← New Books Network
New Books Network
Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen, "The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail" (Heresy Press, 2025)
00:52:35
Loading summary
Transcript69 lines
- [00:00]
Greg Lukyanoff
Limu Emu and Doug Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. But now we want you to feel it. Cue the Emu music. Limu Save yourself money today.
- [00:14]
Nadine Strossen
Increase your wealth.
- [00:17]
Commercial Narrator
Customize and save.
- [00:18]
Caleb Zakrin
We save.
- [00:21]
Greg Lukyanoff
That may have been too much feeling. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes.
- [00:30]
Home Depot Announcer
Massachusetts the holidays have arrived at the Home Depot and we're here to help bring the excitement with decor for every part of your home. Check out our wide assortment of easy to assemble pre lit trees so you can spend less time setting up and more time celebrating. And bring your holiday spirit outdoors with unique decor like one of our Santa inflatables. Whatever your style, find the right pieces at the right prices this holiday season at the Home Depot.
- [01:03]
Commercial Narrator
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan, Real United Airlines customers.
- [01:08]
Greg Lukyanoff
We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew.
- [01:14]
Nadine Strossen
I got to sit in the driver's seat.
- [01:16]
Caleb Zakrin
I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
- [01:21]
Commercial Narrator
That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
- [01:23]
Caleb Zakrin
These small interactions can shape a kid's future.
- [01:26]
Commercial Narrator
It felt like I was the captain.
- [01:28]
Greg Lukyanoff
Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.
- [01:31]
Caleb Zakrin
That's how Good leads the way.
- [01:34]
Greg Lukyanoff
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
Caleb Zakrin
I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Greg Lukyanoff and Nadine Strossen about their recently co authored book the war on 10 arguments against free Speech and why they Fail. Greg is president and CEO of the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Nadine is professor of Law at New York Law School and former President of the aclu. The War on Words is a practical guide to counter some of the most popular and pernicious arguments in support of censorship. Greg and Nadine are truly two of the most esteemed combatants in the War on Words and I'm thrilled today to get the chance to speak with them. Thank you both for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [02:13]
Nadine Strossen
Thank you so much, Caleb. I'd just like to add that my favorite title you left out, I am a senior fellow with FIRE and very, very happy to be a very close collaborator of such an important organization.
- [02:29]
Greg Lukyanoff
And thanks for having us.
- [02:30]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The work that you both do with FIRE I think is so Important. And I think FIRE has really taken up this incredible mantle of being a defender of free expression. And it's really such an important cause. This book, I think, is a really useful book. I'm sure you wrote it for people like me who will encounter arguments against the freedom of speech. And sometimes it's difficult to counter it because you don't want to necessarily, you know, come across like you're advocating for people to. You're, like you're necessarily supporting the bad things that someone might be saying while also supporting their right to say things that you think are. Are bad. So it's really important, I think, to, to address these sorts of arguments. So I would say, you know, just the two of you, before even talking about the arguments of the book, like, how did you come together to write this book? What was the idea for it?
- [03:21]
Greg Lukyanoff
Well, it starts, it starts way back in the 1990s. I always tell the story of how I actually met nadine back in 1999 in my third year of law school. And it was one of the most exciting things that happened to me that year. And the idea that I would get to work with her as a senior fellow at FIRE would just been too much for a kid like me to even imagine. So we've actually known each other for quite some time and in our professional lives really. Obviously, she's one of my heroes and we got to work together on a variety of things. But then when she became a senior fellow at fire, that was especially exciting. But it turns out that back in 2021, I did an article for a now defunct place called Aereo Magazine and I just decided, I don't remember why, to a piece on just arguments that I'm kind of sick of having to answer on freedom of speech and just really rapid fire, you know, format. And then Nadine read it and she said I was actually working on something addressing arguments like this as well. So why don't we actually work together? Since we come at it from. Even though we agree on the conclusions, we come to it with very different perspectives. So why don't we work together and actually start doing a series on it? So I started doing a series on the eternally radical idea, which was that on the FIRE blog, but now it's a substack internally. Radical idea is freedom of speech. It's a reference to freedom of speech. And we started doing these one offs where it would be a question presented and Nadine's answer to it and my answer to it. And I was very proud of the series. I Think we did maybe 18 of them. But earlier this year, Heresy Press was looking for something to publish. And we talked and we decided that let's update the series because people still cite it, people still read it, and there's a lot that's happened since. So we decided to make that our first writing endeavor together.
- [05:30]
Nadine Strossen
And I think, Greg, that at some point we can add some more questions to the list, and we absolutely should have a second edition. Caleb My main activity for almost 10 years now has been evangelizing full time for free speech. I like to write, but speech is by far my preferred medium, no pun intended. And so I give about 200 public presentations per year, and always in the form of question and answer. And I hear the same questions over and over. Unlike Greg, I think he was exaggerating when he said he got sick of hearing. You know, we never get sick of it because we never get sick of the opportunity. We. Let's strike the double negatives. We cherish the opportunity to engage with people who tell us what their reservations are so that we can try to overcome them, not in the spirit of argumentation, but in the spirit of education. Because a lot of the arguments against free speech are really not aimed at what free speech actually is, but rather at a distorted, caricatured version of what it is. I mean, how many people say, oh, you free speech defenders, you're absolutists, you're extremists, and you say that there should never be any exception to free speech and that speech does no harm, and all of that is incorrect. So just to start by letting people know what the law is and how much it accords with common sense goes a long way toward converting them to becoming supporters of free speech.
- [07:11]
Caleb Zakrin
I'm curious, in your individual understandings of free speech, how much you, your own, the definition that you take to, to mean freedom of speech accords with, with what is in the First Amendment? Do you have any divergences or are there maybe more expansive understandings that you have?
- [07:30]
Greg Lukyanoff
Yeah, I mean, I, I'm. My views are pretty consonant with First Amendment law, as I suspect Nadines are to a degree. But we all have our disagreements. I mean, for example, I'll just give one example, the obscenity doctrine. Like, I think that the obscenity doctrine makes sense if your primary goal is to keep, for example, like, hardcore pornography away from kids. But if that's the case, which I think is the only real justification for it, then you should basically say that if you're over 18, you have a right to Access, you know, sexual content of any. Of any kind. You know, the. So I think that the, the Miller test should be much less complicated. And I have no problem with the. With the exception for child pornography, for example, which does exist in a case called Ferber. I definitely understand how Gabeam is used, but the Supreme Court has been good at cabining that to a very specific set set of facts. So, yeah, we both have our disagreements with various aspects of the law, but I do think, I do hold out American First Amendment jurisprudence as probably the best thought out meditation on how you have freedom of speech in the real world that's probably ever been taken on.
- [08:44]
Nadine Strossen
Ironically, it's ironic that Greg picked out the obscenity doctrine because to me, that is a complete. But Greg, the way that you're redefining it is conceptually completely different from the way the Supreme Court has defined it in a way that makes it a different in kind. Difference in kind.
- [09:03]
Greg Lukyanoff
Absolutely. Yeah.
- [09:04]
Nadine Strossen
The obscenity exception right now, which the Supreme Court has not reexamined since 1973, which is really like the Middle Ages in terms of the free speech doctrine that we have now, is so much more expansive. And in particular, the Supreme Court has more and more consistent, constantly enforced what it has called the bedrock principle of free speech, namely viewpoint neutrality or content neutrality. Government must remain neutral with respect to the view, the message, the idea, the content of the speech, no matter how disfavored or disliked or hated or hateful it is, that is never a justification for suppressing it. Obscenity. The obscenity doctrine, which has not been revisited since 1973, is the only remaining exception to that principle. Every other limit on free speech, including the child pornography limit, I won't call it an exception because it is consistent with the limits of protected free speech, child pornography. By the way, it's kind of a misnomer. And I noticed that many advocates lately, including those who work full time, the International center on Missing and Exploited Children, uses the term CSAM child sexual abuse material because so called child pornography is defined not in terms of its content or its viewpoint. It's defined in terms of how it is produced, namely through the exploitation or abuse of children. So it's completely consistent with the viewpoint neutrality principle, the core First Amendment principles to outlaw that. I want to add one other answer to your question, Caleb, which I know Greg agrees with too. You said, is your view of free speech the same as the First Amendment? The First Amendment is a legal principle rule which binds only government officials. Greg and I and Fire believe Very strongly that while speech protective law is necessary for freedom of speech to thrive, it is not sufficient. And that's why we're always also complaining about so called cancel culture and doing what we can to encourage, encourage powerful private sector actors, including social media mobs and social media platforms for that matter, to exercise their free speech rights in a way that do not unduly stifle other people's free speech rights.
- [11:49]
Greg Lukyanoff
Yeah, and that's why we talk a lot about a culture of free speech. And I wrote a book with my friend Ricky Schlott called Canceling of the American Mind. And my, the easiest way to convey some of the principles of a culture of free speech, go back to old sayings and idioms that we, that we used to say a lot in the United States. And they're things like everyone's entitled to their, to their opinion and everybody to each their own. And all of these things that are basically like, listen, it's not my job to be judged during executioner against you based on what I believe. That's not being a good small d democratic citizen. That's not being open minded. So yeah, definitely, as I say, it's like the First Amendment is wonderful, but it's. But free speech is something older, bolder and more expansive.
- [12:34]
Caleb Zakrin
One of the first arguments that you look at in this book is this notion that words are violence or words can be violence. Obviously there's certain, maybe instances where we can imagine someone using words to advocate for real immediate violence. But oftentimes when people say words are violence, they're not talking about I'm going to go and kill you right now. They're talking about words used in other ways, words that might be hurtful or offensive to person based on their identity or based on their religion or et cetera. So how do you understand this, this argument of words are violence and how do you counter it?
- [13:08]
Greg Lukyanoff
So words are violence is an argument. You know, it's a kind of a rhetorical flourish that repeats all throughout human history. But it got particularly intense in my career. I'll actually have been doing this at fire for 24 years on October 2, so close to the quarter century mark, just at fire. And when I, when I first started, the words or violence thing was something that was largely kind of greeted with a little bit of eye rolling because it's like, okay, you're just, you're just trying to make a, make a, make something that makes this, what someone said, that's insulting sound so offensive that we must take action against it as if it were violence. But it really didn't become a common argument that I ran into until about maybe about 10 years ago, maybe around 2015, 2014, where I started seeing this rhetorical flourish, or so I thought, being treated like it was really true that words are essentially the same as violence. And Nadine always points out it's like, well, they're not the same for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that you're the intermediary between words and it harming you. That essentially, just like in my book with Jonathan Haidt, coddling the American Mind, you have some power over how words aff affect you. That is actually the idea of sticks and stones will break my bones. It's a way to teach you to remember that you can have a choice and how badly something hurts you in the same way that you don't have a choice about someone engaging in violence against you. Someone punching you in the face is different than someone saying insulting things. But it was weird to see after 2015 arguments that words are similar to violence coming even from scientists. So there was this. Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote an article in the New York Times talking about how we now, like, we now know that words actually are violent or can be similar to violence because they create a potentially harmful stress response in people. And Jonathan Haidt and I wrote something in the Atlantic saying this is where to even begin on this. To say that violence is the same thing as anything that causes you stress is to make everything in life violence. So it's a bad definition to begin with. I always make the point that, listen, nothing can cause more stress or hurt you more deeply than someone saying, I don't love you anymore. And nobody is seriously arguing that that should be banned, particularly if it's, you know, if it's true. Actually, to be fair, probably somebody out there is saying that thinking the same thing. That should be bad at this point. Maybe in the uk, but the. Sorry, I've been picking on the UK a lot lately. The situation over there has gotten pretty rough for free speech. But when it comes to words being indistinguishable from violence, I always have to point out this is not a new idea. This is an ancient idea. For most of human history, we had essentially decided as a species that there wasn't that big of a distinction between words and violence and that the state could use its power against you and individuals could challenge you to a duel and potentially kill you for what you said. It was only with the advent of things like the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and the democratic Revolution around the time that the American and French revolutions happened, that we really decided that there should be a fairly bright line distinction between these two things, because one is the way we settled things historically, which is violence or the threat of violence or the implicit threat of violence is the way we settled our differences, so to speak, forever as a species. The idea that we'd settled them through persuasion and argumentation in a democratic society was a revolutionary idea for peace, for prosperity, for justice, for innovation, for art, for all of these things. And the idea that we'd go back to this, this way of thinking about things, that your words can just sometimes be violence. If they really hurt my feelings, it's a massive step backwards.
- [17:21]
Nadine Strossen
I would just like to add to that. There's so much more one can say. I was realizing that every single question could probably take the entire session, so I was kind of smiling. Caleb, when you said we probably not going to get through all 10, I was thinking, yeah, it's going to be a lot slower than that. But, you know, each one is a vehicle into a window, into a lot of really important free speech precepts that apply to the other arguments as well. So let me just say that again, the First Amendment standards are very commonsensical, to be sure. The mere fact that speech conveys an idea that might be violent or that somebody objects to violently is never going to be a justification for censoring it. But if you get beyond the content of the speech and you look at it in its overall context, we have another basic principle of First Amendment law, which is is often referred to as the emergency principle. When the speech, looking not only at what it is saying, but also all of the surrounding circumstances, if in those circumstances the speech either directly causes or imminently threatens certain specific serious harm, including violence, then it can and may be punished. One really good example of speech that has a sufficiently tight and direct causal nexus to violence that it can be punished is intentional incitement of imminent violence that is likely to happen imminently. Another example that is also very current and applies sadly to too much speech is what lawyers call a true threat. And the adjective there is to stress that it's not the loose term that we. The way we use the term rather loosely in everyday speech, I feel threatened by that idea. No, but if the speaker directly addresses a particular individual or small group of individuals, and intentionally or recklessly instills a reasonable fear, an objective fear on their part, that they will be subject to violence, then that can and should be punished. So again, let's get away from this idea that the First Amendment is absolutely protecting all speech that has anything to do with violence. No. But on the other hand, it doesn't allow the government to punish any speech that somebody subjectively perceives or misperceives as violence.
- [20:08]
Commercial Narrator
Imagine fast hydration combined with balanced energy. Perfectly flavored with zero artificial sweeteners. Introducing Liquid Ivy's new energy multiplier should sugar free. Unlike other energy drinks, you know, the ones that make you feel like you're glitching, it's made with natural caffeine and electrolytes so you get the boost without the burnout. Liquid IV's new energy multiplier. Sugar free hydrating energy. Tap the banner to learn more.
- [20:37]
Caleb Zakrin
There's obviously, you know, the, as we've talked about, the, you know, the legal understanding of freedom of speech, but then also as you said too, you're not just concerned with the government and how the government regulates speech, but also how private institutions might regulate it as well. And this culture that allows for the freedom of speech, you know, a common occurrence that has happened, I don't know the extent to which it's maybe happening, you know, right now, maybe, versus a few years ago. I think it still is, are shout downs essentially where someone is going and giving, giving a speech. And maybe protesters will go and try and disrupt the event, not let them speak. This isn't necessarily, you know, related to any legal issue, but obviously it can, you know, trying to silence someone, you know, can have a chilling effect. So how do you think about shout downs and deplatforming these sorts of, you know, attempts to get a speaker that someone doesn't like, what their, you know, what their viewpoint is, what they have to say to make it so that they can't talk.
- [21:35]
Greg Lukyanoff
Nadine, why don't you answer first?
- [21:36]
Nadine Strossen
Okay. I was going to start by giving a very sobering factual development. FIRE is about to release its latest campus free speech survey and rankings later this week, as I understand it, tomorrow in fact. Yeah, right. I've signed up for the webinar. I'm very eager. But there was a release last week of the data. Scientists from FIRE gave kind of a preview of one of the really sobering patterns that has emerged, which is that until now, the support on campus for silencing speakers through shout downs was predominantly among those students on the left, the Democrats. But now for the first time, a majority of Republican identified students are also saying that they think that it is at least sometimes acceptable to shout down a speaker. And the number of conservatives who also say it's at least sometimes acceptable to engage in violence, to silence a speaker, that also has risen. And by the way, that connects back to our first question, Caleb. Right. Because if you think that words that you like, dislike are violence, then that justifies you in responding with actual violence to speakers that you dislike. But not surprisingly, this is completely illegal if it's done with government support, which may be the case at a public university. But the term that the Supreme Court has used to describe this phenomenon is the heckler's veto. And think about what that means. Not only does a speaker have the right to convey information and ideas, but the First Amendment also protects the rights of audience members to receive information and ideas. And all of those rights are being violated by those people who choose to silence speakers, depriving the listeners as well, solely because they dislike the ideas. Now, if the speaker was engaging in some kind of illegal speech, such as intentional incitement or true threats, as I described, then it is lawful to suppress the speaker. But you may not suppress the speaker. And again, people say they have a First Amendment right to do that. They do not. They are interfering with other people's First Amendment rights.
- [24:21]
Greg Lukyanoff
Yeah. And I don't want you to distinguish that too much as being just a free speech culture versus free speech law thing. There are cases on point that make it quite clear that in a situation in which there's an angry mob deciding to shut down a speaker, that there's a First Amendment obligation to protect the speaker, not to give in to the mob. And I think that that's as it should be, because really, if you look at human history, the first censors were almost certainly the mob. There were the people in your tribe who were like, shut that person up or I'm going to. Or actually that we're now going to shut you up. And it's particularly pernicious when you have a situation where if the mob shuts someone down and power doesn't do anything about it basically looks very much like powers on the side of the mob. And in many cases, you'll see administrators more hesitant to shut down protesters with whom they're sympathetic to. And that's part of the problem is the distinction between being in a formal and informal part of the system becomes kind of academic.
- [25:27]
Nadine Strossen
And I think we tend to associate shout downs now with. With progressive campus students who are shouting down people who have unprogressive ideas. But the first time that the right of the audience to hear and listen as well as the right of the speaker to speak came from Frederick Douglass, the great self emancipated, formerly enslaved abolitionist crusader and, and great political philosopher. And in Boston he was shouted down by a mob who hated the abolitionists and were afraid that they were going to create havoc in this country. And so this again goes to an earlier point you made, Caleb, in the introduction, that we have to always divorce whatever our views might be about the pros or cons of what the particular message is to understand that a speech, each suppressive strategy is inevitably going to be deployed against exactly the opposite message. So no matter what your own views are on the issue, you have a personal stake in fighting against any kind of suppressive tactic, including de platforming.
- [26:52]
Caleb Zakrin
Something that you talk about in the book is this, this argument, this notion that there are elements of free speech law that are outdated because of the Internet, that there's something unique about the Internet, the way that ideas can be communicated across it that make it necessary to censor things. We obviously saw this a lot, especially with arguments related to whether or not things that are considered disinformation or misinformation should be taken down, whether or not that's protected by speech. So how do you think about the Internet as this place where, and I have to say the Internet is the place where I see this type of speech that offends me the most. It's not that I don't think that people shouldn't have the right to say these things, but there are certain websites, if I log onto them, I see certain things that they just piss me off. So I can definitely understand how certain people might feel this way. So I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
- [27:45]
Greg Lukyanoff
Yeah, I mean, I think that the age of AI may produce some relatively historically novel situations that First Amendment people haven't thought as much about, but the Internet certainly does. The Internet is a mass publication medium, you know, like it's something that allows at a greater volume, at a greater range, all of this kind of stuff. But all, but all the arguments made against or made for censorship on the Internet were arguments made against the printing press or radio or television, and still made to some degree against all of these things. So there's nothing, you know, in this sense, in this sense, there's nothing new under the sun. And I think a lot of the same arguments apply. So before people try to create like a brand new way of mechanism for censorship, it's better to be acquainted with the actual state of the law, because I think they will find it's much smarter and much more prepared to deal with. I mean, the idea that misinformation is some kind of new problem that we have historically. You know, I would like them to talk to Henry VIII about that.
- [28:52]
Nadine Strossen
Caleb, I was kind of smiling when you said the offensive speech you hear is on the Internet. I dare say the very positive and informative and interesting speech you also hear is on the Internet. You know, these are only media for the transmission of communications that come from us flawed human beings. And a lot of it is going to be negative, but a lot of it is going to be positive. And the positive includes and unprecedentedly effective way to counter the negative. As you may know, I've written and talked a lot about hate speech. And yes, to be sure it can spread faster along with everything else on the Internet. But the opportunities for so called counterspeech, for detecting and trying to persuade or trying to counteract hateful speech are also extraordinarily great online.
- [29:51]
Greg Lukyanoff
Yeah, and I tend to argue that the positive of the negative and what I mean by that is that essentially there's a value in knowing, full stop, that essentially, you know, like if someone is a horrible bigot, you know, sometimes the argument is that we'll have a greater chance to refute them. And that's great because that's counter speech as well. But there's also a very simple and almost incalculable value of knowing or having an accurate picture of how many people actually think that, why they think it, you know, what led, you know, what led them to believe it, what the contrast, how many people think that. And I keep on trying to, you know, burn into people's heads. I did a TED Talk, you know, it's great.
- [30:32]
Nadine Strossen
Everybody listening to this should watch the TED Talk.
- [30:34]
Greg Lukyanoff
Thank you, that's very sweet of you. That essentially you're not safer for knowing less about what people really think.
- [30:41]
Caleb Zakrin
I think that's a really important point. And you know, one thing oftentimes I think about is this notion of like the Streisand effect, that when you try and stop someone from speaking, then oftentimes that becomes fuel to the fire of their message and allows them to go, you know, to actually hit out and get more attention that they would have ever gotten. So you mentioned a little bit this notion of counterspeech. And I was wondering if you talk about this because I think that sometimes people think that they hear free speech and they immediately hear it as this kind of right wing buzzword or a buzzword that is meant to protect those in power. And that's what it means when in reality, as you show, like oftentimes speech is the tool, is the recourse for people that don't have power, that want to be able to go and speak out against people that are in power. So I was wondering if you could just get into that a little bit, but strike often.
- [31:36]
Nadine Strossen
I would say always. The definition of lacking power means that you are a political or other minority. And for better or worse, in our democratic system, that means you are generally not going to be able to appeal to majoritarian political powers who represent and are responsive and accountable to the majoritarian power groups in their, their constituencies. And therefore, throughout American history and beyond, the only way that human rights and social justice have been advanced on behalf of groups that were marginalized or excluded has been through freedom of speech, including freedom of association and assembly, petitioning the government, peaceful protest. That was the method that was used by the abolitionists in this century, used by suffragists, by anti war demonstrators, by those crusading against Jim Crow, on and on, LGBTQ groups. And, you know, ultimately they change public opinion through the exercising First Amendment rights, and that will ultimately lead to changes in the law as well as cultural culture. But minority groups, by definition only have free speech as their starting point.
- [33:07]
Greg Lukyanoff
Yeah, and this is meant to keep picturing my TED Talk, but this is one of the things that I say about it in the relationship to power, is that I noticed maybe about 15 years ago that some of the younger people I talked to seemed to think that free speech was the argument of the three Bs, the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron. And I just have to say that's just historically, that's just bad history. And I explained that, Listen, historically, robber barons, rich people, the rich and powerful do just fine. They don't need a special protection for freedom of speech, generally because they're protected by money and power. It's no coincidence that kings and queens went to the merchant class to ask for loans is one of the ways we got some amount of parliamentary democracy. But when it comes to the bully and the bigot, once you get to democratic societies, their views are protected by the vote, if they have them, or the power of the elites in those societies. This is why there's only two types of people who need protections, special protections of freedom of speech. One, minorities and people who are unpopular with the majority and people who are unpopular with the elite. And I mean that in its kind of more ruling class kind of sense. And so, like, literally, it's the reason why every single civil rights leader, you know, attributed part of their success to freedom of speech. You know, as John Lewis would say, if it hadn't been for freedom of speech, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings. But the reason why I think students are getting such a distorted view of this is that they, a lot of academic institutions are pretty politically homogenous and there is a tendency in politically homogenous situations to one, not admit that you're powerful and two, to start seeing the downside of freedom of speech because you're now the person who gets to decide who gets punished. So this is a almost boringly predictable situation that happens repeats all throughout history. But the idea that kind of like free speech is a special protection of the powerful is just a misunderstanding of civics and history.
- [35:22]
Nadine Strossen
We have to thank Donald Trump, Trump for all of his incursions on free speech, because I think that some who had been very blase about it, thinking it did only protect the powerful, are now coming to understand that they rely on it and depend on it. I'm talking about many people on campus who have been subject to various forms of censorship tactics from the Trump administration, including I guess probably the most, most visually egregious are the arrests on the streets and detentions and imprisonment of non citizen students and faculty members for exercising what I believe, and more importantly the courts believe is protected speech under the First Amendment and all of the attacks on Harvard and other universities. Clearly, as a judge ruled last week in the Harvard case as a retaliation. Retaliation for what Trump would call their woke viewpoints. Now people can understand the importance of these First Amendment principles. And let me give a really poignant and pointed example here, Caleb. The ACLU ran into a lot of headwinds from some of our supporters a couple of years ago. Some of our members, when we came to the defense of free speech through the vehicle of a client. Client, right. We're never defending the views of the client, but free speech. The particular client was the nra, the National Rifle association in a very important case that we won in the Supreme Court unanimously and we lost a lot of support from members, including two state based ACLU affiliates disassociated from the ACLU over that case because they hate the NRA's views on Second Amendment. Well, guess what? The decision that the court reached which basically said that government officials cannot use their regulatory power to threaten regulated entities or people over who and entities over whom they hold power by trying to coerce them to punish speech. And that is the precedent and the principle that is relied on now by Harvard and by law firms and by, by all of the institutions that the Trump administration is, is threatening because of disapproval of their viewpoints. So the victory happened to be in a case that involved the nra, but it will actually benefit anti NRA gun control organizations in states where their views are unpopular.
- [38:13]
Caleb Zakrin
There's no denying that, you know, in academia, especially most scholars and many students though, I think that, that, you know, looking at just the current polling, it seems that there might be some shifts in how younger students are identifying themselves politically, but that there is a liberal and a left wing bias and that, you know, conservative speakers have oftentimes been the ones that have faced these issues. I'm wondering, you know, just to think about how you might talk to and you know, the types of questions, especially like Nadine, that you might be getting when you're going and talking, talking on college campuses, talking with students, talking with professors, how to really get them to like, understand that even if you aren't conservative, that it's really important for students who are conservative or academics that are conservative to be able to express themselves, to get their ideas out there so that we can make academia make, make scholarship more open to, to a wide range of ideas. How do you, how do you go about those arguments?
- [39:10]
Nadine Strossen
Wow. You know, the idea that one would have to explain why it's important to you hear different points of view is kind of mind boggling. But let me, and I've never heard the question quite that bluntly, but thank you for the opportunity, Caleb. And I would answer always in a, in a very. So let me, you know, just put myself in role. That's a really important question. I'm so happy that you shared it with me, Caleb. So I can tell you based on my experience how invaluable it is to hear every. And here's the term that I use when I'm teaching my own students. But it's important for me too, to hear every plausible perspective on every issue because that is the only way that I can approach what is the, what I believe to be the correct answer. And I'm smiling at Greg because I'm channeling Jon Stewart. Mill, of course, Mill called the Trident, but I'll say it in my own words. No, Mill didn't call it the Trident. That's Greg's description. Okay, so basically there are three possibilities. If you hear a perspective that's different from your own, or that challenges your own, or that you think is flat out false, number one, it may convince you that, oh, I actually am wrong. I didn't realize that. And what more positive outcome can there be? Than being closer to the truth than we were before by hearing a dissenting perspective and taking it seriously. Second, possibility, in my experience, this is much more common but very important. And that is, well, you're not completely wrong. But you know, you could improve, you could refine, you could polish, you could nuance your perspective. That's also a great benefit. And third, you might be completely reconvinced and reaffirmed in the correctness of your view. But having been forced to wrestle with a counter argument and arrive at the conclusion that you are, after all, correct deepens your understanding and enriches and enhances your ability, ability to communicate it persuasively to other people.
- [41:42]
Caleb Zakrin
The irony is, is that while that, you know, my, When I went to college, the expectation that I had, and I have to say, Greg, on some level maybe the expectation was. I had the expectation because of the Atlantic article that I read that you wrote where I was like preparing myself, like, I wonder what it's going to be like being on a college campus. And I was, I think, very pleasantly surprised by how many professors I had that were constantly trying to introduce students to a wide range of perspectives and constantly pushing back against students. Students, no matter what their views were, if they were coming from maybe a left wing perspective or a right wing perspective, they would push back with the steel manned argument on the other side. So I was quite, you know, very pleasantly surprised, at least with like how my, how my professors taught in terms of just getting, getting us to think in the exact way that you were, that you were saying, Nadine, did he.
- [42:27]
Nadine Strossen
Did your. Did you go to a college that had a fire? Green. Right. Green light?
- [42:32]
Caleb Zakrin
I don't think so. I went to Wesleyan University, so.
- [42:36]
Greg Lukyanoff
But bit of a mixed bag, at least there.
- [42:39]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, you know, there was good and there was bad. I would say that, you know, the professors in general were very, in general very great and the class, a lot of the classes I took I thought were just fantastic.
- [42:54]
Greg Lukyanoff
But there was a great center up there actually specifically for this at Wesleyan that I used to go and speak at. And yeah, like they were, you know, maybe, maybe you benefited from it where they were really trying to inject this way of thinking about things that, but keep in mind, like my job running a, a national organization is. I see all, all of the worst of it and I think sometimes people aren't aware like, of how to some degree they've even somewhat unconsciously shifted the way they're arguing and what arguments they're less inclined to make due to kind of like the. The malu. To the atmosphere in which they're actually saying it. But when it comes to sort of like the cure for, like, the idea, like, why should I listen to this person? You know, like, why? Even though I'm politically liberal, let's. Now, it should be pretty clear that if you're, you know, politically left of center, that there's reason to. To worry for, out of your own self interest. But let's say like 10 years ago, like, if I not am really worried about being censored, why should I care about anyone else being censored? You know, that bothers me at a variety of levels of.1, because I think it's a human right that everybody should have and that you should defend it, even if you think you'll never be in danger. But the two attitudes that help address this, and the second one helps with everything in life, actually, both of them do. Epistemic humility, knowing that you don't know that much in the grand scheme of things. And we all have this illusion of explanatory depth where we all think we know way more than we actually do. And the second one is curiosity, genuine curiosity, because. And once you apply those two things, the idea that someone be like, you shouldn't hear this person talk starts to seem ridiculous. Because it's like, well, why on earth shouldn't I. I. I'm an adult. I can, I can handle, you know, what they're going to say. I can listen to someone who has hateful views and not immediately become a Nazi. Like, I, I want to know, like, what this person is thinking and why.
- [44:48]
Caleb Zakrin
Why. I, I think a lot about the problem too, can be this sort of forbidden knowledge thing where, when something, Absolutely when, When something is, oh, you don't want to hear this. This will, you know, if you hear this, then it will change your mind. Well, if it's so convincing that it will change my mind, then maybe it. It's right. And then it can create.
- [45:05]
Greg Lukyanoff
Yeah, Holocaust. I was going to say Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is one of those ones where I get asked by Europeans, you know, very often, kind of like, well, surely Holocaust denial should not feel legal. I'm like, you mean the single easiest argument to refute possibly in history that essentially you're creating because, like, the only way you can actually convince someone, at least a modestly educated person, that the Holocaust didn't happen is if they're never forced to prove it. That essentially, if you're able to whisper to them, it's like, you know, they're actually trying to keep me from telling you this, but the Holocaust never happened. But it's so hush hush, they have to silence me as opposed to someone saying out and open. I don't think it happened. It's like, okay, do you have, you know, 10 years for me to produce the evidence, you know, every single day for the next 10 years. So I do think that sometimes the idea that something is forbidden can actually, can almost give it a free pass to be sexy and believable, that if it actually had to stand up to public scrutiny, it wouldn't last three seconds.
- [46:08]
Nadine Strossen
You know, and for both of your comments, I was chuckling because I remembered when Ann Coulter was shouted down at Berkeley, Bernie Sanders had the greatest quote. He said, what are you afraid of her ideas?
- [46:27]
Caleb Zakrin
It is interesting too, and I sometimes wonder if there is this almost like a cultural division where maybe even someone like Bernie Sanders, he comes from a time where the new left, where the left was seen as embracing free speech. And obviously that shift sort of took place. You know, I think this, this notion too, that that freedom of speech is right wing or left wing too, is, is one of the, the harms that that happens to it, because I don't think that it has anything to do, to do with that. Two people can be, you know, you know, people on the left and the right can both be in agreement that they want to censor each other, or they can be in agreement that they want to hear from each other. So I think it's a very important value. And Greg, I'm also glad that you brought up, you know, that the, the Holocaust denial example, because I do think that that's always, always the, well, what about the Nazis? And the thing is, today we're seeing on the left and the right accusing each other of either being Nazis, being Nazi sympathizers for all sorts of different reasons. And you do have this discussion in it of Weimar Germany and about how actually this is a really great example of what happens when we try and quote, unquote, censor Nazis. So I was wondering if you just share that just to sort of take us out.
- [47:38]
Greg Lukyanoff
Oh, Nadine did extra research on this, though, so I'd love Nadine.
- [47:41]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, absolutely.
- [47:42]
Nadine Strossen
Yeah. I mean, I get asked this question a lot because I'm the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and also because I've been so involved with the aclu, which notoriously, or, you know, famously, depending on your perspective, successfully defended freedom for neo Nazis at a time when our national executive director, Aryeh Nair, was himself, himself a Holocaust Survivor. And let me just quote Aryeh because he had the experience directly himself. It's a pretty close quote. Not exactly, but good paraphrase. He said, much as I love free speech, I loathe the Nazis even more than I love free speech. His extended family was completely slaughtered by the Nazis. Just his immediate family survived. He said, therefore, if I were convinced that censoring the Nazis would have prevented the Holocaust, I would have been all in favor of it. And by the way, let me say that that's consistent with the emergency principle. If you can show that censoring speech would protect it against immediate harm, then you can censor. So he then goes into a history which is quite familiar, which is the that in the Weimar Republic in Germany, 1918-1933, there were very strong anti hate speech laws, very similar to the ones that still exist in Germany that were very strictly enforced. The leading Jewish organization at the time, which had offices all around Germany, would get prosecutors to bring prosecutions under the criminal laws. They'd bring tort lawsuits under the civil laws. And they said the cases succeeded most of the time. And there were top Nazi leaders who were punished and imprisoned, including the publisher of Der Sturma horribly anti Semitic publication were repeatedly sentenced. Hitler himself was banned from speaking for a number of years in a big part of Germany. And obviously that did not result in suppressing the Nazis. To the contrary, the trials became big propaganda platforms for them. Caleb talking about the forbidden fruit. They welcomed the opportunity to spread their hatred. The real problem in Germany was that while speech was being punished, actual violence was not that Hitler himself got away with a coup, an attempted overthrow of the government with essentially actually a slap on the wrist. And. Well, I don't want to exaggerate. He serves a few months in prison, right, Greg? I don't remember the exact number.
- [50:31]
Greg Lukyanoff
I think it was eight months.
- [50:32]
Nadine Strossen
Yeah. Very short term. During which he wrote Mein Kampf.
- [50:35]
Greg Lukyanoff
Yeah. Utterly insane.
- [50:36]
Nadine Strossen
Yeah. But meanwhile people were being murdered, not only Jews, but political opponents of the Nazis, socialists and communists. So, you know, all that that experience shows is that you do have to punish actual sexual violence and you do have to punish those who are trying to overthrow a democracy. But that punishing hateful speech is at best not going to be helpful and at worst might actually be counterproductive.
- [51:06]
Caleb Zakrin
I think it's such a powerful example. And you know, there are many other arguments that you go through in the book. I tried at various points to kind of combine some of them together because they are, you know, there is overlap, but I really think that this is is a very invaluable book and that a lot of people, students, anyone really who's interested in this topic, would find a lot to get out of this. It's the type of book, too, that you can read in one sitting, too. So I really do recommend people go and pick it up. Well, Greg and Nadine, it was really just so wonderful to have you on the New Books Network, and I really enjoyed speaking with you both.
- [51:38]
Greg Lukyanoff
Thanks for having us.
- [51:39]
Nadine Strossen
Caleb, great to see you as always. Greg, Sam.