← Conversations with Coleman
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- [00:00]
A
I've got two exciting events to announce. On September 14th, I'll be with Steven Pinker at the Comedy Cellar in New York City discussing his new book. A new Steve Pinker book is always an important event, so please don't miss that. That's September 14th at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. And secondly, on September 10th in Pittsburgh, the Free Press is teaming up with FIRE for our third Freedom Debate of 2025. The question this time, is designing babies unethical or is it actually a moral imperative? Gene editing could help us wipe out genetic diseases, but it could also push us into picking traits like intelligence or personality. So are we curing suffering or are we playing God? Jamie Metzl and Dr. Allison Barent will debate Carter Sneed and Dr. Lydia Dugdale with Bari Weiss Moderating. And if you grab a VIP ticket, you can stick around for the after party, meet debaters, hang with Barry and the Free Press team. Plus, of course, strong drinks and good food. So get your tickets@the FP.com debate link in the show Notes welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. Today's guest is Greg Lukianoff. Greg is an attorney, author and free speech advocate who serves as president and CEO of the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, also known as fire. He co authored the Coddling of the American Mind, the Canceling of the American Mind, and and his new book with Nadine Strawson, 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and why they Fail. In this episode, we talk about why Greg is not a free speech absolutist. We Talk about how October 7 changed the campus free speech debate. We talk about where the line between legal protest and illegal protest lies. We talk about the free speech rights of visa holders and green card holders. We talk about Trump's efforts to intimidate his political opponents. We talk about the very depressing free speech situation in the United Kingdom right now. We talk about why hate speech laws tend to backfire and much more. So without further ado, Greg Lukianoff, I want to tell you about a podcast I can't recommend enough. It's called Boundless Insights, hosted by Aviva Klumpas. Aviva is sharp, fearless, and deeply informed, the kind of host who. Who challenges assumptions without turning up the volume. On Boundless Insights, she sits down with diplomats, military leaders and legal scholars, people who actually know what they're talking about to make sense of the chaos in the Middle east and beyond. No hot takes, no tribal echo chambers. Just smart, honest conversations about the biggest stories shaping Jewish life, Israeli politics, and their global impact. If you're tired of the noise and ready for something deeper. Check out Boundless Insights. You'll come away with new insights and a deeper understanding of the issues. Find Boundless Insights available wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. Greg Lukianoff, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [03:12]
B
Yeah, thanks for having me. Coleman, great to see you.
- [03:15]
A
So you are the CEO of fire, the. The flagship and standard bearer in. In the domain of organizations that defend free speech. I've been following fire's work for a long time. I've known you for many years. And you have a new book out called the War on Words. Maybe you can show that.
- [03:36]
B
Yep.
- [03:36]
A
10 arguments against free Speech and why they Fail. So this is an interesting time to talk to you because, you know, free speech is a topic I've covered on the show probably too many times to count over the past several years. And most of the threats to free speech that I've seen and that I've worried about, most have been threats from the political left, in particular on college campuses. And I've told many stories. Maybe some of them will come out again in this podcast about my time at Columbia University, where I graduated in 2020, and where the atmosphere around free speech was chilled is. Is an understatement. And part of that was cultural, part of that was. Was a matter of policies. And so I've spent a lot of time worrying about the threat from free to free speech from the left. At the moment, it seems appropriate to worry equally, if not more, about threats to free speech from the right, given that Donald Trump in his second term, to my eye, has really taken the gloves off in terms of intimidating not only universities, but law firms, really, pollsters, anyone that he views as against him, he seems to have no qualms when it comes to just taking a hammer to their business or to their organization and so forth. So we can talk about both of those threats and how you see them in general. I'm curious, what has fire's role been in holding the Trump administration to account in the last few. Few months?
- [05:28]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, fire one, one compliment that, or a supposed compliment that I don't particularly like getting, is when some people on the left who always ignored what FIRE did, find some of the cases in which we're taking on the Trump administration and gives us credit basically, like for suddenly being nonpartisan and principled. And I, I'm like, thank you. But I want to say go to hell. Because we've always been like this since, since day one. You just have paying attention because he didn't like that. We were also pointing out left wing authoritarianism, but we certainly fight it on the right as well and always have. So when the Trump administration started doing things like suing Ann Selzer, and actually this is. I said administration, but the interesting thing about the Anseller case, and just to remind everybody, Ann Selzer is the Iowa pollster who got the poll wrong that indicated that Harris was up in Iowa. And she was way off, to be clear, but it was, you know, an honest mistake. She explained how she did it. She explained how it was an older methodology that used to be the gold standard, but doesn't work so well anymore. She admitted her mistake and retired after. After that, you know, bad call. And yes, the media jumped all over the idea that Harris might be ahead of in Iowa, but that's not, you know, Ann Selzer's of the Demoine Register's fault. And Trump, in his personal capacity, before he actually became president, sued her under a consumer protection regulation in Iowa, the kind of thing that's supposed to prevent you from running ads that make false promises about products saying that this was somehow a violation of that, which is nonsensical. It doesn't make any sense in terms of First Amendment. And when you look at all the pressure on the various media institutions, whether it's CBS or Facebook for that matter, almost all of them have to some degree caved to the Trump administration and paid in some cases exorbitant funds to this ever increasingly wealthy presidential library. But the one bright star in the media firmament is the one that we're standing up for that essentially took a nonprofit standing up for Aunt Selzer. That's the one place. And the Des Moines Register that hasn't actually caved yet. So that's one of the ones that I think is the worst. I've also written a lot about the treatment of law firms, which I think is underappreciated. Telling people who were adverse to the administration, adverse to the government in cases that they can no longer enter federal buildings is not something that is by any means okay. And I think that people have little interaction or little sympathy for some of these law firms. They don't understand really how unprecedented bad that is. And the most interesting part for fire is that, and I'll give the most famous school in the country as an example, I've been right at the head of the line, being critical of Harvard, for example. And for that matter, honestly, I'm even more critical of your alma mater, Columbia.
- [08:36]
A
Hasn'T Fire, just to underscore that hasn't Fire sort of famously ranked Harvard extremely low. I don't know if it's the lowest, but for many years in a row.
- [08:45]
B
On free speech issues, dead last on the campus. Free speech ranking. And they earned it. UVA last year was number one. And the two bottom ones were Harvard and Columbia, and they earned that ranking. But when the Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard basically saying, because we believe you have violated Title 6 in your treatment of Jewish students without giving them the process that's required to actually establish that, and to be clear, I think they could have actually been found that they'd violated that. But they, there's a process that you're supposed to follow. Sent a letter saying essentially like you have to hand over your normal academic freedom powers over to the administration. It was essentially like a letter saying, we're going to nationalize Harvard because we've decided that you've done this thing wrong, even though you haven't had your process. So we're currently defending Harvard while at the same time, to the frustration sometimes of some more biased people in the media, they're saying, well, do you always have to criticize the schools at the same time that you say you're defending them? And my answer is always yes, because I don't want to pretend that, you know, our 25 year history prior to this moment is suddenly erased and that these are institutions with clean hands. But no matter how dirty their hands may be, the president doesn't get to make up powers he doesn't have.
- [10:06]
A
Right. So I want to get to Harvard in a moment and dig deeper into that. But I want to double click on what Trump is doing to law firms and how crazy that is, because I agree it's an underappreciated, under discussed story. And I think you're right. It's under discussed because white shoe law firms are an unsympathetic victim. Right. Like the public doesn't probably feels about white shoe lawyers at Perkins Coey the way people feel about landlords, and it's just not. And health care CEOs, you know, it's just not. They're not popular as, as objects of public empathy. Nevertheless, Trump actually wrote an executive order, as you say, banning specific law firms from entering federal buildings. I mean, I didn't even know that that was possible. Yeah, right. I, I like, you know, I'm not a historian, might be able to, you know, check me on this, but I'm just, I've never seen a precedent for that in any history book on American history.
- [11:10]
B
I'm quite sure it's never happened before for.
- [11:12]
A
Yeah, and so obviously that, that matters in more than a symbolic way because these, you know, some of these law firms make their bread by defending, you know, contractors in federal court or, you know, any number of, of reasons that they might need to enter a federal federal court building in order to actually represent clients against, against the government. And this is essentially Trump just punishing law firms that worked with Hillary Clinton and law firms, you know, Perkins Coie is known for representing Democrats and Democrat aligned institutions. You know, like someone like, you know, the co founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, is represented by lawyers at Perkins Coie. And so there are law firms known for representing left wing and right wing and so forth. And this is just straight up punishment for being a left wing law firm.
- [12:09]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And at first it started out with things like going after the place that Robert Mueller worked at and that was part of it. That's bad enough, to be clear. But then they threw in allegations like, well, you were adverse to the Trump administration's position on affirmative action. And it's like, hold on, hold on, wait, wait, wait. You're going to punish them because they're, they worked against the government's position on something that, that's not okay. That's, that's not the way the system is supposed to work.
- [12:43]
A
Yeah. So let's get to Harvard in this in a second. But at a broad level, from a philosophical point of view, do you describe yourself as a free speech absolutist?
- [12:55]
B
I don't. And I gave a TED talk about this that, that came out in like a couple, about a month ago. And I talk about free speech absolutism is more or less not a thing. You know, at least, at least there are people who call themselves that. But even when you dig, they're usually like, well, I don't think threats should be protected is a pretty common one. Like if you actually are saying, I'm going to, you know, I know where you live and I'm going to kill you in a way that actually indicates that, you know, they would make a reasonable person think they might actually be in danger, that's not protected. But what I do call myself is an opinion absolutist that essentially I think everyone is quite literally entitled to their opinion. And also that there's an informational value in always knowing what people really think. And I think there's a, there, there's like a childish kind of foolishness that we're somehow benefiting ourselves if we have this sort of like polite dinner table idea of speech that it's like, well, you may have that opinion, but you better keep it to yourself if it goes against consensus on campus, which is usually by the way enforced by a small minority of people. So I always make the point that if you, if the goal is to understand the world as it really is, you have to know what people really think, because that's an essential element of the world as it really is.
- [14:10]
A
Right, so you're an opinion absolutist. I like that. That makes a lot of sense because it distinguishes between expressed opinions and things like threats, things like harassment. I mean, harassment is a, is a tougher one even because threats, a threat is fairly well defined or fairly easy to define, whereas harassment is a little bit tougher. Like what really does harassment mean and is it protected speech and in what scenarios?
- [14:40]
B
You know, harassment isn't so much an exception to freedom of speech as much as considered not speech, because it's. In order to be harassment, it has to be a pattern of behavior that's severe, persistent and pervasive, directed at someone for discriminatory purposes. Purpose that a reasonable person would find objective and the person themselves did. So. There's lots of protections that actually. But then it sounds more like what the word you're talking about if you're saying like, I'm going to make this Jewish student's life miserable because I hate them. You know, that can be harassment depending on actually what you do. It's not the mere expression of something highly offensive. You're absolutely allowed to say things that curl someone else's toes. But when you actually start turning that into a pattern of behavior to, to make someone's life miserable, that's considered and always has been considered something different. What changed over the last several decades is that there was an idea of common law harassment which was about, you know, as Harvey Silverglade puts it, kind of a time, place and manner approach where essentially it's like you're, you know, it doesn't matter if you're calling someone all the time at 3 o' clock in the morning to tell you I love you or I hate you. It's the fact that you're calling them at 3 o' clock in the morning to harass them is the, is the problem. But in the 70s on up, you started getting ideas of racial harassment, sexual harassment, for example. And unfortunately these terms have been badly abused since almost day one. To go after what would be clearly protected speech but properly understood A pattern of discriminatory behavior with all the protections that I talked about is something that isn't, nor do we even believe should be protected, but it's not the same thing as merely being offensive.
- [16:19]
A
So on a college campus that receives federal funding, to what extent do their. Does their architecture of sort of punishing students for behavior have to mirror the Constitution? Or can they just say, well, this is not. The First Amendment is for the government and for state governments and the federal government. We're not a government, we're private institution. We don't have to have a First Amendment like set of norms.
- [16:51]
B
It's interesting interrelationship. Now, first of all, at a public university, you are required to follow the First Amendment, and the protections for student speech at a collegiate level are actually very strong, and I'm glad and thankful for that. When it comes to a private university, if you're using the harassment as defined in federal law that you're required to go after, that regulation has to be limited by the First Amendment as well. This is something that the government cannot make you engage in censorship that the government itself could not engage in. So when. When it comes to the. The regulations that come out of the Department of Education, and this is something that was made very clear in a 2003 letter that came out of the Department of Education during the. During the first Bush administration. During the. Yeah, the first part of the H.W. bush administration. H.W.
- [17:44]
A
Bush.
- [17:44]
B
W. Bush administration, saying that the First Amendment restricts what that harassment can actually mean. So when it comes to those regulations that you're citing, whether it's Title 6 or Title IX on a college campus, they have to be within sort of First Amendment parameters, which is an argument we've been making forever. Because when they're not, by the way, and the Obama administration tried this real hard, is you end up with something where they strip away all of the protections, and it ends up being a state mandate to punish speech that the state itself cannot punish, which is not okay. And it's very hard to challenge. We had a case that we thought was perfect where there was this national speech code essentially passed in the Obama administration that stripped all of these protections and basically defined harassment simply as unwelcome speech, which was just way too broad, way too vague. And of course, they said unwelcome speech of a sexual nature, but that immediately applied to about 18 different categories of just unwelcome speech on the basis of sex, et cetera, race, gender, et cetera. And we tried to challenge this in court. We thought we had a perfect case where we had a professor who got in trouble for, I think, some profanity in class. But when she was punished, she was told by Louisiana State University that the only reason they were doing that was because of this OCR National Speech Code. And we still weren't allowed standing to challenge it. So that, that's one of the things that, one of the reasons why, like the whole, all the stuff that, all the bad stuff that comes out of the Department of Education, everyone has to remember that going forward about how that can be misused as a tool of power.
- [19:31]
A
Yeah. Okay, so let's, let's talk about speech on campuses in the context of the past two years or so. After October 7th, there was obviously a famous, I think most people will remember, congressional hearing where several college presidents, including President Columbia, Penn. I think mit, were pulled in front of Congress and asked about their approach towards anti Semitic speech and anti Semitism on campus. And they all were asked, essentially, you know, is calling for the genocide of Jews a violation of your university's speech laws, speech codes, speech regulations? And they, they, they all gave very lawyerly answers that, that were probably correct from a legal perspective. I mean, you can tell me. And were very much in line with a very broad approach to free speech that in general I would tend to agree with, but was so obviously in, in contradiction to how those campuses have been run for many years. So there was a kind of a sudden discovery of the virtues of John Stuart Mill and free speech and so forth. And I'll just tell one story. I think I, I wrote this on Twitter at the time, and I actually wrote about it in Colette. Many years ago when I was at Columbia, there was this kid named, I think his name was Julian. And he, he was probably drunk and he went on a rant that was caught on video where he was saying stuff like, I love white people. I love being white. White people invented civilization. And he was careful to say, I don't hate anyone else, everyone else is cool, but I just love being white. And he was kind of like yelling this, almost ranting this outside of Butler Library. And it went viral and he was actually banned from bar campus across the street, even though the thing happened at Columbia. And I remember almost no one defending his right to speech except for me and a couple other. Couple other people. And, and then suddenly, you know, you, you turn around a few, a few years later and calling for the genocide of Jews.
- [21:51]
B
Yeah.
- [21:52]
A
Is like strictly protected, right?
- [21:54]
B
Yeah.
- [21:55]
A
Which is much worse than anything that kid said, actually. Yeah. So at the same time, there's really a legitimate question around what who is calling for the genocide of Jews and who's expressing a much more benign political position that I would disagree with. Right. When, when, when someone on a campus says, from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free, is are we equating that with the genocide of Jews? Because those seem like different propositions to me. Even if in practice, when Hamas says from the river to the sea, they mean genocide of Jews. I don't think every student at Columbia that chants that. I think some, some kids are just chanting that they saw a video of a Palestinian child being killed with that slogan. And it sounds like a cool revolutionary slogan that frees oppressed people. Right?
- [22:45]
B
Yeah.
- [22:46]
A
So a package of questions here. Where actually is the line between anti Semitic speech on the one hand and expressions of support for one side of a war that are legitimate? And how have campuses been navigating or misnavigating that issue?
- [23:05]
B
Yeah, I mean, and I agree with your analysis, just to be clear, the post 2007 period was definitely complicated in a lot of ways because generally when fire sees protests on campus, honestly, for a long time now that you've been a mix of protected and unprotected speech. But that got much more intense after 2007.
- [23:33]
A
You mean after 10 7.
- [23:35]
B
Yeah, sorry, after 10 7. Yeah. And we've defended plenty of pro Palestinian students and speakers, and we always would because that's who we are. We also pointed out that, that 2023 and 2024 were the two worst years for student shout downs in history, to our knowledge, to our best research. And those are situations in which a student speaker will come and activists show up and make sure to shout it down. Don't allow the speech to go on, chase the person off, for example. And 2023 and 2024 were the two worst years for that. And that was overwhelmingly pro Palestinian students, you know, who expected their free speech rights protected. Now, to be clear, having saying that.
- [24:25]
A
They were shouted down. Who was doing the shouting down in those cases?
- [24:28]
B
No, no, the pro Palestinian ones were doing the shouting down.
- [24:31]
A
Right.
- [24:32]
B
And, and at the same time, these same students wanted their free speech rights respected, but they were not respecting the free speech rights of others. That means they still get free speech rights, but every time they did that, they should have been punished because that's mob censorship. That's not protected speech. If you and the administration in many of these cases, you know, like if it had been a right wing group doing this, they probably would have punished the right Wing group. But if it's a group that they're highly sympathetic to, it starts looking kind of quasi official. Like in the case, for example, at my alma mater, Stanford, where, where Judge Duncan tried to speak after hours of talking to DEI administrators at Stanford. And then they have this sort of orchestrated shout down followed by a scripted speech, you know, read by Tyrion Steinbach, where he really got see how a lot of times it is actually not just the students themselves, but this being tolerated or even encouraged or even partially arranged by administrators, because it starts looking a lot more like formal censorship as well. So when it comes to where the line is, we saw lots of examples of things across the line after October 7th, including outright assault. And I think that people are, for example, at Harvard of Jewish students. I think Harvard alums are right to be mad that that included the students who actually assaulted the Jewish student in one famous video, you know, got. They got awards later from, from the, from the university. Kind of like the students who shouted down Nicholas generic Christakis back in 2015 got awards as well. They weren't just not punished, they were, you know, commended to a degree. I think actually, though, I think in the Harvard case, they were punished, but then also given a word. So there was lots of examples of things that obviously crossed the line, like outright assault, outright intimidation. There was that famous thing from Colombia, you know, where the, that activist shouted, you know, zionists avenger the camp by which he meant Jews. And then they, you know, formed like a human line, sort of like march, march the Zionists out of their, out of the quad, essentially of Colombia, which they have no right to do. There were certainly threats, famously at Cornell, for example, not protected, nor should it be. And then of course, what happened at UCLA that was like particularly horrible, where they were, you know, not letting Jewish students pass by, that they were restricting the movement of people, which is also completely not okay. So there. So normally when we see protests, we're asked to call balls and strikes and being like, that's protected, that's protected, that's not protected. The spring of 2024 was much more like, that's protected, that's protected. They definitely don't have to allow full time camping. They can if they want, but I don't think they enforce that in a viewpoint neutral way. They tend to allow some people to do it and some others. And then there are cases where it's like, oh no, that student should be expelled, that student's a threat to academic freedom of speech, or that student engaged in violence, which is not A. I always have to point out violence is not an extreme form of speech. It is the antithesis of what free speech is. Mm.
- [27:47]
A
Right. So let's talk then about how the. The Trump administration's response to these meltdowns.
- [27:57]
B
Where.
- [27:57]
A
Where has it been appropriate and where has it overstepped?
- [28:02]
B
Yeah. I would say one of the more interesting things about this, and the fire doesn't do affirmative action, for example, I think we've always stayed out of it, but I'd say the Trump administration is always on the strongest ground when it's going after racial discrimination and admissions and hiring, because that's. I think that on the left, there's a little bit of, like, post Students for Fair Admissions decision, that there's an idea that essentially we're just in the. That essentially now, after that decision, affirmative action is frowned upon. And I always have to make the point, guys. Actually, there was a kind of exception for racial preferences created in the diversity rationale of Bakke that was, by the way, very limited. And two cases called Gratz and Grutter, the Students for Fair Admissions case, by the way, showed that they weren't even comporting with those decisions. But once that special sort of, like, exception to allow some limited sort of, like, positive racial discrimination was gone, it just goes back to being racial discrimination, which is the heart of darkness as far as the 14th Amendment is concerned. And if that's the case, a lot of these schools that didn't change very much post Students for Fair Admissions and, by the way, were also doing things beforehand that weren't in line with Graz or Grutter or Bakke. They're very vulnerable on those grounds, and I think they know it. So sometimes when people are sort of shocked that some schools cave, I'm like, well, they probably do have them on this thing. I wasn't surprised. Columbia, you know, for example, settled because they were the one most likely to actually be dinged for. For anti Semitic. For tolerating too much anti Semitic behavior and then followed. Followed by Harvard. So I think that some of the reasons why the administration is going after these schools have real legitimate underlying reason. It's just been sometimes kind of almost bizarre to see some of the tactics that they're using against these schools when they have them on something that even if they follow the process, they could very easily be found guilty of. And they decide to say, we're immediately going to stop all your grants from nih, you know, hoping that you will sign this agreement that effectively nationalizes your school that is going way, way Too far. So it's been. And it's. It's weird. I think, I think that the administration is more okay with arguments that will lose in court than most other administrations. So, for example, like when they tried to use the pressure of banning international students just at Harvard, that was an argument that they tried and got quickly shut down by court. They tried to make the argument that there's national security concerns having particularly, I think they were kind of alluding to sort of potential, you know, Chinese students being security threats. And that's why they could get rid of the ability of Harvard to admit international students. But they only did it at Harvard. And so that's the kind of thing that doesn't smell right at all to a court because they're kind of like, listen, if you're concerned about national security, there are lots of other schools that this should apply to, not just Harvard. So the legal strategy coming out of the Trump administration is inappropriate in a lot of cases, but it's also confusing, like. Like, why would they go through some of these approaches? So I'm very curious to see what we're going to end up with in the Harvard decision. You know, like, what it's actually going to look like, what the settlement's actually going to look like. I will say anything that's short of full nationalization of Harvard is an improvement from the, from the opening position, but we will see.
- [31:46]
A
Yes. So with Trump's demands on Harvard, some of them make perfect sense given Supreme Court decisions like Students for Fair Admissions.
- [31:56]
B
Yeah.
- [31:57]
A
Just demanding that, that schools comply with that is. It makes perfect sense. And. But then there are other demands that are things that I personally would like to see, but I don't see how the federal government has any standing to demand it. For example.
- [32:13]
B
Yeah.
- [32:14]
A
I would love to see Harvard have more conservative professors.
- [32:18]
B
Sure.
- [32:19]
A
Right. Because you have, as I've talked about on the show many times, you have whole fields that have basically become fake, fake academic fields because they're so deeply slanted in one direction that ideas never get challenged. Right. Like gender studies is perfectly interesting thing to study. Like, you know, why, let's learn everything we can about the, the differences and similarities and between men and women and how concepts of that have changed over time. But when 99% of the people doing the studying are all progressive, you end up with just insane theories that, you know, they're. That are totally unbounded by science. Essentially. You get kids being taught that there are just no differences biologically between men and women.
- [33:09]
B
Yeah.
- [33:11]
A
And you just get an echo Chamber of basically intellectual masturbation that is totally devoid of any facts or reason. So I would love for colleges to correct that in the interest of having better research and having better classes. And that's part of the reason why I taught this past semester or two semesters ago at University of Austin, which is trying to embody that, that mission. However, I don't see on what grounds the federal government can demand that change.
- [33:42]
B
Exactly. Yeah. No, we basically had exactly this discussion this morning is that we'd love to see greater viewpoint diversity in higher ed, but there's serious First Amendment issues, there's serious separation of powers, there's all sorts of issues with the government imposing that. And here's one of the frustrating things, though, where I think the critics of when we oppose the Trump administration have a point, which is that I know that Harvard behind the scenes was having discussions that some of these changes needed to happen, and they did make some changes around the edges before the Trump administration. But now that the Trump administration got a gun to the head of Harvard, it looks like the only reason they're going to make these changes is because they have a gun to their head when these are changes they probably should have made voluntarily all along, including improving viewpoint diversity. So I think Larry Summers, I just did an interview with Larry Summers yesterday, and I think that his point is we must resist the Trump administration doing things that go well beyond its power, but we also must reform. And that's, and that's pretty much exactly where I am. But, but if it ends up being, you know, viewpoint diversity ends up being imposed by the federal government, that's a problem.
- [35:06]
A
Right. What would you say to the argument, though, that realistically, I mean, we've, people like you and I have been complaining about college campuses for years and years and years and very little has changed, which was proven, proven by the reaction to October 7th. So that practically speaking, unless they feel the pressure, nothing is going to change.
- [35:25]
B
And so, yeah, I'm sympathetic to it. You know, I'm sympathetic to it, but there's still, you know, First Amendment restrictions on what they are allowed to do that we must defend. It's one of the reasons why I think a lot of the hope for the future of higher ed is making sure that regulations are such that it's easier to create competing models to higher ed as it currently exists. I hope we lean hard into AI to allow for. I always talk about higher rigor, lower cost and high prestige approaches where basically because that's the part that people leave out, they kind of forget that people want to go to Harvard because of the. Networking's amazing and it's extremely prestigious and that's been left out on a lot of the online stuff is that there's no element of networking, there's no element of prestige. So I think that. And sometimes government regulations have been in the way of that for a while there. I also just think when it comes to truth seeking, we need a lot more friction, we need a lot more checking and rechecking. I think that some of the stuff that Jaya Bhattachary is talking about doing at the NIH makes me extremely happy. And I really want to give him credit because he's talking about. NIH should be funding replication studies, we should be creating replication journals and we should be basically trying to make sure that the integrity of the knowledge that these institutions are producing is low. And I think, sorry, it's as high as possible. And that we have. And I think that if you have these counter institutions, these ones who find their job to actually poke holes in knowledge creation as it currently exists, you'll have schools be really freaking embarrassed, you know, and that actually can also, that can help with reform. I also, by the way, think it is a scandal that so much scholarship and so much research that is publicly funded is behind paywalls. Because I think that if we want this to be something for the common good, which education is supposed to be the idea that. And by the way, you can't actually see what humanities papers actually looks like unless you have a membership or pay $50 per article.
- [37:41]
A
Right. A lot of places to go from there. I mean, so the replication crisis. This is something I've talked about in the podcast as well. We have all of these PhD graduates that can't get jobs because it's the, the market for becoming a professor is just way too competitive. Yeah, you can go to a great school, do fantastic and still, you know, basically have to move almost to the middle of nowhere to even have a hope of finding a job. And that wasn't the case many decades ago. Why don't, why aren't, why isn't there a center to employ these people in some kind of government NIH funded replication task force?
- [38:25]
B
Yeah, no, I think, I think about this a lot. And there very well might end up being like, I've talked a lot about, why doesn't someone buy up one of these old universities and create Replication U where every class is co taught by people who disagree on something within the field where basically you serve for five years and all you do is Poke holes on the existing state of knowledge. I think there's so many things that we can do now, but, but we need desperately to do this now because like right now we're training these godlike technologies on this corpus of supposed knowledge that we all know has a lot of, you know, everything from P hacked to plagiarized, you know, content and extremely biased because, because academia is overwhelmingly left leaning right. And the idea that we're going to create these omnipotent, you know, machines that actually, that's their understanding of objective reality and then that becomes, as Brendan McCord puts our autocomplete for life is a formula for potential chaos and tyranny.
- [39:27]
A
Yeah, I mean it's a very tough problem to fix because as you say, everything that chatgpt and LLMs in general is trained on is going to have a bit of a left wing bias for the most part, even as it programs in some kind of deep logic and intelligence that makes it fairer than a lot of institutions. And I do think it does have that going for it, which is it's constrained by logic in a lot of ways. But how do you actually correct that bias at a deep level without being able to train it on more unbiased content?
- [40:06]
B
I think you have to do a lot of sort of creating higher integrity knowledge base. I think that. But here's the good news and here's the good news. It's the nature of truth and the nature of truth the extent to which like, you know, and basically there's nothing weird about me talking about this because every First Amendment lawyer is an epistemologist. Like we care about how we know things. And I think that you can't really know things without dissent, without clashing ideas. And also the fact of what people really think is itself, you know, important knowledge. But generally the way we find find out things is by not by getting directly at truth, but by slashing away at falsity. And so even though a lot of egos will get crushed, a lot of people will feel really mad if we turn, you know, let's say a half dozen really well trained AIs to try to find, you know, what, you know, to distinguish what is good science from bad science, but also what is plagiarized dogma from, you know, from, from stuff that might actually be. There's an opportunity to slash away at all the stuff that is BS and be left with. We might find papers from, I don't know, 1925 that were like, oh wow, this person was really onto something like this was a huge sample size. They had an interesting theory like if we take this, if we take a really aggressive approach to, a ruthless approach to truth finding, we can have an opportunity to have a quantum leap in the reliability of our knowledge. Yeah, I also know some nerds out there who get mad that I use Quantum leap like that. But anyway, this episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. From streaming to shopping, prime helps you get more out of your passions. So whether you're a fan of true crime or prefer a nail biting novel from time to time, with services like Prime Video, Amazon Music, and fast free delivery, prime makes it easy to get more out of the whatever you're into or getting into. Visit Amazon.comprime to learn more now at.
- [42:15]
A
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B
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- [42:42]
A
Chipotle for real. So getting back to campus issues, I think a lot of Trump's most controversial decisions have revolved around foreign students.
- [42:55]
B
Yeah.
- [42:57]
A
What speech rights do foreigners have on American soil if they say, have a typical student visa?
- [43:05]
B
Yeah. So generally the major distinction is that you can be highly subjective in the granting of visas of any kind and of citizenship and green cards because there's limited spots essentially. And I take this is personal to me, both my parents are immigrants. My beard is at full Russian mode at the moment. And I think that if my anti communist dad lost his place to another Russian who wanted to overthrow the government and wanted to impose their terrible ideas on us, I'd be like, that's ridiculous. I don't like this at all. And I think a lot of the people, a lot of first generation and immigrant kids who come here, they're the ones who are some of the most patriotic people you'd ever see. So I think that the idea that you can have, you can't have vetting, there's a certain amount of like, no kidding, of course you can. But when you're actually here, we don't like the idea of people getting deported for speech that any, any American is, is allowed to do. And, and so the, the most egregious example, this was the Ramesa Ozturk case. And this was a student at Tufts. She'd written an op ed saying that the university should divest from Israel. I disagree with it. Who cares? But it wasn't a screed. It was a article expressing a fairly popular opinion on most campuses. And she was the one who you saw the video of. And she's a smaller young woman being approached suddenly out of the blue by plainclothes immigration officers and stuffed in a van and then flown to ultimately Louisiana, where she was in jail for like a month, I think. And that's the kind of thing that is not okay. Also under, by the way, under existing law. There was some great discussion, by the way, Jeb Rudenfeld did some really cool discussion at the Free Press about some of these issues. But there's some distinctions to be drawn. There's a 1905 case that I can't remember the name of, and it was a case where you could deport someone citing speech, but that was a case about someone who was here illegally. And basically you can deport someone who's here illegally for any reason, bad reasons, good reasons, you can deport them. But if you're here legally, there's a case called Bridges v. Wixon from 1945, which does indicate that while you're here, at least you have First Amendment rights. What the full parameters of those remains. You know, there's some question about if it's exactly coextensive with Americans, but at minimum we can say getting kicked out of school, getting kicked out of the country for an op ed is not something that should fly under the First Amendment, even if you're not a full citizen.
- [45:53]
A
What about the case of Mahmoud Khalil?
- [45:56]
B
Yeah, so the Mahmoud Khalil case was definitely one where, given his involvement in the Columbia case and the Columbia protests, I kept on expecting to find out that he did something clearly illegal during that and when. So when he was arrested, you know, first of all, of course, the video of him being arrested would look horrible. And then he was also deported to or moved to Louisiana. I was kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. But then the administration really was talking about flyers. A group he was affiliated put out flyers. Again, I disagree with that. They were. They were pretty pro Hamas, flat out, and I think that's contemptible. But at the same time, they only. The administration itself only pointed at his speech over and over and over again, and we're like, dude, is this really all you have on this guy? You know, for a long time. So even though I understand why people are not the least bit sympathetic to him for some of the positions he's taken both before and since. I think that that should not get you deported. Is that the kind of thing that I think will come up if someone is a supporter of a terrorist organization in granting a visa or a green card in the first place? Of course it does, and I think it always does. But I do think that that was inappropriate. I do understand why the administration is somewhat frustrated, though, because there were lots of people at particularly Columbia, but other schools that did things that they're here on visas and they did things that should have gotten them kicked out of school. But Columbia wasn't willing to do that because if they kicked them out of school, they knew they'd lose their visas. And I know that that's part of the frustration on behalf of the administration, but it doesn't mean that you can then turn around and then just deport people. For what?
- [47:44]
A
Protected speech, though I remember in reading about it a couple months ago that there was a statute or regulation which technically allowed the Secretary of State to kick someone out on a visa if they, quote, provided material or other support to a terrorist group. And the, the, the wide reading of that statute seemed to enable anyone who really like, supported Hamas in terms of organizing and handing out flyers seem to give them that power. Is that, is that true or is that me misremembering or having the wrong thing?
- [48:21]
B
There's a provision in the law that gives the Secretary of State the power to deport someone if in his sole discretion, they are found to be adverse to foreign policy. We at Fyre think that this allocation of power is just too much. Yeah, we think that that's. That's too much power to be solely in the hands of Secretary of State. And by the way, it's been challenged one other time in court, and it was ruled unconstitutional back in the mid-90s by Trump's own sister. Now, she died in 2023. She was a very well respected judge, and the case was overturned for completely different reasons. But we agree that we think that this provision gives the Secretary of State too much unreviewed power, which is one of the reasons why we're actually suing in this case to get that declared unconstitutional again, because we think that that's. That's going too far.
- [49:21]
A
Yeah. Okay, let's pivot a little bit and talk about free speech and social media. I think Twitter, now X, is the most important battleground for this. And it's the reason Elon Musk says that he purchased Twitter in the first place, which was partly inspired by the fact that the Babylon be the satirical onion like newspaper that has more of a, I guess a right leaning. I'm not even sure if it necessarily has right leaning bias, but it does. That kind of satirizing of the left was locked out of its Twitter account for a while and Elon says this is why he purchased it, to restore free speech to what that has essentially become the public square in his view. So a few questions. One, is Twitter now X really a public square or is it a private company? And how should what, what free speech protections should exist on, on that website, if any?
- [50:25]
B
Yeah, I mean I, I wrote a letter to. An open letter to, to Musk when he was considering buying X and urged him to try to take inspiration, not necessarily follow strictly, but take inspiration from a lot of the well thought out rules created under the First Amendment. Because I always talk about First Amendment jurisprudence is the longest meditation on how you have freedom of speech in the real world. And I think there's just a lot of philosophical wisdom in there, a lot of practical wisdom that you can garner. I think what's actually happened is it's become another social media company and I think that they pick and choose what content they amplify and what they don't. And once you actually seem to have more of a tilt left or right, that tends to also become a self reinforcing phenomena. So I definitely have watched Twitter become, I would say more conservative, more maga. I think there are obviously pluses and minuses to that. I will say one plus is that it did seem for a minute there that all social media was basically sort of politically homogenous in terms of what its assumptions were, as what was commendable and not commendable, kind of like you would see in Europe, for example. And that's worrisome. I think it's really good to have diversity in terms of political tilt if you're going to have companies like social media. And I think that the old argument that made oftentimes by the left and the right that we have to effectively nationalize social media because it is the public square and we have nowhere else to go, has been proven to be BS because people flock to blue sky, for example. And that's where I hear at least that replicates a lot of the worst aspects of say, I don't know, 2018 Internet culture, which I don't particularly want to revisit.
- [52:36]
A
Yeah, sure.
- [52:38]
B
So for me as a First Amendment defender, my big concern is One, making sure that companies get to make these decisions and that it's not the government coercing them to make it. I would like them to not engage in viewpoint diverse, not engage in viewpoint discrimination. I think, I think that that's what censorship actually means. At the same time, they're private companies and I want them to remain private companies. Where I get really concerned and I'm still mad about this is in the Missouri v. Biden later Murthy v. Missouri decision at the Supreme Court. We had a case where I think it was very clear that the. But for reason a number of people got kicked off social media was because they are pressured by the Biden administration or people who work closely with the Biden administration to suppress, for example, Covid misinformation, oftentimes which later out turned out to be not just not misinformation, but sometimes actually even true. And the Supreme Court punted on this case, saying that the people who were involved in the case didn't have standing to challenge the government's coercing the social media giants from engaging in censorship that the government itself can't do. And I think that that was a wrongly decided case. I think there was enough evidence that those people should have had standing. But the even more maddening part, as a lawyer was Zuckerberg, just a couple months later comes out and is very clear that he wishes he stood up to the government more about the jawboning, which is how it's referred to of his company. And it's like, dude, like, if you'd been part of this litigation, we absolutely would have had standing. And I believe the Supreme Court would have no choice but to say that the government may not coerce social media platforms to engage in censorship, that the government is forbidden from engaging in itself. So that's my biggest concern about social media, that it maintains its independence.
- [54:39]
A
How do you view the issue of algorithmically boosted content? Because if I own Twitter, I could easily picture myself saying, well, you know, I. I believe in the First Amendment, I believe in free speech. So anyone can have a Twitter account, anyone can tweet whatever they want, as long as it's not a threat or not. You know, let's say it's not pornography or something like that. But not, not every post is going to be subject to the same algorithmic boosting. In other words, if your post cont. Inward, I'm not going to take it down, but I'm going to have a rule in my algorithm which says this is not going to show up in people's for you Feed, if they don't already follow you. Right. Because it seems to me like. And I wonder. I wonder if this is true, is there any analogy or. Or analog to, like, algorithmic boosting in the history of First Amendment jurisprudence? Because, like, you know, it doesn't seem that there necessarily would be. It seems like that's unique to new, new technology and would not necessarily have to be subject to neutrality.
- [55:54]
B
Yeah, it's an interesting argument. I've heard a lot from it. And the people who think that algorithmic policies can. Can be regulated by the government or try to make some version of that argument, they usually rely on the idea that this is the equivalent of sort of publishing and that essentially the algorithmic decisions are the same thing. Then the company itself becomes the speaker, and then maybe things like defamation will then be owned by the company itself. Now, once they have that, they also sneak in, usually. And content that we might think is unfit for children, content that we might think is in other ways societally harmful. Misinformation, disinformation. And I get the argument that the power of the various social media companies to algorithmically boost content that fits sort of a narrative that that company might like and to really deboost stuff that they don't has troubling implications overall, depending on what those policies are. But I'm much more frightened of the government having any say in that whatsoever. And, you know, and I tend to think that if the government of California and the government of Texas and Florida all agree on a way to regulate social media companies, it's almost certainly a terrible idea. So I think that the. I'm much more concerned about maintaining independence here. And I do think that if we started regulating algorithmic decisions of social media companies, we would really regret the government having that power.
- [57:35]
A
Right. Okay, let's pivot again. I. I know you and fire are focused on America.
- [57:42]
B
Yeah. Oh, God. Are you talking about the international situation?
- [57:45]
A
Yeah, I mean, because I, you know, I. You read these articles about the United Kingdom, which is, you know, a country that, as Americans, we feel. I think most of us feel a kind of similarity to. Yeah. And we read these articles about people getting arrested for Facebook posts.
- [58:04]
B
Yeah. All the time.
- [58:08]
A
And I mean, it's. It's incredible. I mean, obviously, I know the UK doesn't have a First Amendment. It doesn't have analogous ironclad speech protections, but you'd expect that the. The common culture of libertarian ethos with respect to speech issues, like, obviously the Founding Fathers got many of the ideas around freedom of speech. Yeah, From a philosophy that was very much in the air in Britain, but also by trying to not replicate the mistakes that had been made in Britain and during the civil wars and so forth, you'd expect that the culture alone would be sufficient to prevent a situation where the police are knocking on grandma's door because she made a, you know, a Facebook post.
- [58:59]
B
Yeah.
- [58:59]
A
And yet that's happening, it would seem. So how closely are you following what's going on there and what do you make of it as a free speech defender?
- [59:07]
B
Well, one of my big goals actually for this year for FIRE was, well, one, to do more in higher education reform, two, to do more in tech, because I don't want the same people who messed up knowledge creation in higher ed to be in charge of objective reality and AI for the rest of existence. But the third one was to make people more aware of how bad the global situation has become for freedom of speech, and not just in the unfree world. And I always make the point too, by the way, though. But the nightmarish things that Iran, for example, in China has been able to do with AI assisted surveillance and social control is terrifying. But watching this just absolutely collapse in the European Union and in the Anglosphere has been horrifying. And what's going on in Britain right now is a full free speech crisis. There was a number, and I remember there was some people questioning whether or not 30 people a day are really being arrested for speech in Britain. That was something that was reported by, I think, the Free Speech League or Free Speech Union, but also by the economists, I think. But according to our numbers, just for this past month, when we looked at the number of people being arrested for protesting, for example, we're like, yeah, no, that's probably wrong. It's probably worse because they arrested about 10,000 the Spasmod. It's bad. And it's weird to watch kind of like the establishing sort of like surveillance state in the name of sort of punishing, stopping fascism, because it's like, well, I don't know how different this actually looks, guys. So I'm very worried about Britain. And when I was over there, by the way, last October for the. And the. The situation for people getting arrested had already accelerated, but it's getting worse still. I remember talking to a lot of Brits who were nominally pro free speech, but like, yeah, sure, people get arrested sometimes for like, silently praying, but, you know, like. And it's like, no, no, no, there's. And I went on a show on GB and I was like, you guys are insane. You have Stockholm syndrome here. Like, people are getting arrested just for being rude on the Internet or sometimes, you know, saying things. And most overwhelmingly saying things that would be absolutely 1,100% protected by the government. And oftentimes to be just, you know, to be totally palms up. Sometimes it's about complaining about immigration and crime. And it's like, you have the right to do that. It's not a democracy if you're not allowed to complain about the, about these kind of things. And so, and we see similar things going on in Germany. You know, if you can stomach it, you know, people should watch the 60 Minutes feast on what's going on in Germany. You know, morning raids of people for. And this is, this one blew me away for calling a politician a penis. You know, like, the idea of like, and you know, with the German voices and being like, yes, this is, you know, this is even worse. You know, like, you have to respect our politicians. And it's like, oh my God. So we're in an international free speech crisis right now. America is kind of unique in holding the line, but it's hard to be the only one that really is respecting this, particularly when we have this rot from within coming out of a very free speech, skeptical, essentially ruling class.
- [62:26]
A
Okay, final question.
- [62:29]
B
That was sunny.
- [62:31]
A
Final question. Why don't hate speech laws work?
- [62:35]
B
Oh my God, where do I even start? First of all, if you define hate, you know, the way that's defined in academia, you end up tying yourself in loops and then you end up basically having to engage in viewpoint discrimination of saying, well, only some people's hate matters and only hate under certain circumstances matters. They have to create all of these ridiculous, highly subjective rules that basically means, I don't know, stuff that people on the left don't like. You know, it becomes hate speech pretty quickly, as we've also, by the way, seen in scene in Europe. But there's another subtler reason for why they don't work. And I said this when I did the Bill Maher show. So you'll notice that in the United States, for example, we didn't pass laws banning anti Semitic speech, whereas in several countries in Europe they passed laws that did this essentially way back in like the 90s. And even though part of the shift is a demographic, a lot of immigrants from the Middle east, but you'll also notice that all of these countries that have passed these laws, anti Semitism has gotten much, much worse. And certainly part of that is that group polarization takes over. And group polarization is one of the best proven things in social science, where essentially, if you get people to only talk to people they agree with, they become more radical in the direction of the group. Talking to people they disagree with has a moderating effect, but only talking to people on your tribe makes you more tribal. Censorship doesn't stop anyone from thinking anything. It just encourages them to talk to people who are safe to talk to, which means in this case, people who agree with you. And I'm like, well, no wonder anti Semitism has gotten so bad in Europe. You've told the anti Semites that they can only and exclusively talk to other anti Semites. This is going to have a spiraling away effect. And that's exactly what we're seeing. So I do actually think that it's not just that these things don't work. I think they make the problem much worse. And as I say a lot, if you're battling people who believes there's a conspiracy to shut them up, do nothing that looks like a conspiracy to shut them up. And Europe is following the exact opposite.
- [64:42]
A
It.
- [64:42]
B
And it's, it's, it's gonna, it's gonna blow up.
- [64:45]
A
All right, Greg Luciano, thanks so much for your time. The book, once again, is the war on words. 10 arguments against free Speech and why they Fail. Thanks, Greg.
- [64:54]
B
And please support. And please support. Fire.
- [64:57]
A
Absolutely.