← Armstrong & Getty On Demand
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A
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He actually may disagree with you, but defend to death. You're right to say it. Greg Lukianoff It's Armstrong and Getty Extra
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Large because four hours simply isn't enough.
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B
This is Armstrong and Getty Extra Large. Greg Lukianoff is an attorney, New York Times bestselling author, and the president and CEO of fire, the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. There is no more important cause on earth then the right to free speech. Everything else flows from there. Greg, welcome.
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D
How are you?
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C
I'm pretty good. How are you doing?
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E
We're great. Glad to have you back on the Armstrong and Gettys show again. You got my attention around the fourth of July celebration stuff with some of your tweets when you were pushing back against some of the numbskulls that were attacking the country and basically saying that we're a force for evil in the world and that sort of stuff. And then also some of your stuff around socialism. You tweeting out something that we talk about a lot. I got two kids in high school right now. They've never learned anything good about the free market or anything bad about socialism in all their years of schooling. The only reason they know anything about it is from me. You tweeted the other day. It represents a massive generational failure of our K through PhD system that they didn't learn the history, philosophy or economics that would have prevented them from falling for the same midwittery that too many of our Grandparents fell for. So between your bassing of the schools and socialism and standing up for the United States, what say you?
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C
I believe there's nothing more patriotic than a constitutional lawyer, even if sometimes they don't know that or not. And I think that essentially, like those of us who defend the First Amendment, those of us who defend the Bill of Rights, we're standing up for something very special in human history and very special and unique about America. And I say that a lot less apologetically than most.
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E
Yeah, so it was, I don't, I don't. You know, there's a little bit of nut picking going on where the stuff that makes those of us who love the country the angriest. We share the things online that got under our skin. But it's amazing how many people seem to sincerely feel that the United States in this experiment has been not only a failure internally, but a failure for the world. Bad for the world.
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C
Yeah. Well, that's one of the things that I was taken on the 4th of July was, you know, I ran into this a lot at law school and when I started meeting kind of like, you know, like wealthier kids and that kind of stuff is how much you would run into this kind of disdain for the idea of America being exceptional. And it's like if you don't think it's exceptional, then you just don't understand history very well because it's by whatever definition you come up with, whether it's economic strength, whether it's the, yes, it's the world's old and first attempt to have a large scale democracy, for goodness sake, it's the first meaningful Bill of Rights, it's the longest Constitution's been around. When you look at the inventions, the dynamism that's come out of it, when you look at the contributions of everything from, if it wasn't for America, for example, Europe would be dominated by Germany, maybe even to this day. I mean, just one thing after the other things we like about the world. Hip hop, you know, jazz music, barbecue, you know, bourbon, for goodness sakes. Like there is so much to be proud of. But if, but even if you're not proud of it, just recognizing that it's an incredibly influential, dynamic, bizarre historical force. You know, you can't deny that part, or at least if you're denying it, you sure you don't know that much about other countries?
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B
Right? And I would argue that the United States and its, its systems, which have been exported throughout the world, have also brought a lot more justice to more than any Other system. And what makes me insane. And again, this happened on our watch. So I'm blaming my generation for assuming everybody believed and thought the same things we did. And we also assumed incorrectly that schools were the way they were when we were kids and they had not been captured by left wing ideologues. But anyway, the fact that the United States and its history has been compared to some sort of heavenly perfection as opposed to every other effing system that's ever been tried by man since the dawn of man. And these kids, not their fault, don't understand the good.
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C
Yeah, well, yeah. And that's one of the reasons why kids like me, you know, both my parents are immigrants. I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of other immigrant kids and you know, first generation kids. And you don't take that kind of stuff for granted when your family is fleeing totalitarianism or authoritarianism. And it was, it's weird, particularly in sort of like, like, sort of like America's like richer educated strata about how often they seem to not know very much about other, about other countries and what their histories are and actually like what they're like, because I sometimes refer to it as Europe worship that essentially like, like it's like this. There are these perfect states over there and we're just these weird barbarians. And it's like when your mom is British and your dad is Russian, like this just sounds like weird kind of, you know, sort of exot of places because they have better cheese than us.
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B
I always call it xenophilia. And people say, oh, you mean xenophobia. And I said, no, I'm pretty good at talking. I meant xenophilia. People who have an unnatural attachment to and passion for the foreign and they never examine.
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E
Well, yeah, to that point I've asked, we've had I don't know how many different thinkers, historians or whatever on the air over the years has this ever happened in history where, where a country's population turned against itself, where they decided its children then taught its children to hate themselves?
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C
I think, I think it's a periodic cycle now that taught their children to, to hate themselves, I think is something that's a little more rare because just a lot of previous societies didn't have, you know, massive centralized educational systems like we do. But I do think that countries and empires and civilizations lose faith in themselves. They become obsessed with everything that they're doing. I mean, you know, Edward Given, talking about the rise and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, you know, talked about how there was this sort of, like, ingrained, sort of, like, contempt for all of the things that actually made the Romans great. So I do think it is a. It is part of a normal cycle, but unfortunately, the thing that tends to break it, if it can be broken, is something really bad happening. And I'd like to remember us. To remember what the stuff that makes us so special is without it having to be something like World War II, which actually did break a cycle similar to this, with a lot more sort of growing, sort of like, we're not exceptional. We're terrible. We're just like, you know, we should give in to totalitarianism, either from the right or the left, which was all over the 1930s, but World War II kind of reminded us that, no, we're about something big and beautiful and broad.
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B
Just as an aside, Greg, prior to 2020, Jack used to always ask me, do you think we can heal this and get it back together? And I said, essentially, what you just said. It's gonna take a giant war or a pandemic. Well, we checked off one of those, and it didn't help. And more on that to come. You know, it just. It bothers me so much. The knee jerk, lazy. Look how enlightened I am. I'm gonna say something critical about America. It's just so lazy. Stupid. It's like dealing with a teenager. That's stupid. Yeah. Would you like to go to the park? That's stupid. Do you want to watch tv? That's stupid.
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C
Oh, and just to be clear, you know, they have every right to have that opinion, and I will go to.
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I'd like to beat it out of them. But that's the difference between me and you.
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C
But at the same time, it's like, what do you think the rest of the world and the rest of history actually look like? It's, you know, particularly having, like, family that had to flee the Soviets, for goodness sakes. And watching this within my own lifetime, within a tiny, tiny frame, having to explain, no, my dad fled the Soviets and my. And I spent a lot of time after the Wall fell in Eastern Europe, and nobody was saying, boy, wasn't that just so swell? I'm so happy. I'm so sad that we have, you know, prosperity and tourism and dynamism, you know, here now, like. And honestly, that really does fall a lot down on K for PhD, not teaching young people that. It's like, yeah, fascism was terrible. It was evil. They spend, like. They spend like an hour on that. They spend, like, three minutes on Stalin, and they don't have any sort of sense of comparison to the rest of history. I have to like, teach my kids about me too. You always have to ask, compared to what?
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E
Yeah, that's one of the great lines Joe Biden always used to use. It actually is apt here. It's the don't compare me against God. Oh my God Almighty. Compare me against the other guy. And that's the same way with the countries.
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C
Yeah.
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E
Comparing yourself against perfection, you know, to the fall of the Roman Empire and all that sort of stuff. Reminds me of Christopher Hitchens said one time that a lot of people don't realize when the barbarians take over, when the barbarians are the gate, there's usually somebody there holding the door open for them. That's the way civilizations fall. The people that have turned against their own country or. Yeah, there are people in the United States right now that would hold the door open to let in, you know, Islamo fascists or communists or whatever, because they somehow think that would be better.
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C
Yeah, no, it's weird because I think of it as a kind of narcissism. And I said this, you know, like when I was living in San Francisco, for example. And as a kid, I will say, like there was another kind of narcissism, kind of like what I call positive narcissism about the US So that bugged me as a kid because I'd learned things like, you know, like in seventh grade that essentially the American bomber campaign won World War II. And it's like, well, no, that and, you know, tens of millions of Russians, you know, you had a big, big part to play in that. So like the patriotic kind of like, everything good is from us is silly in its own way. But. But I thought even worse was everything bad comes from us. Because like, basically if your story is either like, daddy is all good, or you're still just thinking about daddy all night, you're still just thinking about your own family and having a dad. My dad would teach me about like 9th century Russian history, you know, at. At length. You really like how funny Americans can be sometimes to think we created all the problems of the world that were old when other countries were new.
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B
Right, right. Absolutely true. So I made reference to the COVID thing. It's a little more top of mind than perhaps last week just because of the Fauci diaries story coming out. Coming out these days. And as record this, you know, comment on that or don't, it's entirely up to you. But our position is that the whole Covid thing, the whole Covid Response was an unbelievable incursion on civil rights, including free speech, and that it's absolutely worth going over again because if we say, yeah, well, what are you gonna do? Every time our rights are trampled on, no matter what you think of effing Donald Trump or Anthony Fauci or whatever, it will happen again sooner. What bothered you the most or what do you remember most acutely about that time?
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C
Oh, about 2020. 2020 was so bad that we decided at FIRE to expand beyond campus. So it really, you know, we used to just battle for free speech and economic freedom on campus, but it was. The situation for free speech was so dire both on and off campus that we're like, okay, I guess we actually have to take on the whole world now, because this is. This is ugly. I remember in the course of, like, a couple of weeks, people were getting fired from newspapers, you know, in some cases, you know, websites, news websites that they helped. That they founded as they were engaged in. Wrong. Think it was a ugly, scary, dark period.
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D
Yeah.
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E
Well, we now know in the last 48 hours since Rand Paul put out the Fauci diaries, that Anthony Foushee came to the conclusion very quickly that the it was a lab leak and probably happened earlier than the Chinese were admitting. And so for a variety of reasons that maybe we'll learn in the hearing tomorrow with Rand Paul, it became something you couldn't say out loud, and Zuckerberg wouldn't allow it on Facebook and it wasn't allowed on Twitter and all that sort of thing.
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C
Oh, my God. So I'm behind on this. So when you mentioned that, I'm like, oh, I haven't read the Fauci things. That's. That's horrible. I didn't. That's even worse than I was expecting. And by the way, I remember watching people jump down each other's throats when someone would mention the lab leak theory in, like, March of 2020, and just being like, no, dude, there was no secret investigation of China that no one else has heard of that actually exonerated China. And you're acting like, we know for a fact this cannot possibly be a lab leak. And when you see things like that, you start getting, like, when someone's like that defensive, it, like, it makes a lot of us, you know, who are students of human nature, be like, oh, I get it. This is actually true. That's why you're overreacting.
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B
Right? Right. My God, if I know truth is on my side, I want the other guy to speak. I enjoy it. I'll Give him a little thicketa. Thicketa Thakur da. The idea of, you know, silencing your opponents. And that's actually what I was going to get to. Greg, help us. Everybody listening. And Lord knows this has been addressed by various sages throughout history, including some of our founding papas. What is your simple Explanation to an 8 to 12 year old about why the free exchange of ideas is the only way to go?
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C
Oh, wow. Yeah. No, I mean the way I explain it is that freedom of speech is the best invention humanity ever came up for, for innovation, for authenticity and for peace and for self rule, for representative government, for democracy ever invented. And the peace part people really miss because it's like, no, it's a decision to decide conflicts without regard to violence, but through heated, oftentimes persuasion that replaces the single most common way we solved conflicts in the past, which is violence or the threat of violence. And then when you add to that like so it became this incredible tool for peaceful coexistence. But at the same time it gives us everything from medicine to self understanding to the chance to just be ourselves sometimes.
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B
Yeah, I think everybody needs to have in their holster speech isn't violence. Free speech prevents violence because it's unquestionably true.
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C
Yeah. And we see what's going on in Europe at the moment since they're really clamping down on free speech, particularly in the UK and Germany that you start, you know, you're starting to have, you know, outbreaks of violence in places like Ireland, for example. And that's gonna get worse because you don't solve a problem by saying, just demanding that nobody talk about it.
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E
Yeah, it's amazing that that free speech argument you just laid out seems so correct to some of us and like beyond dispute. Yet you have to fight it on a regular basis, kind of like socialism. As we see what's happening in parts of Europe, free speech is like not the natural state of man, apparently.
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C
Well, and. Oh, it absolutely is not. I mean, I call my subset the eternally radical idea because I say that in every generation most people rise up to oppose freedom of speech. So the fact that some of us who defend freedom of speech are on the winning side is actually a radical idea in every generation that essentially like this sounds. You mean everybody gets to talk? Sounds a little bit crazy to people. But again, it is this, it's been this absolute revelation in the course of human history to let more people speak, to let them argue it out, to let people believe what they believe. Not just because. Not just because sometimes like Power, actually, power is wrong all the time. But also for this very simple but crucial point is if you're not safer for knowing less about what people really think.
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B
Right, right. I'm a bad host. I should have plugged Greg, your terrific book with Nadine Strossen, the war on words, 10 arguments against free Speech and why they Fail. Really, really good. Very, very affordable. And everybody ought to pick up a copy and, you know, become a fellow warrior.
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C
Yeah, would love that. Nadine is the former head of the aclu. You know, we talk about arguments that people make against free speech that drive us nuts. And fire is the hardest working, you know, free speech organization and show business. Because right now threats are coming from every direction and the picture globally looks pretty grim for free speech. So we gotta, we gotta stand up and fight for it.
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E
That would be a good ending spot, but I'm not gonna end there because I want us to be the one to read this to you from Anthony Fauci's diary since you haven't seen this yet. Oh, wow.
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F
The headlines, they move on. But the heartache and the terror they do not. Iran and its terrorist proxies are continuing to target Israel. Hezbollah continues its attacks in the north, forcing families to live under constant threat. But Israel is not only defending her people, she is standing on the front lines against terrorists that threatens us all. Even when the news crews leave the international fellowship of Christians and Jews, they remain. Every day they are on the ground providing life saving aid. Now near Israel's border with Lebanon, a Hezbollah drone recently struck the home of Yelena. Widowed earlier this year and living alone, she was trapped inside by the blast. Thankfully, she was not injured, but she remained displaced. It's hard these days, she says, but I don t want to leave. Well, as Christians we are called to stand with God's people and pray for those defending Israel and protecting the freedoms we hold dear. I want you to join the international fellowship of Christians and Jews in praying for the peace of Jerusalem and for the soldiers, families and civilians carrying the burden of this fight right now. Visit pray ifcj.org that's pray ifcj.org this
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E
is from January 26, 2020. Anthony Fauci writing his own diary. It now appears, using EPI data and genomic data, that the first infection was in early December and not connected to the market. Now we know the market was not the source. It was the amplifier part of the entry. From that day, he knew that early on the Chinese had been misleading them. The market amplified it, but that's not where it started.
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B
Yeah.
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E
Yeah. And soon as you know, you got, you got your account shut down on Facebook or Twitter or lots of places are. You couldn't be on cable news if you said anything close to what Anthony Fauci said in that diary entry.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And I wrote a whole piece talking about, like, let's say you have an alternative universe in which China has a free press. We probably would have known about this disease breaking out fast enough to be able to contain it.
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E
Absolutely.
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C
People really don't appreciate, like, how important that is.
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Trillions of dollars, millions alive saved if that happened.
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B
So every time we talk to Greg Lukianoff, I am fired up anew to be a pro free speech warrior in my own little way. Jack as well. Greg, it's always great to talk, stay in touch, and to the good folks listening, I will tell you, I personally support fire both financially and verbally. And I think you ought to too. Greg. It's great to talk. Thanks.
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C
Yeah. Thank you so much.
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E
Yeah, that was fun. Glad we could do it.
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A
All right.
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B
Yeah. Take care, Greg. Let's talk again soon.
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C
Absolutely.
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F
Yep.
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E
And now you got to hang up, Michael, or we have this really uncomfortable. We keep saying goodbye, and he's saying goodbye.
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B
No, you hang up, you're smoopy.
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E
I. I feel. I feel guilty. Taken the time of a guy as smart as him, almost just, you know, I'm sorry you have to talk to a dullard like myself, but throw questions at you and see how you answer.
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B
I like golden retrievers, you know, and they're not terribly bright. They're just lovely. And so he pets us and we. Off we go.
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E
So my final note on this, she said I keep getting sucked back into this super smart friend of mine who, who is a liberal, I shouldn't say was they're not dead and they haven't changed their political views. But I remember when the FBI or CIA, whichever one came out because they both have saying that the most likely thing is the virus came out of the lab. Yeah. But it's not. Then they're not certain. They just think it's most likely. All right, why why hold on to the fact to the lie that we now know? Anthony Fauci put out a lie and some people are still willing to hold on to it, even when all our intelligence agencies say the most likely thing is it came out of the laugh.
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B
I was so intrigued by human nature and horrified. I don't get that. I can't relate to it. I, you know, I don't want to talk about myself. Yeah, I don't. I. It's very, very difficult to relate to other people's emotional and intellectual lives because you're not living in their brain. I don't understand why people aren't more intent on knowing what's true. Because if I get something wrong, for instance, on the podcast slash, radio show, and I find out I was wrong, I'm mortified, I'm embarrassed, I'm regretful.
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E
I agree.
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B
I kick myself for not working harder and figuring it out. 100 and so if somebody says, and when we get emails and, you know, text messages or whatever and say, hey, you guys, I think you're missing something on this, my reaction is an F you. It's. Oh, crap. What? What do you mean? Talk to me. I want to know. And I don't understand people. Is it insecure? I don't want to come off as high handed because I think you're dealt the genetic cards you're dealt. But I don't understand wanting to inoculate yourself from the truth.
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E
Well, I hate to always bring it back to this, but like, the particular person that I'm thinking of talking about, it would be admitting that Trump and Fox News was right. And they just can't live in that world.
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B
All right. Hey, friends. Sometimes Trump is wrong. He's wrong a lot of times he's right.
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E
He's right a lot.
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Sometimes he's kind of in the middle. Sometimes Joe Biden was wrong. Sometimes he's right. Sometimes he's kind of in the middle. Shall I go on?
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E
It's okay.
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B
But it's the quasi religious tribalism that is reinforced by the Internet every single day that I think may be the disease that's causing the symptoms that we're talking about.
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E
Outlaw algorithms.
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B
Outlaw the Internet. Unplug it. Yanks a core.
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A
Yuck.
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B
Extra large.
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A
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D
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