wedding season, festival season, or just planning the ultimate vacay, the right shoes can make or break an rsvp. So own the moment. You've got big plans and we've got just the shoes at the perfect price, of course. Get ready to get ready with Designer Shoe Warehouse. Head to your DSW store or dsw.com today and let us surprise you. Welcome back to Afterparty, everyone. As promised, the one and only Steve Krakauer joins us. Steve is of course executive producer at the Mega Megan Kelly show and of AM Update and he helps out on the MK Media Network as well, where of course, the show is based. Steve, as I mentioned before the break, was really instrumental in getting the show off the ground. He is a friend, dare I say a mentor, and he's got the weirdest background you will ever see. Steve thanks for being here, Emily.
- [07:01]
Steve Krakauer
I am, I'm honored to be a guest. Thank you for that intro I've got. It's the first interview I've ever done with a cocktail. Just a beer today. And I've got my. This is fine. This is like my representation meme of the Internet in 2026. Just everything's on fire. No one knows what's going on. But we're just gonna try to, you know, we're just gonna stay, stay with it, have our drink, talk through it. It'll be fine.
- [07:22]
Emily
And you see yourself as the dog in this image for the listening audience. Um, this is the everything is fine meme. You see yourself as the dog with the placid expression and the bowler cap.
- [07:32]
Steve Krakauer
I could do it, you know, I'm fine. This is the thing. I'm, I'm open minded. You know, we'll have, we'll just talk it out. We'll get through this. Me and the dog, we'll, we'll make it through. Everyone, let's all just power through.
- [07:44]
Emily
I, I'll prepare the audience and I'll prepare you, Steve as well, because we'll get to this in a minute. We're going to start with something else first. But Steve has become a little bit of a rabble rouser on the Internet, a target of some opprobrium from our critics. And we're going to get to that in a moment. But because it's such breaking news, I did want to bring the audience and I wanted to get your reaction to this Steve as well, because I see this really in some significant ways as a media story. Wanted to get your reaction to some of the reactions we are seeing from people in the pro Carmelo Anthony camp. Just about 24 hours after a jury rendered a guilty verdict in that case. They took about three hours. It was a pretty quick decision. And if you follow the case case closely because you've watched After Party or the Megyn Kelly show where they have covered this very, very granularly, including some excellent legal analysis, you're not surprised by the fact that the about three hours to deliberate and rendered a guilty verdict in this case. But if you're Jasmine Crockett, you are mystified that the self defense case wasn't taken as seriously as it should have been in for on behalf of Carmelo Anthony. I should say also reaction here you're going to see is, is going to be from Carmel Anthony's grandmother. You're going to see Jasmine Crockett, sitting congresswoman and a supporter of Carmelo Anthony. That was outside of the courtroom. We, we chose one clip, but there were many, many, many. And Megan played as well. Let's watch S0 here. And what we saw with that verdict is the evidence of a broken system. Now he ended up hitting Austin one time and it was about where he hit him one time, two inches. This was the one who said, hey, let me stab you five, six, seven times. 35 years for a kid who had Decided to go under a tent that was not his team's tent as it was raining and simply didn't want to be put out in the rain by some random kid that he didn't know. Please. Lodgers in him. The fact that there was little to no mercy scene or humanity seen. When this black boy said that, I was scared. So you think race roll in the verdict? Oh, my God. I know Pollen County. So absolutely a white boy would have said that they were afraid of a black boy. Something tells me that that jury that didn't have any black people on it, they would have believed him in his fear.
- [10:28]
Steve Krakauer
Brother would have been with him.
- [10:29]
Emily
You see, they should have both been arrested.
- [10:36]
Steve Krakauer
Should have been.
- [10:40]
Emily
So it started there with the grandmother saying that it was racist. Jasmine Crockett saying that if it were, this is of course a different argument, actually, that if it were, the races were reversed in this case, people would have understood the fear that Carmelo Anthony had and perhaps rendered a different verdict. But that's actually also not an especially great argument. Just that there's a double standard for him being guilty of murder in a case where, again, she said, oh, just simply. And she used the word hit, which is a real, I think, choice given that what Metcalf, Austin Metcalf is accused of having done is shoving Carmel Anthony, who was under the tent. This is just a detail. If people hadn't followed the case. They were at a track meet last spring in Texas, actually probably not far from you, Steve and Austin Metcalf got stabbed in the chest during this confirmation, this, this confrontation after Carmelo Anthony went under Metcalf's team's tent and refused to leave after multiple requests, ultimately took out a knife and stabbed, not hit, but stabbed Metcalf in the chest. So, Steve, this seems to me like a case where the system actually worked very well, as opposed to the Crockett line, that it's a example of the system failing. What say you?
- [11:59]
Steve Krakauer
Yeah, it's, it's. I wish I was more surprised by the reaction that we've gotten here. This was an open and shut case. This was literally. He said, you know, make me, make me. It was, you know, you could say, well, was he, did he go in there intending to pull out his knife and stab him? I don't, I don't think so necessarily, but we don't, we don't know. I mean, this is a case where you normally, in a self defense case, you might see the defendant go and take the stand, especially someone who, you know, is as emotional, you know, He's a Young. He's 19 now. He was 17 at the time. Carmelo Anthony also, you know, lots of reports that he didn't come from some broken home. He was. It was. So it was. It's very odd. It's very sort of surprising to see. But what we're seeing in the reaction after seems like this conclusion that is, I guess in search of evidence or the evidence doesn't even matter. I mean, this is. It was a foregone conclusion that he was going to be found guilty. There was. There was a last minute. Is he going to be guilty of manslaughter instead of murder? It was murder gets 35 years. You can get out in 17 and a half. This is the law here in Texas. So. So, yes, I think it's. It's a sad reflection of things, but I do think it is also a symptom of the society we're in when it comes to social media. I think that there. Jasmine Crockett is a social media creation. You know, Jasmine Crockett wouldn't exist in her current form, it. If she didn't have these platforms. She can become fame ish in this. In this society. Anyone can, you know that that guy outside of the courthouse can all of a sudden become this star on TikTok for like five minutes. And then I think that's why people do it. They feed into it. You know, there's reporting outside the courthouse from some reporters who have been covering, doing a great job. Nick Sorter was one of the videos you played that some of these people who are these Carmelo Anthony supporters, when the cameras go away, they're very calm. There's. Everything is sort of calm there. And then the cameras come back and all of a sudden it becomes this big scene again. There's sort of this. This effort to play to the camera here. And I think it's such a serious issue. It's such a sad story for the Metcalf family that it's. It's really unfortunate that some of these people are trying to, I think, capitalize on this in this social currency way.
- [14:06]
Emily
And TMZ, D.C. did a good job of getting Crockett on the record there. Actually, interestingly enough, asking specifically, do you think race played a role? To which she replied, absolutely. We should also mention, based on your point, Jake Lang has been whipping up controversy from the. I don't want to say, like, is it. I don't really know much about Jake Lang, but my understanding is that Jake Lang is kind of like far right influencer and has been saying that he had, quote, black animals or animalistic blacks, I think attacking him. He's been whipping up racial tensions of his own, which I don't think is surprising to anybody in 2026. But I have to go back to the moment that we were all reckoning with what happened to Trayvon Martin. Steve, because I was in college, I talk about this a lot. I just had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Like I literally remember where I was. I was on a bus and I had a sinking feeling in my stomach about the country as we all reacted to it. And that coincided with social media, algorithmic social media ending up on everybody's phones and in our pockets because smartphones were loaded with social media. If you were my age at the time or your age, Steve, that started to become really prolific. And the way media handled these stories, from Trayvon Martin to George Floyd to Jacob Blake. We're fast forwarding to more recent history. I mean, I have to put this up on the screen. I went and wrote a piece for Unheard this evening about Carmelo Anthony and looked at some of the media coverage. It is actually remarkable to see how this, quote, all white jury narrative spread. It is not true. And Megan has been covering this. It is, it is like just factually incorrect. The, the Daily Mail, others like Marianne Martinez of the Daily Mail listed out the jury's racial breakdown from inside of the courtroom. It included Hispanics, it included Asians. The county itself is about 63% white, 21 Asian, 16 Hispanic and 12% black. There's some overlap racially there, but it's crazy. It was repeated on cnn. I saw it show up in News Nation. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. It seems that like nothing is ever going to get us back to a place where we can have like fact based conversations about these that aren't bringing out the worst in all of us.
- [16:17]
Steve Krakauer
No, no. Yeah. The jury make up, you know, certainly multicultural. Yes, there were no black jurors, but, you know, there were a lot of black witnesses on the for the prosecution side, fellow students of Austin Metcalf who were friends of his or even just there and were just saying what actually happened there. You know, it's interesting you mentioned Trayvon Martin. I think that's a great corollary. And really I would say the starting point. And I wrote a book a couple years ago called Uncovered. I was a producer at CNN when Trayvon Martin and the George Zimmerman case happened. And honestly, it was one of the first moments where I thought, what is Going on here. I was ON A. At CNN, we used to do this 9:00am call where the whole network would get on and we would talk about the. What the story is for the day. And the person at the time who was leading the network and leading this call brought up this Trayvon Martin story. And I could, I guarantee you, he found this thing from Twitter. I would think he did, but he goes, what about if George Zimmerman punched himself in the face? You know, this was a big thing about him having two black eyes. What if he had given himself two black eyes? We should at least dig into this. I'm thinking to myself, where is he finding this? Where is he getting this? What are we trying to do here? By the way, the Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman case, much more complicated. You know, this was a stand your ground. Much more complicated than the Carmelo Anthony case, which is very cut and dry about what happened here. So, yeah, it was. But I think that that was the rise of social media as a performance app, Twitter and Facebook and your signaling to your communities about your feelings about was certainly the precursor to Michael Brown. And what came a couple years later in Ferguson, which was a utter disaster by the national media and I think really fed into a lot of these narratives that have never gone away, was so poorly covered. Hands up, don't shoot. And so, yeah, I think that this is what we're left with right now.
- [18:07]
Emily
Right. And people probably famously remember George Zimmerman being referred to as a white Hispanic. I forget which outlet specifically used that designation. I think there were actually a couple of them at the time. But the other thing to talk about in that respect is polling has found in the years since this racial reckoning that started in the Obama era over the killings of unarmed black men by police, sometimes, by the way, black police or, you know, the Zimmerman case, white Hispanics. It wasn't a cop. But there was, as Steve mentioned, this complicated standard ground question. All this is to say polling has shown that people across the board, even Republicans, will vastly overstate when asked to estimate how many unarmed black Americans are killed a year at the hands of police. Like, we're talking by the hundreds. If you're on the left, same in the center. And still really high overestimations from people who are on the right identify as. As Republic Republican. Steve, I'm sure you've seen this information before and it tells us a little bit about, like, I'm thinking right now of the. It's a weird connection, the Thomas Massie election results where none of the ads against him were really Talking about Israel. It was a ton of money that came pouring in to convince people that Thomas Massie was anti Trump and people in his district care about the Trump agenda. They want to see the Trump agenda passed. But it puts us in this complicated scenario where we're trying to decipher what is real public sentiment. Like just today, OpenAI, I don't know if you saw this. OpenAI trying to dismiss the data center concern. I'm going all kinds of directions, Steve, so I hope you're here for it.
- [19:44]
Steve Krakauer
I'm gonna make a drink.
- [19:45]
Emily
They. So they put out. Yeah, they put out a survey that OpenAI had conducted. And let me put this up on the screen while we're talking about it. And Politico reported on it. The headline was, OpenAI says China launched influence campaign to shape US attitudes on AI data centers. Well, if you scroll to the second to last page of the surve survey, it says, quote, most of the social media posts we identified generated little or no observable engagement. It is giving Russia collusion, Steve, like big time giving Russia collusion. And we're here kind of trying to decipher what's real, what's, what's really being ginned up by the media was actually a product of manipulation and what's organic public opinion. And you see, I think in many of these cases, clear cut examples of where the media is really manipulating how people see the country.
- [20:31]
Steve Krakauer
Oh, totally. I mean, we see that, we see so many examples of this and I think we see this and it becomes more and more, I think AI is actually contributing to this because, you know, you could watch a video and even that video itself is no longer even what actually happened, let alone chopped up and, you know, edited in a way that is, that is actually not, you know, giving the full context. Sure, you know, that's, that's a start. But no, absolutely, we're seeing it's easier than ever to run these manipulation campaigns, to manufacture a narrative. A lot of the times it happens on X. You know, I'm a huge free speech fan. I love what Elon Musk has done with X in the sense of, you know, used to not be able to like write on X a man is a woman or a man can't become a woman, like that was, you would get banned, I mean, let alone the hunter bat and laptop. So I'm all for more speech, not less. But what we need to understand is that within that, that context comes a lot of these campaigns which are not based in facts at all. A lot of times are based in bad faith, are trying to convince people of something and are doing so in a way that are manipulating them. It's actually, you know, it's really sad. It's scary and it's. And we're seeing it more often than ever now on all sides. And I think that it's something that people have to be aware of. And, you know, a lot of times I've been doing this a little bit. I mean, in the last six months, we've gotten some, certainly of this scene firsthand with Megan with the show. And I've got a couple instances with family, with friends say, okay, well, what specifically are you talking about? And then they might send an X post and say, okay, well, here's the full context of it. And there have been a couple times where people, I mean, it takes a lot say, I watched that. And you're right, Like, I don't know why this person framed it this way or why that. But, you know, we saw this. There was a post, Emily, you covered this of Tucker doing an interview saying essentially, I mean, this has become just the norm now, that he loves Sharia law, like that, he's a fan of Sharia law. And that was never said, but it went viral because of the words that were associated with a video that no one watched. This is where we're at right now in this scenario. And it's. It requires a real discerning eye. And when you're a news consumer, a lot of times people are busy. You don't have a lot of time to sift through this and try to understand who is trying to manipulate me. But that is 100% happening.
- [22:57]
Emily
Yeah, I just had a conversation with somebody who's not like a fan of Tucker over the weekend about that exact clip you were mentioning. Because the quote, basically it was, to paraphrase, he was saying allegedly Sharia law had made Middle Eastern cities much better than Western cities. And it was put in quotation marks as though that was verbatim what Tucker Carlson had said. You clicked on the clip, the person I was talking to over the weekend, like, we both kind of agreed. We don't necessarily agree with Tucker's argument, but how dangerous is it to start tossing verbatim quotes out there knowing people aren't going to watch the video, knowing that algorithms prize, as we talk about here all the time, extreme emotion, whether it's a condemnation or an embrace, that gets people. That's what gets people to engage with your posts. We were all sort of being subtly reprogrammed to think in these ways, because that's what the language. That's the language that's rewarded on these apps that we've exported so much of our personal, professional, political lives onto. And so it brings us to something that you actually wanted to talk about, Steve, which was this interesting exchange at the turning point, I think it was called this year the Women's Leadership Summit,
- [24:05]
Steve Krakauer
not the young one. A lot of controversy about that over on the.
- [24:10]
Emily
I will say it has been the case for a while that these conferences got so big. There were more and more older people coming to the conferences. You could chalk that up to being a product of success. We don't have to get into it. But I was a little amused to see people criticizing it this time around. So, like, you could go back a few years and probably find the same thing happening. But this was a. An interaction Dana Lash had, who's been very critical of Tucker, had with a young woman who came up to the microphone. Let's watch S2. So I have a lot of friends that are liberal, that don't share my same political ideologies, and I can also get very passionate about politics when I talk to them. So as someone who can also get very passionate when talking to people, do you have any advice for not getting angry at people who you genuinely care about, who you want to preserve a friend, friendship with and not like, ruin something over politics?
- [25:13]
Steve Krakauer
We're very passionate and because we feel for it.
- [25:16]
Emily
And it's not because you're trying to
- [25:18]
Steve Krakauer
win an argument with someone.
- [25:19]
Emily
It's because you really do care about what happens to this person. You care and you want to make sure that this person actually is cared
- [25:28]
Steve Krakauer
for and that they are believing things
- [25:30]
Emily
that are true and are not being robbed of a choice because they believe lies. And that's where your passion comes from, because your care is coming, your concern
- [25:39]
Steve Krakauer
is coming from such a genuine place.
- [25:41]
Emily
The biggest thing that this is, this is what helped me. Sometimes all you can do is plant the seed, and then you got to trust God to do the rest of it. Plant the seed and then trust God to do the rest. Do not ever compromise yourself trying to win a fight. Never compromise yourself trying to win a fight. Okay, Steve, So I really have always liked Dana. And I mean, what she did was, it was a CNN town hall after the horrible Parkland shooting. I thought was like nothing short of heroic. One of the things that strikes me about that answer, some of which I agree with, is she jumped immediately to people who disagree with. You are believing lies, right? She said, you don't want them to be deprived of a choice, to make a fact based determination. And, and that conflation, I don't know if it was intentional, I doubt it was. But I actually thought that was kind of an interesting choice because often what I found like on Breaking Points, for example, and actually on like, even as I've had conversations on air with, with Megan and other people over the years, you don't always agree with things and you sometimes find out that you are the one that has been accepting things uncritically or less critically. And you don't get that unless you come to a conversation with abject humility that someone else might know something that you don't know. And I feel like that's actually, in contrast, one of the best ways to maintain friendships is just to be nothing but humble.
- [27:05]
Steve Krakauer
Well, of course, of course. Or maybe you have this conversation and you come away saying I'm right. And the other person goes away saying they're right. And that's totally fine too. I mean, this is what, I've watched this clip now many times. I don't know why it bothers me so much. I used to work with Dana Lash at the Blaze. I like her as well. I don't, I don't really know what's happening here. I don't know if this is the answer she would have given a year ago. But I have to say the question, if you listen to the question, it's not, how can I convince my friend that they are wrong because I care about them? It's I want to maintain friendships with people that I disagree with. How can I do that? How can I myself stay contained and not let it bother me that they disagree with me? And the answer was trying to plant seeds in them so that you can like it, subtly run this campaign of eventually convincing them over time that they're wrong. I mean, that is so counterproductive to life, to friendships, to, to family, to the people that we love. You should obviously, and I'm not saying you, because obviously, Emily, you're like the prime example of this, of me.
- [28:10]
Emily
I'm the best at just about everything.
- [28:12]
Steve Krakauer
Well, yes, yes, you are the best at everything, but including, I would say, having friendships with. You know, sometimes I will come across a Ryan Grimm X post and I'll be like, what the fuck is he talking about? And I'm like, but you know what? Ryan Grimm's a good guy. You know, I disagree with him a lot, very strongly. And I know Emily does too, but, but you can do it because that's That's a skill. And it's. It's so much better. It's such a better way to live your life than to try to. Even people that have are like one tick to the left or one tick to the right of you to try to convince them that they're wrong, that they're doing something wrong. And honestly, it made me think about 2024. Because, you know, Emily, you're, I would say, more political than I am. And I know you're not a big teen Jersey person. I'm definitely not. I don't care who wins elections. I truly don't. I feel like I'm a journalist. I know I have political opinions, but I really don't care who wins whatever election is coming up. I've just suppressed that feeling in me, and I totally feel that other people feel differently, and I think that's totally fine, but I don't feel that way. What I am into is like, unity. It's sort of corny, I know, like Barack Obama, 2008. Hope and change totally let me down. But I was into that for a moment. And then 2024, this. This coalition that Donald Trump put together, that was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek. There's this Nicole Shanahan video, which is amazing, of all these people, even J.D. vance. You think about J.D. vance as someone who. Who hated Donald Trump for a time, was very critical of Donald Trump and then came around to it. And he, I'm sure, doesn't think Donald Trump is the be all and end all when it comes to politics, but they found ways of working together. Can you just imagine if RFK comes to the room and you say, okay, we agree on, you know, Maha and ending wars. And there was a third one that they talked about. Oh, censorship, Ending censorship. These are three things that Donald Trump and RFK could agree on, and that's why RFK endorses him. What if he's like, well, what are your views on abortion or housing policy or health care? Like, well, okay, well, then I guess the coalition's done. You know, the only reason they were able to put that together and inspire people is by not trying to find where you differ, but by trying to see what unites you and to galvanize around that. This is something Charlie Kirk cared so much about. He was the person, by the way, who really helped put that together. RFK and Trump, it was a turning point run, you know, rally. When RFK came out, it was this electric moment, and it inspired People. And so I hear answers like that. I think from a personal level, that's just really sad and wrong, but I also think from a political side, from a coalition building, again, I don't care about the coalition, but I just sort of can step back and say when we are trying to push people out or narrow the boundaries of what is considered quote unquote, acceptable by one side or the other. First of all, that's a very lefty kind of mentality, but it also, it. It just shuts out lots of good people. You may not agree with them on everything, but they're good people and they have good ideas and. And some of them you'll disagree with. But that's. That's what it's all about.
- [31:17]
Emily
You know, the. Your point about Ryan's tweets was so funny, and I wanted to follow up just by saying the reason those, like something that Ryan says or posts or whomever it is that I disagree with. Glenn, whomever it is, it doesn't bother me because I know the people who agree with them on most things look at posts that I make and say, what the is she doing? Say like I. And I know it for a fact. And I think it's actually really admirable. And I have so much respect for Ryan and Crystal and Cenk, Anna, Glenn, for being willing to sit down with people who their friends are telling them are abhorrent, are bad, and are categorically not to be discussed with or not to be broken bread with. And that's. That's really common. I don't want any part of that because I. I don't think that's how you function as a country. And Steve, this is just another point on this. It's also kind of a misunderstanding of what people do in journalism. Yeah. And I don't know who out there, like, considers himself a journalist or not, but I think the job of a journalist is just to be curious and to be curious from. You know, if you're one of the few people who can be a neutral journalist, fine, do to affect the voice of God, whatever. But if you're coming from a position of opinion, which a lot of journalists are now, I think that's great. I think it's transparent. I think it's helpful to the audience. Then your job is just to ask questions and to do it transparently from your set of values, your worldview, and then trust people in the audience to factor that in and make up their minds. But your job isn't to kind of program or to treat your Audience as a manipulable or malleable or your friends. I don't like that. I don't like that either, Steve. I think that's a, It's a weird way, It's a, it's a weird way to. If you, if you meet people as human beings having a conversation as opposed to minds to be changed, it's a better relationship, I think, because it's, there's more humility involved.
- [33:22]
Steve Krakauer
Yeah, well, right. I think there, you know, humility is, I think, hot right now. You know, I think that that is actually something that people really respond to. Authenticity, obviously. Honesty. I think about Joe Rogan. Why is Joe Rogan popular? Why does Joe Rogan resonate with people? And you could. I would make an argument that Joe Rogan practices humility throughout every interview he does because he's curious, like you say, and he's interested. I don't even think Joe Rogan's a journalist, but he's someone who comes across as authentic as himself and he is, is, is trying to learn more and to say what he truly believes. And, you know, if you really wanted to go and say, I'm going to take every three hour Joe Rogan interview and look at this, this what he said today and then a month ago, he said something that was sort of different than that. Well, okay, sure. I mean, that's the way people are. They, they say different things. They, they're kind of going with the flow. They're responding to people they talk to. I, I think that, yeah, I think that that's the first thing. The other thing I would say is so much of journalism now is that social media. I have a theory that if Donald Trump never ran for office. Yes, Donald Trump destroyed the media. He broke their brains, the brain worms and tds, and all of that is true. But just the inclusion of social media to the way journalism works now ruined it. Because people want to be liked now. They want to get followers and fans and likes and retweets. And that is the opposite of journalism, journalism. You know, I too, am very curious. That's how I always be. I like to say, you know, I'm the person who, like, if I hear people having an interesting conversation at dinner, like at the table next to me, I'm like, I'm like, kind of listening. What are they like?
- [34:58]
Emily
You want to be worst kind of person?
- [35:00]
Steve Krakauer
Yeah, like, I. But that's the thing. Those kind of people are like, annoying and they're, they're kind of like little gnats and they're they're nosy and they're prying in, and I want to know all the gossip and the secrets and. And those. Those are not necessarily people you love and want to follow and like, but that's what a journalist is like. That. That should be the goal. That you should be the annoying person that pisses off people in power and tries to get to the truth. And so much of that is closing ranks and trying to shut people out. And I want to say something else that kind of relates to social media with what you were getting at before about these manipulation campaigns. Because I do think that the intention of a lot of these campaigns is to make it seem like things are much bigger and they're to convince people that come and be part of something that is huge. Look at these 30 people that are going to eventually either give you praise or yell at you and then react and then change the way you think or change the way you act publicly because of that, as a reaction to it. And they're trying to do that by faking how important these sorts of campaigns actually are and how effective they are, and it's a lie. I think that so much of this is, you know, this is like touch grass. Like, you know, real life. Some of it is certainly bleeding into that now. And I think it actually is, unfortunately, messing with people in some ways, but I think that a lot of it is. Is a manipulation of even just how actually important and big these things are.
- [36:29]
Emily
That is really interesting. And I know you've been seeing a lot of that on social media, just like in your role. And I always. I think journalists like. Good. I like journalists who have more questions than answers. And it's fine if someone's a pundit. Talk radio, that's. I actually get that. But if you see yourself as a journalist, it's. It's a little bit of a different role. And I guess, Steve, I mean, we could keep going round and round on this, but that is because we clearly agree with each other. Like, oh, you're so brilliant, Steve. No, Emily, you're so brilliant. Maybe it's just great money.
- [36:59]
Steve Krakauer
Let me find the way. I disagree with you on.
- [37:00]
Emily
Okay, yeah, I was gonna say, you gotta. You gotta bring it here. Yeah, you gotta fight with me. Find something, Steve. My goodness. But now I've lost my train of thought, and that's me being honest and authentic and transparent with the audience. Just sometimes the train leaves the station.
- [37:17]
Steve Krakauer
Listen, I think that is. Is, you know, Megan is a journalist. What we try to do with the Megyn Kelly show is journalism. And, and, and, but at the same time, we, you know, Megan is very authentic about where she comes from, about when she endorsed Trump in 2024, which, what it's kind of crazy to think, I mean, she was, she was speaking at a rally by the end of 2024, but that was, that was a big deal when in April she said, I'm voting for Donald Trump. And so, you know, always been very honest about it. But the other thing that we do is, you know, we always considered ourselves like Switzerland in, in the different fights that are going on. I mean, there was a reason why if you came to the, you know, the Megyn Kelly Live tour, which, you know, you and I were hanging out in San Antonio with, one night you got Tucker Carlson in New York, and the very next night you got Ben Shapiro in Florida. And the reason is because that's, that's what we want to be. We want to be a place where you can find all different sorts of perspectives. At the time, you know, October, we're trying to essentially like, like broker a piece. Like, literally trying to do that. It's kind of so quaint and funny to think about that now that that even felt like it was possible. But what happens is, you know, there are certain factions of like Tucker who have absolutely no problem with that. You know, it's like, I, I'm not going to go and be friends with Ben Shapiro, but you know, you can. But then, then all of a sudden it became this thing where, well actually, you know, one side is saying, actually you can't, that that's, that's what's wrong. And it's so strange. And I do think, obviously, you know, you think about like, what is the cause of it? Where did this, do this come from? You know, I think that, you know, certainly like Israel became a big issue, which again is so strange.
- [38:51]
Emily
Like, well, and Steve, you're Jewish, right? Like, has this not been experienced for
- [38:56]
Steve Krakauer
you to be called? Like some people, Emily, are like Jewish. Like, they're like, you know, like, I'm like, I had like a bar Mitzvah and I was like kosher for 18 years and I can read Torah and Hebrew and there's two different kinds of Hebrew in the Torah verses. I can do all that.
- [39:11]
Emily
And so you're a self hating Jew. Listen, I'm an anti Semitic Jew.
- [39:17]
Steve Krakauer
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I said anti Semitic. No, but like that's so, so weird. And I'm, I'm like, I'm pro Israel. You know, I'm by any definition of Zionism. I would be a Zionist. I think, you know, Israel should exist, but that I'm also, you know, I've written columns and it'd be critical of all sorts of sides of my own government. I don't know why the idea that anyone would be critical of the Israeli government would be an issue.
- [39:40]
Emily
And nothing you've written or said would be out of place in Israeli media.
- [39:44]
Steve Krakauer
No, like, actually nothing, of course, but it's not. Again, it's not even about that. Who cares? Like, I can. If someone is anti Israel, like, that's fine too. And that's what's so interesting. It's like being Jewish has actually not a lot to do with, you know, my own personal feelings, you know, positive feelings about Israel overall. What I always feel like it taught me is this very deep, traditional about, you know, every. Like Hanukkah and Passover, it's all about the Jews were, like, very oppressed and had a very tough history. And we overcame that. There was this resilience. And through that you get this thick skin. And, you know, it's a lot of. There's a lot of Jewish comics. And, you know, you could say anything and let it roll right off you. You know, we've been through so much worse, you know, that our ancestors really went through it so that we can now not take everything so seriously and. And not be so into kind of trying to close the boundaries of what's acceptable. And this narrow thought that is actually what it taught me more than anything is the ability to talk to anyone and be interested and try to just have conversations because you have that kind of thick skin and you're into free speech that I think led me to be a journalist. So that's what I find so ridiculous these days, is this push away from that. That, frankly, it feels very lefty. It's such a weird thing to hear, like, the woke, right, these days as, like this. This attack. Because I always think of WOKE as like, they're trying to close the boundaries of what's acceptable. That's kind of what's happening on the right in some instances right now.
- [41:18]
Emily
This is actually what I was going to ask you anyway, so I'm glad we ended up on the topic. But, yeah, it's. It's the. The Jewish community's, like, tradition of education and knowledge, prioritizing education and knowledge. I. I mean, that's where this entire conversation we've had about having this curiosity about the world around you, about the way other people see it, I just think too often it's it's certainly you've seen it from some Christians. You've seen it from some, like centrists, non Christians, who just want to shut down a lot of the conversation too. It's, it's just I don't like to ad hominem and not enough explaining because I think a lot of times if the case was made in an explanatory way, in a humble way, in a way that was trying to meet people where they were, it would be so much more successful and effective because it would actually really, I think, be changing hearts and minds instead of trying to categorize something as necessarily bigoted, anti Semitic, or from the less perspective, racist, sexist, misogynistic. Because this is a generation that obviously is turning against Israel and needs to be persuaded, needs to be convinced they're starting in a hole of skepticism and to lift them out of it, if that's your goal, you gotta do more explaining than insulting. I think.
- [42:39]
Steve Krakauer
Okay, I found a way to bother you for a second. No, I agree with you, but you sound like Charlie Kirk. And I know you had mixed feelings personally about Charlie, but I do think that it is 100% where he was coming from with this. First of all, Charlie, absolutely. He was basically Jewish, by the way. I mean, the guy wrote a book about how he honors the Sabbath and he was such a fan of Israel. But he would talk about how last year, one of, or his very last appearance on the Megyn Kelly show, and he was a monthly regular, Charlie was live on the air the same time we were. So he would get up and do a pre tape every month at 9:00am Eastern Time, 6:00am in Arizona time, just. And he was like fired up, ready to go every time he did it. I mean, he was an incredible guest, incredible thinker, and he understood this better than anyone. You know, he. There's been a lot of conversation about the Hamptons Summit, but I think even the people that were there who say, you know, no one was trying to bully Charlie, what they were saying though was that he was saying, listen, I want Israel to win. I want Israel to have better arguments for making the point about what I believe, which is that Israel is the one we should be supporting and all this, but you guys are not making good arguments. The argument is not support Israel or you're anti Semite, that's going to stop convincing them. And he knew because he spent so much time with young people and because he was curious and he was interested. That was his whole shtick. I wrote this down when he sat down that day when he was assassinated, the first thing he said was bring the best libs Utah has to offer. That's what he wanted. You know, he didn't want the idiots. He didn't want people that like, he wanted the best because he wanted to have a conversation and he wanted to debate. Maybe he'd convince a couple people or maybe other people would listen and find it. You know, conversation, discussion. That's how you win arguments. Obviously, you know, it's not just telling people that they're wrong or they're idiots or that they're dangerous or that they should, you know, no longer say the things that they actually think or believe. It's, it's, it's so counterproductive. And, and I, I do, you know, I think when Charlie was assassinated and people watched it and he was so integral to the movement and to the right and to the media, some people I think went a little crazy. And I do think that there was some other people in a nefarious way saw a Charlie Kirk sized opening that they thought they could fill in a different way than, than he had. And, and I think that's, that's unfortunate and I think, you know, know that's whatever it is, we're, we're really missing him right now.
- [45:13]
Emily
So true. And just a. Yeah, I, I think that's exactly right. Where, where Charlie was, was going in the last year, two years was such a deep intellectual place and it was, it was a bit different than an activist place. It was really compelling. And this is a, I guess Steve, kind of a plug by the way, for the happy hour shows that we do. Because I want to hear from everybody who disagrees with everything that was just said. Emilyevilmcaremedia.com we take the emails, we do it off an algorithm. You know, it's not on X, it's not on Instagram. It's where I get your emails and just spend an hour and a half on Thursdays hearing what people have to say, hearing good faith criticism, sometimes even not good faith criticism and engaging with it because I genuinely want to know if I'm wrong about something. I don't want to be out there talking about something I'm incorrect about. And so if I'm doing it, I'm to hear from people.
- [46:01]
Steve Krakauer
You do it on the Wrap up show too? Every day, you know, taking callers, it's so valuable.
- [46:05]
Emily
Oh my gosh, the Wrap up show has been fascinating. Started that in November after Megan on Sirius and Steve, just before you run, wanted to make this pitch from You, I wanted to hear you make this pitch for why you are convinced as a Texan now.
- [46:22]
Steve Krakauer
Yeah.
- [46:22]
Emily
That James Talarico, also known as Six Gender Jimmy. Not a line that Paxton has really pulled off so far, but it's, it's in the prompter for him should he come around to his stage Persona in the near future. But you're convinced he can do it. You think he could take Texas? So I wanted to roll this clip of Talarico recently again making this sort of populous stand for himself in an interview. Here it is.
- [46:49]
Greg Lukianoff
I've been bucking my own party since I got elected in 2018. You know, I flipped a by taking Mary Maels and I did that by, by being independent. I already have a religion and I already have a sports of Reid Hoffman. I have no problem sharing hard truths with my own party. I called out Joe Biden for failing to secure our southern border and I got a lot of heat in my own doing that. But I remember talking with my colleagues
- [47:16]
Steve Krakauer
in the legislature who represent border communities
- [47:19]
Greg Lukianoff
and they told me about the utter chaos caused by BRO you said there
- [47:23]
Emily
should be a welcome mat.
- [47:24]
Steve Krakauer
And the Democratic Party, we're the ones
- [47:26]
Greg Lukianoff
that should be about making government work for people. And our immigration system is a prime
- [47:30]
Steve Krakauer
example of government not working for people. And so I'm a border supporting Democrat. I believe we've got to have a
- [47:36]
Greg Lukianoff
sane, orderly process to ensure that we know who's coming into our country. But I also think we have to keep out folks who mean to do us harm. And public safety is the most important thing the government does. More important than public education, more important than public health. Nothing matters if we're not keeping people safe.
- [47:54]
Emily
Steve, I have to say I, I kind of know where you're going with this. Right. Like he has the right. This is different from 2017. 18 Dems. Like he actually has pretty good talking points, all things considered.
- [48:05]
Steve Krakauer
Well, that's the corollary, I would say. You know, you ask what, what do I see it? Look, I've lived in Texas, I've lived in Dallas since 2014 and I've seen it. It's, you know, Dallas. If you kind of draw a circle around Dallas, it's pretty 50, 50 red blue. Dallas is a little bit more blue itself, but the surrounding towns are more red. I know in real life, irl James Tallarico fans, fans like not just like I'm a Democrat so I'm going to vote for him but like I love James Talaricoin people and people are into it. So here's what I would say. Yes. 2018. Ted Cruz. Beto O'. Rourke. Beto. Beto O'. Rourke. Three point win for Ted Cruz. Three points. Obviously, it's the exact corollary to right now. This is two years into the Trump administration. Number one, Ted Cruz, not super popular. Not terrible, but not super popular. Beto o', Rourke, you know, the hardcore left likes him. The rest are kind of like, yeah. And he gets three points away. Now you have James. Now you have Ken Paxton, who is, you know, he's Maga. But is Maga going to help you in 2026? We'll see. I mean, I'm not convinced one way or the other yet, but it might not. And the establishment conservatives do not like Ken Paxton at all. They wanted corn. And then you've got Talarico. Who? Joe. Joe Rogan again. I mean, the guy went on Rogan and did just fine. I mean, Joe Rogan liked him. Joe Rogan may endorse Talarico. Okay, so. So it's going to be a very close race. I absolutely think Talarico can pull it off, as crazy as that may sound.
- [49:35]
Emily
Well, you heard it here first, folks. Steve Krakauer says he can do it. Steve, I wish you were on every show, to be honest. So thanks for taking the time tonight. You stayed at the office late. It was so kind of you. I was looking forward to this one. You smuggle Corona somehow into the office.
- [49:51]
Steve Krakauer
I did, I did. I don't have whiskey like you, but. But thank you for the invite. And you're crushing it, you know. You, Kelly, the team you guys are. You guys are doing great. So congrats.
- [50:00]
Emily
Thanks, Steve. Yeah, we do have a really great team here. So we'll do it again soon. All right, everyone, we're going to be back with Greg Lukianov in just one moment. Going to take a quick break. I'm going to jump in the chat if you're watching live. Enjoy the interview with Greg. The spring if you want real results, better gut, health, glowing skin, stronger hair and steady energy, start with colostrum. When your gut is balanced, everything else improves. It starts there. Today's sponsor, Cowboy Colostrum offers premium bovine colostrum sourced entirely from American grass fed cows and made in the usa. Unlike many brands, it uses true first day whole colostrum packed with bioactives like immunoglobulins and growth factors. Don't worry, only surplus colostrum is collected after calves are fully nourished. I love that part. Heart Cowboy Colostrum is unprocessed, full fat and protein rich for a maximum nutrient density. Supporting your gut can boost immunity, reduce bloating and improve skin, hair, nails and energy levels. Results that you can actually see and feel. Who wouldn't want that for the summer? It's also easy to enjoy too with natural flavors like chocolate, Madagascar vanilla matcha and my favorite, strawberry, all made from real ingredients. You just add a scoop to your coffee or smoothie or milk and you feel the difference all day long. For a limited time, our listeners get up to 25 off their entire order. Just head to cowboycolostrum.com afterparty and use code AFTERPARTY at checkout. That's 25 off when you use code AFTERPARTY@cowboycolostrum.com afterparty Hataday presents in the red
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Greg Lukianoff
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- [51:47]
Emily
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- [51:49]
Greg Lukianoff
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Steve Krakauer
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Greg Lukianoff
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Emily
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Greg Lukianoff
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- [52:30]
Emily
Well, I'm joined now by one of the most consistent and courageous men in politics. That would be Greg Lukianoff. He's the CEO of the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He's also, of course, a New York Times best selling author with some very influential books under his belt. So Greg, thanks so much for taking the time to stop by.
- [52:47]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, thanks for having me, Emily.
- [52:49]
Emily
You know, the original plan for this conversation or the impetus for the conversation is I wanted to kind of do a fair minded assessment of what happened when the administration that was elected partially on a platform to react against bad censorship and suppression came into office. We now have a year and a half of the Trump administration in the rearview mirror. But I actually want to start now just with what's happening in Belfast because riots actually have the city in flames after the Sudanese national attempted to behead a man in the middle of the street. And now what we're seeing we could probably put some of this up on the screen. Just as I'm describing it, it can only be described really as riot, the riots. There are reports of people going house to house hunting for migrants, taking law and justice into their own hands. Just really awful scenes out of Belfast, no question about it. But also some of the reporting coming out of Europe, unsurprisingly about Ofcom, an agency I'm sure you're very familiar with, Greg, that is the Office of Communications. We put Reuters up on the screen. I'm just going to read from this report today. Britain's media regulator Ofcom, on Wednesday warned online platforms of possible legal consequences if their services are used to incite violence and spread hatred. Linked to recent civil unrest in Belfast following a knife attack in the city. Technology Minister Liz Kendall said she had asked Ofcom to, quote, discuss urgently with Elon Musk's X as well as other platforms how they would comply with Britain's Online Safety Act. Ofcom said it had told the online providers in a letter that some of the unrest in Belfast appeared to have been fueled online and included racially motivated violence, arson attacks on homes and vehicles and assaults on police. It said it had reminded them of their duties under the actual act to assess and mitigate illegal content. Now, Greg, your specialty is of course, the United States and they don't have a first amendment, but there is something about how some of the, the suppression and censorship can potentially make people even more frustrated to the boiling point at a certain level. So I was curious just to get your reaction off the start here about that.
- [54:59]
Greg Lukianoff
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I haven't been keeping up enough with what's going on in Ireland. Weirdly, I'm an Irish dual citizen, even though my mom grew up in Britain. But whatever, that's a long. Yeah, no, I mean, and that's exactly the point I was going to make is that Europe is trying to deal with very serious problems by just getting critics to shut up. And that is not a sustainable model. And one of the things that they've really made really radioactive is to say that we're having crime issues with some of some of the newer immigrants and some of the newer refugees saying that you're just immediately that's treated as hate speech. And in Britain, for example, you might be One of the 12,000 people who were arrested last year for speech. And a lot of it was people complaining about this kind of stuff to each other and even much milder stuff. And if you actually are having problems, that means that only the people who are already angry about it, since they know they can get in trouble for it, they tend to only talk to the people that they know it's safe to talk to. And that's people who agree with them. That makes things much more radical. So, like, I think Europe is turning itself into a powder keg in a very predictable way, to be clear, without. And then, then what they're trying to do is just stop the speech, stop the flow of information. But that's kind of one of the things that got them into this problem in the first place.
- [56:19]
Emily
Right. And so it reminds me of how we heard often from the left, I mean, for a long time, but after George Floyd's death, that the riot is the language of the unheard. And I just want to say I kind of agree with that in some cases, but it doesn't justify rioting.
- [56:32]
Greg Lukianoff
Absolutely.
- [56:33]
Emily
What's, what's an interesting contrast here though, is that people on the pro George Floyd side or the anti police side in 2020, which much of that was exported culturally into the United Kingdom, they actually feel like that's an unfortunate American cultural export, but they were not being censored at all in any way whatsoever. Whereas in this case, the people who are rioting actually have been subject to some suppression and censorship of their speech. Again, does not justify the rioting, but it is, it does make for an interesting context.
- [57:03]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I gave a TED talk, and one of the weirdest things I said in it was saying that free speech helps keep you safe. And what I mean by that is that one, it's valuable to know what people really think, full stop. You are not, you know, as I try to say it, you know, in the opposite, you are not safer for knowing less about what people really think. That's, that, that's, that's, that's insanity. But also it has this, you know, function where essentially if there are problems, you talk about them before they come to a boiling point. And a society that has a culture where they can't talk about it has problems. But when you have a law that actually means shut up if you disagree on this. And immigration is an important issue in every society, you shouldn't treat it as something radioactive to talk about or, or it has the potential to blow up.
- [57:54]
Emily
Right, right. And so now if we turn back to the United States, my understanding is, and I know FIRE has done some work on this, that actually there are, are laws being considered. COSA is one of them. But, and you can tell us what that is a Child Online Safety Acts. I think what it stands for. Republicans and Democrats have been behind this bill, but there are other pieces of legislation under federal consideration that actually would bring us somewhat closer to a European speech regime. And some of these American companies are already in a certain way probably modifying their speech regulation because they're compliant with European regulations. Can you tell us just a little bit about how the European speech regime could actually then be imported to the United States here?
- [58:37]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, I mean, I did a talk actually just last week with Matt Taibbi about the, about like the Twitter files. And one of the points that he made that I think is correct, but it really kind of brought it home was talking about a lot of the European censorship is achieved through sort of private agreements with private organizations that then are given obligations to police speech speech. And that's the way if it happens here, it's going to happen. And that's one of the things the Biden administration was trying to do was essentially what's called jawbone, which basically just means talk the ear off or threaten social media companies to censor speech they don't like. And that to me is outrageous because that's saying that you are going to allow the government to censor indirectly what it may not censor directly. And there's many ways to get away with this. Now, when it comes to the Children's Online Safety Act, I feel especially sort of strongly about things that, because I'm the co author of Coddling of the American Mind, the book I was going
- [59:33]
Emily
to bring this up.
- [59:34]
Greg Lukianoff
Right, the book, the book in which John Height and I were like, you know, like the only thing that seems to line up in terms of a lot of these problems we're seeing is this being the first generation of kids who grew up with social media in their pockets.
- [59:45]
Emily
And it seems John, John is pro kosa, isn't he?
- [59:49]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, he, he is. And I'm not at all. And, and he knows that I love him. But I, I, I am much more afraid of, of tyranny than I am of anything else. And I think that if we create a situation. So these European countries are jumping on this more like an opportunity to create an Internet where there is no anonymity. Now the amazing thing is the Europeans try to say, oh, we're protecting your anonymity, not from government, of course, but from corporations. And I'm like, wow, this is the weirdest topsy turvy place I've ever heard of. You need to be the most afraid of government, be people. But they don't you know, the ruling class of Europe somewhat, unsurprisingly, doesn't see it that way.
- [60:32]
Emily
Now, to the Trump administration, I wanted to rock with some of these fire poll results that you guys found on dei, which were very interesting and actually showed we could put it up on the screen. This was of law professors, and a majority said that DEI statements should rarely or never, or were rarely or never justifiable in hiring, and that law professors also report widespread self censorship and fear of speaking freely. You guys do a ton of polling, which is super, super helpful.
- [61:00]
Greg Lukianoff
Just giving us a. I'm very proud of our research department.
- [61:02]
Emily
Oh, it's excellent. And it gives us such a good window into kind of the mindset throughout time of, you know, the average college student or professor and the like. But this is one of the things that I'm, I personally don't know about yet right now. I mean, I think what the Trump administration has done in the case of like, Ramesa Ozterk has been utterly shameful.
- [61:19]
Greg Lukianoff
Absolutely.
- [61:21]
Emily
And then I think what the Trump administration has done in with, with rolling back some of these DEI policies has genuinely been helpful to the cause of free speech. So as we're trying to assess this, I'm looking at those poll numbers and I'm thinking, well, is some of this how politics can be or culture can be downstream of politics sometimes too? You have somebody who comes into office and is like, we're not doing this anymore. And people are like, oh, yeah, I guess that was kind of bad. What do you make of all of this, Greg?
- [61:47]
Greg Lukianoff
Well, one of the interesting things about DEI is one, and unfortunately this does tend to, tend to come more from Republicans is there's conflation with the DEI sort of industry and affirmative action. And I wish people would clearly delineate which one they mean, because affirmative action's basically been declared unconstitutional and therefore just goes back to being regular racial discrimination in higher ed. And higher ed has not adjusted to this at all. Like, they don't, they don't get it. But the DEI that fire worries about is more like the DEI administrative apparatus that was used kind of like the censorship department of higher ed for a long time. Not for all things, but, but for an awful, awful lot. Those were the.
- [62:25]
Emily
And for big Tech.
- [62:26]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, and for big Tech, these were like the equivalent of the hr, you know, human resources officers, but who are also policing speech. And this was. This is, this continues to be a fact. Now, the interesting thing about DEI statements is we've been doing polling on that among professors for a long time. Professors know they're terrible. They know they're political litmus tests, and they always have. It's this small. And oftentimes these are DEI administrators who really want these specifically because they are political litmus tests, so they can get more people like them to work for them. And here's the craziest stat we got from a DEI survey we did several years ago. We asked people if they were political litmus tests or if they were appropriate. What I wasn't expecting was to get around 26% of people saying, sure, they're political litmus tests and they're appropriate. And I was like, whoa, I thought you had to fix it. And that's not good.
- [63:22]
Emily
Well, at least there's, there's some principle there, I guess, that they're at least,
- [63:26]
Greg Lukianoff
at least they're lucid, you know?
- [63:28]
Emily
Yeah, right. There's a coherence to it.
- [63:31]
Greg Lukianoff
A creepy coherence.
- [63:33]
Emily
Creepy coherence. Well, also, the Trump administration people are familiar with this, has gone after Harvard, has gone after Yale. Certainly the most high profile example is Columbia. And I imagine you have probably a nuanced perspective on this because in some cases, you look at what, what's happening and you say these, these schools were completely, in some cases out of control, had been for a really long time. And you say the solution, is it worse than the problem? What do you think?
- [64:00]
Greg Lukianoff
It's incredibly frustrating because nobody cares about higher ed reform more than I do, and I've been doing this for 25 years. And if you're going to do higher education reform, you better do stuff that's actually going to work. And certainly if it's not constitutional or it violates the First Amendment, you're going to be on the wrong side of the. And so we ended up in this somewhat funny position of defending Harvard a lot, for example, because Harvard finished dead last in our campus free speech ranking, totally on its own steam. It's not a subjective thing. It's just an algorithm that we plugged in. And for two years in a row, they got negative scores by our ranking. But what the Trump administration did, it was just so many unforced errors. So basically, Columbia was the most vulnerable to the claims of antisemitism. So they settled quick. And that was not a surprise. Harvard was somewhat less, but still potentially had stuff to worry about. But they sent a letter to Harvard saying that you have to settle this, you have to hand over decisions on hiring, curriculum, student admissions. It's like, basically, it's like you're saying you have to nationalize Harvard. Then the administration said, we sent that letter by accident a couple days later, but we stand by it. And we're like, I don't. I'm not even following this. And so it was this very strange. And so of course it's like, no, you don't have the power to nationalize Harvard on accusations you haven't proven. You never have the power to just nationalize Harvard. And then they did crazy things like Trump was in a good position to say. And it probably is a problem that, for example, maybe that there is a problem with Chinese nationals being students and some of them reporting what they find back to the cc. So if Trump said basically, we have to investigate this, maybe no admissions for a while from China, he'd probably be in a pretty strong position to do that. But instead, what he did with Harvard was he said, because of this problem that we're having with international students, we're banning all international students too. And what would have made sense would be any school that receives a certain amount of Department of War money. But instead he said, just for Harvard. And of course, when a judge saw that, I'm like, okay, that's what's called a pre tax. Like that rationale doesn't make sense. Just applied to Harvard. So we wasted all of this energy, all of this opportunity to make real meaningful reforms in higher ed that would benefit freedom of speech for stuff that we have to fight and we're proud to fight. That's going to get laughed out of court at the same time. And it has been so far right.
- [66:31]
Emily
And they weren't legally making the argument that is, I think it's a stronger. I guess, I don't know if the right term is like ethical argument that federal taxpayers spend X amount of money subsidizing research at Harvard or grants to Harvard or whatever else. Therefore Harvard is nationalized and we can kind of bully you into the right curriculum, et cetera. They're making a different argument, which is that it became such a. What was it? Equal rights? Was it a.
- [66:58]
Greg Lukianoff
It was Title six, which. Which is anti. Anti Semitism. And it's interesting because, like, one of the things about doing this job is sometimes you imagine if you were an evil consultant, you know, like, try trying to figure out how to do the wrong thing. And the place where they have a lot of these schools dead to rights are on a lot of the affirmative action stuff because schools know they've been violating the law on that. They know it cold. And certainly since the Students for Fair Admissions decision, it's unambiguous but by going through it through the Title 6 approach, they were playing sort of like a weaker hand. And meanwhile, kind of like the way you can, the government can actually help fix this. I mean, I feel like J. Bhattacharya is doing more serious thinking about how you get your way out of this, like within the administration, trying to get, you know, have funds that require schools to have academic freedom, for example, requiring them, trying to get more people funded to do replication, deciding how to move, use their money more wisely, all of these things, getting rid of the, the thing that allows colleges to charge more and more every year while acting like a cartel is something that has to be addressed. But I, I, I, I fear we, we have squandered a moment.
- [68:11]
Emily
And then it raises the question of whether some of this has created a chilled climate for professorial speech. And I know you're in touch with many professors, academics and around the country and I wanted to put up this example of Karina Mullen. This is a New York Post story. So it's very anti Karina Mullen right off the bat, quote, a radical political science professor once arrested for leading anti Israel protests that resulted in $3 million damage to the City College of New York's Harlem campus. She lauded Iran's, quote, phenomenal military for depleting US Weapons stockpiles of the Middle east as she urged support for its armed forces, saying, literally, quote, this is having a huge toll in the capacity of the US Empire to impose its will. We need to bring the empire down by any means necessary. Mullen, the Post says who specializes in teaching anti colonialism, was fired by City University of New York in 2025 after eight years on the job. The termination came after she led an April 2024 encampment at the City College of New York, York. She fought the move and was reinstated this year, though her name didn't appear on City College of New York faculty pages. It's unclear if she taught in any classes at the spring semester. She also teaches at the New School. And all of that, Greg, is to say, I think you and I probably have the same position on whether it's anti US, anti Israel speech or anti left speech, which often got censored and suppressed, which is that there's a double standard that makes it a little bit glaring often to see the anti US rhetoric espoused without being or, you know, speakers get pushed back on whether they're conservative speakers and then.
- [69:39]
Greg Lukianoff
Or shouted down.
- [69:40]
Emily
Exactly. Yes. And you know, the owner, security fees, all of that type of thing. And on the other hand, we see this, but it's, it's just, I think our position would be don't ban any of this speech like this. It's crazy, but don't ban any of it. So then people don't have to complain about the double standards.
- [69:59]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, no, agreed. Don't ban any of it. Meanwhile, kind of like one thing that has been frustrating, though, is that I get people were rightfully angry at Columbia for the fact that there were a lot of students who broke rules, who engaged in violence, who engaged in vandalism that Columbia refused to punish because that would have forced them to be sent back to the countries that they came from. And I get why people were mad about that. There's no First Amendment or free speech argument that you have the right to vandalize or break school rules. So even in that story, like some of the stuff they're talking about engaged in some of the disruption of campus. And yeah, you can be punished for that, but when it's just extreme opinion, we're always going to be on the side of the extreme opinion. I do, however, think that it does show glaringly, kind of the lack of viewpoint diversity in higher ed that you end up in a situation where this is treated as totally use a term that you might like totally kosher, and speech that most Americans would find much more mainstream is treated like it's haram. Geez, where did that come from?
- [71:09]
Emily
That was good, Greg. Well, the Trump administration, meanwhile. This is from the New York Daily News. Let's put this up on the screen. Speaking of New York and City University of New York, they announced yesterday that they are investigating City University of New York over allegations of racial discrimination. According to the doj, the agency civil rights arm said it received reports alleging that the City University of New York's black male initiative gives preference to some students over others on the basis of race. Quote, race can never play a role when deciding how to distribute educational resources or opportunities, according to Assistant AG Harme Dillon, the Justice Department. This Justice Department, she continued, will not tolerate universities directing educational benefits to certain students over others based on their race. If you're degrade that, Greg, this policy in particular, is this a fair investigation?
- [71:59]
Greg Lukianoff
Yes. But I want to say one caveat. Fire has very sensibly, since day one, been like, we don't do affirmative action, like, we're staying out of it, but the law related to that has changed. So if you are engaging in what should have been called from the beginning, kind of like an idea of positive racism coming out of a court case called Bacchy. The idea that you could increase diversity and that should be left up to schools. That one exception, exception to racial discrimination being okay is over. Like, the Supreme Court has thrown that out and schools aren't adjusting to it, and it makes them very vulnerable to, to all sorts of potential attacks. And I don't know if some of these schools are understanding that.
- [72:41]
Emily
Yeah. And I guess I'm just thinking about the big picture question we started on too, where you had an administration, you know, JD Vance goes, what was it? Munich right away. And he kind of castigated the European countries for EU speech codes and the like, which I was all for sort of thing. Right. It was a good speech. It was a good speech.
- [72:57]
Greg Lukianoff
But at the same time, you know, it's like, you shouldn't be casting stones if you're not, if you're not keeping your own house clean. And I'm just worried about, I'm worried about free speech in the US I'm worried about it globally. You know, I think that free speech is something fragile and if we don't protect it, and that means protecting it for the people, we don't like that. Like everybody. Hitler thought that free speech he liked, should be protected. You know, like every bad person in history thinks that there's nothing exceptional there. But I worry that we're increasingly losing the ability to say, you know, I, I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death. You're right to say it, which is the heart of free speech.
- [73:33]
Emily
Yeah. And what are you seeing show up? Because when you wrote coddling with John Haidt, there was, I think, some good evidence already that younger people, my generation, millennials, were becoming very sensitive to speech they didn't like, to say the least. But also to this idea that speech can be violent. Violence.
- [73:50]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah.
- [73:50]
Emily
That it can be actual tantamount, actually tantamount to an act of violence that was really popular. And it became a predicate to go up and try to assault Charles Murray and administrators and such. What are you seeing show up among Gen Z?
- [74:06]
Greg Lukianoff
The scariest thing is when you look at the. Well, Gen Z, we're still trying to figure out where they stand, but when it comes to their attitudes about violence in response to speech, speech about shout downs, about blocking people from getting into talks, the numbers are horrifying. Like, they're like 71% thinks, at least in rare cases, you know, you can shout down at a speaker, like about a third think you can engage in violence. And at schools like oberlin, it's like 50%. And this is the kind of, like, dangerous sort of cosplaying that campuses should not be tolerating, that they should be sending a message down. And by, by the way, they act like they're helpless to do anything about it. The administrators at these fancy schools are like, oh, no, they're just showing up like that. I'm like, then try to make sure that you're getting students who don't think that it is. It is something that should be considered a basic, minimal requirement for going to college at all, or at least a good one that you can actually handle the fact that there's going to be someone there speaking that you disagree with. Otherwise, the. And it's so funny because I get so angry about mob censorship. Censorship, because to me, it's the heart of authoritarianism. And I always, I always like, it's funny to watch people who call everybody else fascists so often. I'm like, well, you know what the fascists actually did, right.
- [75:25]
Emily
Well, and by the way, what you're just describing, the University of Chicago has been able to do reasonably well. So there is a model that a lot of schools started trying to follow, and I guess Claremont's doing quite well.
- [75:35]
Greg Lukianoff
Dartmouth is really, really killing it. Daniel dearmeyer. Vincent Vanderbilt is really killing it. My big fear there, though, is the biggest impediment, though, to reform, oftentimes of the faculty themselves and the administrative class. They're the problem to a large degree, at least a big chunk of them. And that's one of the reasons why that whole administrative layer has to go. For there to be any hope for higher ed and freedom of speech. And it's hard to feel too optimistic despite all the pressure and all the change.
- [76:04]
Emily
Well, no, those numbers you just described as horrifying are easy to. To will easily engender pessimism in anybody who cares about this. And before I let you run, I wanted to ask and, and ask about your leadership, particularly in this awful Charlie Kirk case where the, the Tennessee case, I mean, the Charlie Kirk case is awful enough, but unfortunately, I don't think either of us is surprised about what happens when people get power and they are elected officials, goes back to, you know, Voltaire and corruption and the like. I think we all kind of understand how this goes, but. But this Tennessee case, we can put it up on the screen. I'm eager to hear you talk about it a bit. Greg, your headline was victory. Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins $835,000 settlement after First Amendment lawsuit. Now, if you're wondering whether you read that correctly, you did 37 days in jail. Greg, tell us what happened in this case and then what it tells us about the climate for speech, whether it's Republicans or Democrats.
- [77:01]
Greg Lukianoff
Democrats, yeah. I mean, I was horrified by the murder of Charlie Kirk, and I went and spoke at UVU a month later just to, you know, in solidarity, because it's just you have to stand up against that kind of violence. But unfortunately, some people in the administration, some people outside of it, took it as an opportunity to go after anybody who said anything negative about Charlie Kirk after he was murdered. Now, to be clear, some of what people said was pretty horrible. Other people said things more like me. And what I say is I disagree with him, Charlie Kirk, on a lot of things and that that's fine. But this was even worse in a lot of ways because all the guy said this, this was retired cop in Tennessee. He got invited to a Charlie Kirk vigil and he sent in a meme that was a picture of Trump saying, we have to get over it, which was about a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, I think, and basically, you know, being snarky, you know, and saying, I'm not that interested in it. And by the way, here's what, you know, your president said, you know, about this. The quote's a little bit unfair, but it is accurate the way he quoted it. Now, that's unquestionably protected speech. That's not even close to the line. But a local sheriff, and this happens sometimes in small towns, and a local judge got together and they made this argument because that was Perry High School in Iowa, and we're in Perry County, Tennessee, and it's about a school shooting. This is somehow a threat to the students at Perry County High School here. It's insane. I'm always like, if you're looking for it to make sense, give up. It does not. And they kept him in jail and they may put a 2 million dollar bail form and they kept in jail for 37 days until we were able to get enough pressure, you know, public pressure to get, get him released. That's like particularly giving how clearly the speech was protected and the length of the jail sentence. People disagree with this part, but, you know, I'm doing con lawyers math. As far as I can tell, you're talking, you have to go back to like the 1920s, before the First Amendment meant much of anything to see a case quite this bad. So I, I'm utterly horrified by this case.
- [79:07]
Emily
Yeah, it feels very European, much like that.
- [79:09]
Greg Lukianoff
It does.
- [79:10]
Emily
I believe you guys also dealt with this case in Florida where the local police knocked on the guy's door after he posted something. I think it was like anti Israel on one of the social media.
- [79:18]
Greg Lukianoff
We've had a lot of cases, people knocking on doors. I'm like, no, that will not be us. We're putting our foot down. Yeah, it was something. It was some anti Israel something and it's just not okay in the U.S. i mean, I don't think it's okay anywhere. But certainly we're not going to let it happen here.
- [79:36]
Emily
Yeah. And I hope not. And I hope that people who are polling poorly on their free speech sentiments in Gen Z don't grow up to feel the same way. And I hope they're paying attention to the work that you all do at 5 buyer Greg Lucianoff. Thank you so much for taking the time today to break all this down for us.
- [79:50]
Greg Lukianoff
Thanks, Emily. Such a pleasure.
- [79:52]
Emily
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- [80:56]
Greg Lukianoff
In the red corner, the undisputed undefeated weed whacker guy, champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere. And in the blue corner, the channel challenger extra strength Hataday eye drops that
- [81:12]
Emily
work all day to prevent the release
- [81:13]
Greg Lukianoff
of histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes. And the winner by knockout is Pat. Pat. Bring it on.
- [81:25]
Emily
You know that thing where you get an amazing pair of shoes at a really great price and want to tell everyone about it? Yeah. So do we here at Designer Shoe Warehouse, we'll give you something to brag about. Like the latest styles from brands you love or the trends everyone's obsessing over or shoes that make you feel like, well you. So go ahead, show off a little.
- [81:46]
Greg Lukianoff
Find shoes that get you at prices
- [81:48]
Steve Krakauer
that get your budget.
- [81:49]
Emily
Head to your DSW store or dsw.com today. DSW. Let us surprise you. Welcome back everyone. Such a pleasure to have Greg Lukianoff on the show. Show. Now I wanted to show you this trailer just so that you get a taste of exactly how Aaron Sorkin is preparing to pollute our collective understanding of the Facebook file story. You'll remember that from the Francis Hagen whistleblower series in the Wall Street Journal not long ago. And I'm just telling you from this trailer you can see he is preparing to pollute our collective understanding of what happened inside of Facebook. Who Frances Haugen is how she got damaging documents into the Wall Street Journal. This is a star studded rendition of that story featuring Jeremy Strong who from the trailer appears to be doing an excellent performance as Zuckerberg. The rest of it seems to be hallmark level directing and dialogue from Sorkin who co wrote it and directed. Let me just play the trailer. We'll get into some of it on the other side. Anxiety, depression of teenage girls got worse as a result of time spent on the platform. Senior leadership knows and is doing nothing.
- [83:04]
Steve Krakauer
I know there are easier enemies to make. The mafia would be an easier enemy to make.
- [83:09]
Emily
So what would you need to stand up? The story, the internal documents. This is a material violation of my NDA.
- [83:14]
Steve Krakauer
We're twice as big as the biggest country on earth. We're not frightened of congress or post government around here. Please, please let me poke that.
- [83:22]
Emily
We have 102 hours to get everything.
- [83:25]
Greg Lukianoff
She's going to get sued into small pieces.
- [83:27]
Emily
I don't want to be made an example of by a guy with unlimited resources. Harm, I promise you is imminent.
- [83:33]
Steve Krakauer
Enough people around here understand that when
- [83:36]
Greg Lukianoff
I say no, that's the end of the debate.
- [83:38]
Steve Krakauer
I'm not two years out of a dorm room anymore.
- [83:40]
Greg Lukianoff
Charlie, look around.
- [83:44]
Emily
Okay, Bill Burr is in it. I'm excited for that on its own. That was an excellent Zuckerberg from Jeremy Strong. Just an eerie, an eerily apt Zuckerberg. Fantastic acting. No surprise from Jeremy Strong. But let's toss this Breitbart element up on the screen. They did a side by side of Francis Haugen and of course who's playing Francis Haugen in Mikey Madsen in the film and it already tells you they have. Aaron Sorkin has very little into interest in doing a really fair depiction of what's happening. I'm not saying anything about Frances Haugen's looks or Madsen's looks just to say that there's a glaring mismatch between the sort of sexualized look here that you're seeing in the film and how Hagen has since presented herself to the media. At least, unless Sorkin has some inside information that she was walking around presenting herself like that, I think we can already tell that the Hollywoodized version of this is less interested in the truth of the story than the drama. And then really smoothing the edges of the drama into a, as Sorkin has promised, David and Goliath story. I just want to note for the record, Francis Hagen, when she was a whistleblower, was living off her crypto money in Puerto Rico. She mentioned at the time like, well, thankfully I invested in crypto early. And so I've just been able to, you know, have my Puerto Rico crypto tax haven lifestyle. Shouldn't put it like that, but there you go. So Francis Hagen, just as a. Or Haugen, just as a reminder, was a product manager on the civic Misinformation team of Facebook. And here you had Zuckerberg presented as a guy saying, I'm a free speech absolutist. Although, I mean, as though that makes him him the dark shadowy figure in all of this. And Francis Haugen's record hasn't been great on that, nor has Zuckerberg's. For what it's worth, I thought John Nolte, also at Breitbart, made an excellent point too. I wanted to pop up on the screen. He said, I like how a lefty like Aaron Sorkin is demonizing someone for saying he's a free speech absolutist. Zuckerberg isn't a free speech absolutist. Obviously Zuckerberg is a left wing fascist, but Sorkin is falsely portraying him as a free speech true believer believer. So they can demonize free speech, he says. Things sure have changed in Hollywood. They surely have. Aaron McCarthy, Sorkin. That's a little bit of McCarthy bait, by the way. I don't want to get caught up in it and go down the Stan Evans rabbit hole doing the kind of typical conservative song and dance about. Dance about how McCarthy was right. What I would say is McCarthy was righter than you think. So buy the book, buy the Blacklisted by history if you want the other side of that. I needn't delve into it at this late hour. Maybe we'll do a segment on it someday. But he's so right about this depiction of Zuckerberg and it's a great point. I went and just pulled some information on Francis Haugen's record on this and. And Haugen works with the center for Humane Tech, which I actually really like. And she is correct. You'll remember she was a whistleblower about what Facebook knew internally, particularly on how Instagram was affecting young people girls, and brought that to the Wall Street Journal, then testified in front of Congress and forced Zuckerberg to confront some of these really serious allegations. I agree with her on some of these points about the algorithms. We talk about it all the time on the show. But let's just look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This is a. I mean, I think they would call themselves a center group. I would call them a center left group. I don't think a lot of people would dispute that.
- [87:30]
Steve Krakauer
That.
- [87:30]
Emily
But Haugen has been supportive of the European Union's speech censorship regime. Unfortunately, the Digital Services Act. Haugen has had a lot of nice things to say about. And EFF has said, quote, DSA gives way too much power to government agencies to flag and remove potentially illegal content and to uncover data about anonymous speakers. The DSA obliges very large platforms to, to assess and mitigate systems systemic risks. But there's a lot of ambiguity about how this will turn out in practice. Well then EFF goes. The DSA sets up rules that allow a few American tech giants, this is as it was already in practice, to control huge swaths of Europeans online speech because they're the only ones with the means to do so. What does that mean for America? Quote, within these American run walled gardens, algorithms will monitor speech and delete it without warning and without regard to whether the speakers are bullies engaged in harassment or survivors of bully describing how they were harassed. And so what it looks like Haugen is going. What it looks like right now is that Haugen is going to get the Sorkin treatment, which is a gloss and it smooths away the edges to produce a very simple, as he says, quote unquote David and Goliath story. That is a companion piece to the film. Everybody remembers the social network, which totally did change the way that we saw those early Facebook years, accompanied a couple of quotes from the trailer. You have Zuckerberg saying, quote, unquote, I am a professional defendant. In addition to quote, I am a free speech absolutist this is a description from the Hollywood Support Reporter who said the forthcoming film is set 17 years after the events of the Social Network, which focused on, as you remember, Jesse Eisenberg's lead portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg as he created the social media platform and was later sued by co founder Eduardo Sabrin, who was Andrew Garfield. Garfield and the Winklevoss twins, Armie Hammer, Todd Black, Peter Rice and Stuart Besser produced the Social Reckoning alongside Sorkin. And so Francis Haugen and Mark Zuckerberg have both played this really high stakes public relations game about who they are and what they stand for. But at the end of the day, both of them were people with significant power. Zuckerberg certainly much more significant than Haugen, who never really, really truly were free speech absolutists who aren't truly now in line with what we should expect from corporations who do respect the First Amendment here in the United States. And Sorkin has gotten so tired. Maybe it's because Americans are much more cynical now, but I actually think the, the Sorkin gloss has made Americans more cynical about the fact that what happens at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue revenue is not the world of the West Wing. What happens in the newsroom isn't the world of the newsroom because Sorkin has this deep faith in American institutions that he depicts. And I shouldn't even say that he has this deep faith in the centrist governance of American institutions that has done so much damage. First of all, you have the chasm between his Hollywood depiction and what people have come increasingly as media has democratized, to see as the reality. And then second of all, you have the reality itself, which is, which has poisoned a lot of people on the, the good of institutions that a lot of people just used to trust as being general, literally, directionally moral and correct. That faith in institutions is, has dissolved. It has plummeted. Study after study shows it. So for yeah, this is what I'm trying to disentangle here. Is it, is it my cynicism and the, the culture's cynicism that makes Sorkin's dialogue seem utterly ridiculous? Or is it Sorkin's dialogue also devolving into Hallmark quality or Hallmark movie quality that isn't what you'd expect at the Academy Awards? I mean, even some of the acting in that trailer looked just egregious, flagrantly terrible and overwrought. But I, I went back and watched West Wing, which I didn't watch growing up when it was originally airing. I honestly couldn't get through a few episodes. It's a cliche here in D.C. to say the city is much more like Veep. I'm. I would imagine that people in Silicon Valley would say that Silicon Valley was a pretty good depiction of Silicon Valley, maybe more than Sorkin could do. But that's, I don't think it's, it's new that Sorkin is, is kind of a bad writer who was lauded because his writing resonated with the centrists who ran the institutions. Now, West Wing was a very popular show, and I think part of it was that it did appeal to the better angels and it did appeal to what we wanted to see in the country around the turn of the millennial millennium. And, you know, it was serialized, so it was kind of a page turner. Not in the year of our Lord 2025. When I went back and tried to watch it, it was just gradingly cheesy and so out of whack with reality. Maybe it's, it's been poisoned because we now have Veep, but it just, it's. It's going to be galling to watch this. I mean, it's one thing to, to praise Jeremy Strong. It's another thing to act as though this film is, is correctly depicting the David and the Goliath and the heroes and the villains in the situation. You know, it can often be true that a film features nothing but antiheroes. And that's fine as long as the film understands that and is true to the heart of the story. I mean, you can sex up the actors, I don't care. But to, to fully re. Envision them, I just think speaks to a reimagination of the entire story that we're about to see on the, on the screen. And then we're going to see get lapped up by people who write for the, the big publications and do criticism, film criticism and the like. So just wanted to bring you a little bit of that hilarious trailer and break down a bit of where I think this is going, because there are so many people who are still high up the ladder in corporate America, the NGO space, that believe paternalistically they should have the power to tend the gates, to keep the gates of the information that ultimately gets to you. Some of it, yes, is profit motivated. They don't want their platform to get in Trouble and Section230 and all of, of that. But some of it is also because they are paternalistic and they believe if they control the flow of information, people will make decisions that are more in line with the decisions they want to see get made, that they will be able to control attitudes and sentiments in the population by controlling the flow of information. And in fact, they believe that they should have that power because they believe technocratically they can hire people, people who will sort fact from fiction better than the public. It's their job. How could they get it wrong? We have this wonderful, you know, we have this, this wonderful rubric. We have these standards, we have our algorithms. It will all be fine. Let the experts handle the flow of information. It's not to say, of course, that there aren't downsides to the gatekeepers being gone, but the fact that anybody still wants to appoint themselves the guardian of the information that gets to you, whether you're in the UK or the United States, is depressing. And, you know, I just don't really have the appetite to see it depicted as valorous or, you know, whitewashed or downplayed. So anyway, those are my thoughts on the Social Reckoning trailer. I couldn't, couldn't resist. All right, thanks so much everybody for sticking around for today's edition of After Party. It's been a pleasure as always. I answer your emails in our pre recorded happy hour segments. For podcast listeners, that's the Friday episode of the show. Emilyvelnaycaremedia.com is where you can reach me. I do that around Thursday afternoon, usually 3 4pm so if you want to be in this week's batch, hit me up before then. Otherwise we will see you, I guess you will hear us on Friday's edition of the show and then we'll be back with more on Monday. Have a great weekend. God bless. Possible. Why have I asked my h vac guy I found on Angie.com to change my grandpa's trachea tube? Because I was so amazed by how quickly he replaced our air ducts, I knew I could trust him to change Pop Pop's tube while I was on vacation. Make it quick, young man. Aw. See, Pop Pop trusts you.
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