Ep. 242: Is cancel culture dead?

Summary

So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast – Episode 242: Is Cancel Culture Dead?

Release Date: May 8, 2025

Hosts and Guests:

• Nico Perino – Host of So to Speak
• Greg Lukianoff – President and CEO of FIRE, author of Coddling the American Mind and Canceling the American Mind
• Ricky Schlott – Co-author of Canceling the American Mind, New York Post columnist

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1. Introduction and Context

In Episode 242 of So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, host Nico Perino engages in a comprehensive discussion with Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlott about their recent book, Canceling the American Mind. The conversation delves deep into the phenomenon of cancel culture, its origins, manifestations across various sectors, and its implications for free speech in contemporary society.

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2. Defining Cancel Culture

Greg Lukianoff opens the discussion by providing a precise definition of cancel culture:

"Cancel culture is the uptick, starting around 2014, of campaigns to get people fired, punished, ostracized, or expelled for speech that would be protected... it often happens in environments where the First Amendment doesn't apply, creating a climate of fear." [08:52]

This legalistic definition sets the stage for understanding cancel culture not merely as a series of isolated incidents but as a systemic issue affecting various institutions.

Nico Perino emphasizes the importance of defining cancel culture to move beyond anecdotes and address its widespread impact.

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3. Origins and Evolution of Cancel Culture

The conversation traces the roots of cancel culture to 2013-2014, marking a significant shift on college campuses. Greg Lukianoff notes:

"Around 2014, students started showing up in large numbers demanding new speech codes, demanding professors get in trouble. This was a sharp, sudden change." [11:35]

Both Greg and Ricky recount personal experiences and observations from their time in academia, highlighting how cancel culture began predominantly within educational institutions.

Ricky Schlott shares her firsthand experience at NYU, where she felt the encroachment of cancel culture led to self-censorship and fear:

"I had hidden books under my bed because I was afraid my roommates might see them and cancel me." [09:00]

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4. Case Studies Illustrating Cancel Culture

The book, as discussed by Greg and Ricky, explores various case studies across different environments:

• Academic Institutions: Instances where students led campaigns to have professors fired, disrupting academic freedom.

• Corporate America: The story of Alexi McCammond, the editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, who faced firing despite issuing public and private apologies for past offensive tweets.

  "She had already apologized and yet, public pressure campaigns continued, leading to her resignation. This demonstrates how apologies alone can be insufficient in quelling cancel culture." [25:31]

• Science and Medicine: Citing the COVID-19 pandemic, Ricky points out how cancel culture stifled scientific discourse, hindering effective responses to the crisis.

• Law Firms and Media: The targeting of law firms and media professionals for representing controversial clients or expressing dissenting opinions.

Greg Lukianoff shares a deeply personal and tragic story about his friend Mike Adams:

"After enduring relentless canceling campaigns, Mike took his own life. This underscores the severe emotional toll of cancel culture." [18:37]

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5. The Role of Social Media in Amplifying Cancel Culture

Greg Lukianoff attributes the escalation of cancel culture to the advent of social media platforms like Twitter (now X):

"Technologies like Twitter enabled almost instantaneous creation of perceived mobs demanding someone's downfall, a scale previously unattainable." [32:43]

Ricky Schlott echoes this sentiment, noting how social media facilitates rapid mobilization and amplification of cancel campaigns, making them more pervasive and damaging.

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6. Political Spectrum and Cancel Culture

The discussion broadens to address whether cancel culture is a left-wing phenomenon. Greg Lukianoff argues that while cancel culture initially started on the left, it has since permeated the right, especially under the Trump administration.

"Cancel culture started on the left with grassroots campaigns but has evolved into more institutionalized actions under the Trump administration, including targeting law firms and media outlets." [33:02]

Ricky Schlott highlights the shift, observing that platforms like Blue Sky have become havens for left-wing cancel culture, while the right employs strategies like "industrial grade whataboutism" to justify their actions.

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7. Impact on Free Speech and Democratic Society

Both guests emphasize the detrimental effects of cancel culture on free speech and democratic discourse. Greg Lukianoff references John Stuart Mill’s advocacy for free speech, arguing that cancel culture impedes the exchange of ideas essential for a healthy democracy.

"In a free speech culture, you aim for tolerance and understanding, not shaming or punishment. Cancel culture undermines this by silencing dissent and fostering fear." [14:36]

They discuss how cancel culture fosters an environment where individuals are reluctant to express differing opinions, stifling meaningful dialogue and progress.

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8. The Aftermath and Current State of Cancel Culture

Addressing the central question of the episode, Greg Lukianoff asserts that cancel culture is not dead but has evolved:

"Cancel culture still exists in corners, but the more pressing issue now is the direct exertion of state power against speech, which is even more concerning." [50:58]

Ricky Schlott concurs, noting that cancel culture has taken on new forms with government involvement:

"Federal actions targeting individuals and organizations resemble cancel culture but are state-directed, making them more pervasive and harder to combat." [51:04]

They highlight how recent actions by the Trump administration, such as revoking security clearances and targeting law firms, represent a more institutionalized and state-backed form of cancel culture.

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9. Conclusion and Reflections

In wrapping up, Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlott reflect on the enduring challenges posed by cancel culture and the necessity of advocating for a robust free speech culture. They underscore the importance of their work in documenting and analyzing cancel culture’s trajectory to inform future efforts to combat its negative impact.

Greg Lukianoff concludes:

"Our advocacy is crucial in understanding and addressing the backlash caused by cancel culture. Recognizing how we got here is essential for moving forward." [52:46]

The episode closes with Nico Perino highlighting the updated paperback edition of Canceling the American Mind, which includes new data and an epilogue addressing recent developments in cancel culture.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Greg Lukianoff [08:52]: "Cancel culture is the uptick, starting around 2014, of campaigns to get people fired, punished, ostracized, or expelled for speech that would be protected..."
• Ricky Schlott [25:31]: "She had already apologized and yet, public pressure campaigns continued, leading to her resignation... shows how apologies alone can be insufficient."
• Greg Lukianoff [18:37]: "After enduring relentless canceling campaigns, Mike took his own life. This underscores the severe emotional toll of cancel culture."
• Greg Lukianoff [32:43]: "Technologies like Twitter enabled almost instantaneous creation of perceived mobs demanding someone's downfall, a scale previously unattainable."
• Greg Lukianoff [50:58]: "Cancel culture still exists in corners, but the more pressing issue now is the direct exertion of state power against speech, which is even more concerning."

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Final Thoughts:

Episode 242 of So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast offers an insightful exploration into the complexities of cancel culture, its historical context, technological amplification, and its pervasive influence across the political spectrum. Through personal anecdotes, case studies, and expert analysis, Greg Lukianoff and Ricky Schlott provide listeners with a nuanced understanding of how cancel culture has evolved and its implications for free speech and societal discourse.

For those interested in delving deeper, the updated paperback edition of Canceling the American Mind is recommended, featuring fresh data and an epilogue addressing the latest trends in cancel culture.

Subscribe and Stay Informed:

• YouTube Channel: So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast
• Substack Page: So to Speak
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• Feedback: Email at [e-mail]

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This summary is intended to provide a comprehensive overview of Episode 242 for those who have not listened to the episode. For the full discussion and nuanced insights, listening to the original podcast is highly recommended.

Transcript

[Greg Lukianoff]

The dirty little secret of Cancel Culture is it wasn't just the students getting bad. It was the administrators, who were already bad, meeting the new students, who are much more open to settling scores with professors and students. It was this unholy alliance between these two forces meeting somewhere. I read of the freedom of speech.

[Nico Perino]

You're listening to so to Speak, the free speech podcast brought to you by fire, the foundation for individual rights and expression. All right, folks, welcome back to so to Speak, the free speech podcast, where every other week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define your right to free speech. I changed up that tagline a couple of weeks ago, and now it's. It just doesn't come out like it used to. Yeah, it used to be the. An uncensored look at the world of free expression through personal stories and candid conversations. So, our dear listeners, if it sounds weird to you, it sounds weird to me as well. And I'm still getting the hang of it. I'll have it down in no time today.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Turn into a limerick.

[Nico Perino]

How would I do that?

[Greg Lukianoff]

I don't know. Make it rhyme.

[Nico Perino]

We'll put producer Sam on that one.

[Ricky Schlott]

ChatGPT could do that pretty quick for you.

[Nico Perino]

You know what? I always forget that ChatGPT is a resource.

[Greg Lukianoff]

It's really good at this kind of stuff.

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah, I just adopted it recently, and it's scary, but I feel like it's like make or break. You gotta do it at this point. Cause if you don't do it, someone else is gonna start doing your job and doing that.

[Nico Perino]

Well, now there's. I think it's a Google GPT or a Google AI tool that can take your articles and turn them into podcasts.

[Greg Lukianoff]

That was more than a year ago. Like, and it came out, and it was eerily. Actually, they did it. It was more. Even more than that. They. They did that. Suleiman, our brilliant IT guy, he ran canceling the American Mind, you know, like. Like, tried to do a podcast about it, and it was really good. But it does also point out how formulaic most podcasts are. Except, of course, so to speak.

[Nico Perino]

Yes. Well, the one that I listen to was great. And so far, as, as I mentioned you guys before we started recording, I like messy podcasts where there's a lot of give and take, where questions are premised, where it's not just question, answer, question, answer, question, answer. And this one that I heard, it was exactly as I'd want the podcast to be. Oh, nice.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Okay.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah, some interjections. The sort of dinner table conversation that might naturally happen if there aren't microphones in front of people. That's what I try and emulate on the podcast. And this did a great job, probably.

[Ricky Schlott]

Cause it's like trained off of like the endless hours of Joe Rogan.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah. I mean, does Joe. Does he do podcasts in that way? He lets his guests go quite some time.

[Ricky Schlott]

He'll interject, though. I feel like.

[Greg Lukianoff]

I always feel funny since promoting books were so reliant on podcasts. I don't really listen to podcasts.

[Nico Perino]

When Joe Rogan had Ira Glasser, the former ACLU executive director, who I made a documentary about called mighty Ira in 2020, on his podcast, Joe just would throw out a question here, a question there, and then let ira go for 25 minutes and.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Which he can do.

[Nico Perino]

Which he can do. And that's the problem with Ira Blasso.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Does he do it really well?

[Nico Perino]

He does it really well. He's one of those people who talks in perfect sentences in perfect paragraphs, and if you will let him, perfect pages. But you need to interject in his monologue.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Oh, but Nobody outdoes John McWhorter on that, though.

[Nico Perino]

Oh, yeah, Yeah.

[Greg Lukianoff]

I mean, he does it in like perfect iambic pentameter if you ask him to.

[Nico Perino]

I'm always jealous of that skill.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Oh, it's.

[Nico Perino]

It's.

[Greg Lukianoff]

It's creepy.

[Nico Perino]

But you mentioned promoting books. That's why we're here today.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yay.

[Nico Perino]

We have the Canceling of the American Mind, we. Which is your guys book that is now out in paperback. And I guess I should introduce you guys. Of course, regular listeners will know Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of Fire.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Hi, everybody.

[Nico Perino]

Author of Coddling the American Mind and Canceling of the American Mind. And we're also here with Ricky Schlott, who is Greg's co author on the Canceling American Mind, a New York Post columnist. Ricky, welcome into the studio.

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Nico Perino]

Is this the first time on the podcast?

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah, it is.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Oh, my God. And I haven't gotten seen Ricky in a while, so this is.

[Ricky Schlott]

Oh, no, it's not. It's my second time on the podcast.

[Nico Perino]

I think we did one.

[Ricky Schlott]

We did one. I think when the book came out.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Did we?

[Ricky Schlott]

I'm pretty sure we did.

[Greg Lukianoff]

We did. We did.

[Ricky Schlott]

We did. We did.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yep.

[Nico Perino]

Yep.

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah, we did. In the whirlwind of podcasts that happened when the book first came out, how.

[Nico Perino]

Many have you guys done?

[Greg Lukianoff]

We did so many.

[Ricky Schlott]

I don't Even remember it was really crazy. And we divided and conquered too. So I did some and Greg did some and we did some together. It was. I said the same terms so many times over and over and over again. It was crazy.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah, well, let's see if we can differentiate ourselves here. Maybe I can throw some grenades into this conversation.

[Greg Lukianoff]

That'll stay this young woman.

[Nico Perino]

I did say we can have some verbal violence on this podcast, but no physical violence, please. Let's start. I guess for those who aren't familiar with the book, what is the origin of this book? Why a book about cancel culture?

[Greg Lukianoff]

Oh yeah. No. So it's. I definitely, as you know, I kill myself every time I write a book. It's always way more than I can.

[Nico Perino]

Yet you're still here.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah, well, I know like the. It is one of these things that sometimes people ask, kind of like, you know, like, you got an organization, you seem to be doing stuff all the time. Like how do you also write books? And I'm like, one, I have great co authors, but also two, I kind of kill myself over these things. So after coddling came out, I wanted to wait a while before writing another book because I need to get back to more day to day work and. But I start getting the itch. I really want to write another one. So around the time the itch was getting really bad that I wanted to write my next book. I mean, I'm thinking about two books I want to write right now.

[Nico Perino]

What was that year that you were getting this?

[Greg Lukianoff]

I would, that would have been 20, 22.

[Nico Perino]

Okay.

[Greg Lukianoff]

You know, about. I guess that would be about four years after coddling came out. And. But we found this brilliant young woman, you know, Ricky Schlott, who I think I first met when she was 19.

[Ricky Schlott]

I think I was like maybe 20.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Maybe 20.

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah, 20 or 21. Because it would have been after the pandemic.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah, yeah. And we, and we kind of immediately had our eyes on her because she was like someone who was writing for reasons sometimes and just writing better than people twice her age easily. You know, like, and we're like, this is a real talent we've got here. So we made Ricky a fellow and we really. I really enjoyed working with her. And I started thinking, you know, coddling the American mind was so much about the problems faced by Gen Z young women. It would be really cool. But obviously me and Haidt are not Gen Z young women.

[Nico Perino]

Oh, really?

[Greg Lukianoff]

Haidt likes to claim he's Gen X and he might technically be correct. Sorry, sorry, listeners. I'm A very proud Xer, but working with her. So we originally talked about writing a book that was kind of a follow up to Coddling the American Mind. But as we were getting ready to write it, there were all these people who were actually starting to say that cancel culture. And they had been saying it, but I thought they would have shut up at some point, saying cancel culture is a hoax or a myth. And I was like, this is insane. Like, we have the data to show that starting from 2014 up. It was a disaster for students, it was a disaster for professors. And we just have. The first and foremost thing we needed to do was one, show the data and prove that this is happening and it's really serious. Two, I really wanted to situate it as getting people to rethink cancel culture as a way of winning arguments without actually persuading anybody to just kind of scare them, but as part of a constellation of cheap tactics to win arguments and then really get into how we solve it. So we started, I think we signed the contract maybe in late 2022.

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah, that sounds.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Earlier than that.

[Ricky Schlott]

It had to have been earlier. I think.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah, you're right.

[Ricky Schlott]

Because this came out in October 23rd, 2023.

[Nico Perino]

It came out right after October 7th.

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah. Ten days after.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah. O. So might be off by a whole year.

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah, I think it was probably 21 when we were talking about selling it. I don't know.

[Nico Perino]

You mentioned you had the data to prove that cancel culture was happening. But I think we should probably start by defining what cancel culture is.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Sure.

[Nico Perino]

What is this thing that people are debating happening or not happening?

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah, I gave a somewhat boring but very lawyerly kind of definition of it, that we were kind of like, maybe we should make it something better than this. But at the same time, I wanted to be hyper precise about it. And it's the uptick, starting around 2014, of campaigns to get people fired, punished, ostracized, or expelled for speech that would be protected, for example, for like, a public employee under First Amendment doctrine, but often happening in environments where the First Amendment doesn't apply and the climate of fear that results from that situation. And it begins around 2014. So I was trying to. We were trying to really offer, like, a historical definition that essentially saying, like, cancel culture is something weird that happened that started around 2014 and really kind of went off. Went crazy.

[Nico Perino]

Well, you kind of have to. Otherwise it's just anecdotes. Right. You need to create a precise definition if you want to be able to quantify it.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah.

[Nico Perino]

So Ricky what was your experience at this time? Why did you feel like this was the right project for you? What were you seeing?

[Ricky Schlott]

I mean, my, like, entrance into the media scene was like an op ed for the New York Post about my experience at nyu, feeling that that free speech was under siege and like having hidden books under my bed in my dorm room because I was afraid that my roommates might see them and cancel me. And I. Thomas Soule books, Jordan Peterson books. We did Jordan Peterson's podcast, and now I'm very canceled by those same roommates. Actually not my roommates, to give them credit, but other peers at nyu. But I very much self censored on campus and had the experience not yet of being canceled until I did put myself out out there, but was living that day to day until the pandemic. And it was kind of like my life story. And so I think having had that recent experience on a college campus, which is kind of like the heart of cancel culture or was the kind of ground zero for it, made me feel like I was a collaborator that maybe could put some meat on the bones of the story too.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah. So you were experiencing this at college in ways that maybe don't always capture headlines. It's just the environment. It's the zeitgeist.

[Ricky Schlott]

Meanwhile, Greg, absolutely.

[Nico Perino]

You're here at fire. What are you seeing that is signaling to you we have a problem here?

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah, I mean, you know, I've been doing this for 24 years now almost, and fire is 25 years old last year. And, you know, I started in 2001, and I always explained that even in 2001, it was already easier to get in trouble for what you said on a college campus than I expected. And my whole background was specializing in First Amendment free speech law. But overwhelmingly it was administrators doing the censoring. Students tended to be very good on free speech. They came to each other's aid, they protested, sometimes they fought on behalf of their professors. Free speech rights in some cases. And it was really more a problem of the administrators. But something really dramatic changed very clearly around 2013, 2014, and students started showing up in large numbers demanding new speech codes, demanding professors get in trouble. That really accelerated in 2017, but that started to really spike in 2014. So it was a very sharp, sudden change. And a lot of the first exploration of this was actually in my book that I wrote with Jonathan Haidt, Coddling the American Mind, trying to explain how we believe. Oh, it's going to be. By the way, the original article is 10 years old. This August.

[Nico Perino]

Don't tell. That feels like yesterday.

[Greg Lukianoff]

17.

[Nico Perino]

I know, but I mean, it feels like yesterday.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Neither of you are old. 2013, 2014. The idea of coddling was essentially the observation that the same habits that. That are peculiar to students showing up on campus around 2014 would be really bad for free speech and academic freedom because they were sort of justifying new reasons to restrict freedom of speech and academic freedom, but also that were relied on a way of thinking that would actually make those students anxious and depressed. And unfortunately, the data has really supported that idea that we are onto something because both things happened. But canceling the American mind was much more to focus on the toll in terms of professors and students that we saw after 2014. And it really. It really got bad. And I think one of the things that listeners might not understand is that historically it is not normal for students to sign petitions against their professors to get them fired just for their research, teaching and what they say on social media. What they say on social media, it's not saying this is completely unprecedented. But in terms of like, scale, it is very unusual for students to be the ones leading the charge to get professors fired.

[Nico Perino]

What are they usually doing?

[Greg Lukianoff]

Just debating them, Protesting in some cases, being snotty to them in other cases.

[Nico Perino]

Is what qualifies as a cancel campaign, what that protest is demanding?

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yes, that's a huge part of it. If you're just saying this person is wrong and a jerk, more power to you. We're right there with you. And I want to be clear about. This is something. This is a disagreement between me and Randy Kennedy at Harvard. At Harvard, yeah. He talked about, for example, our de platforming database being an assault on freedom of speech, essentially, because of course, students have the right to demand that someone not speak on their campus. And I was like, of course they do. We defend people's right to say that, to demand that someone not speak. But. There's a but. So if we didn't believe in their right to do it, we'd be demanding they be punished for doing that. We're not saying that people should be punished for engaging in cancel culture. What we are saying, however, is that you can have movements that censor and make people shut up and chill speech that are directed from individuals that are fundamentally illiberal impulses. And that's one of the reasons why we're not arguing for cancel culture being banned. We're arguing for free speech culture where you're much more tolerant of people you disagree with. And yeah, do I think you have the right to Get a campaign together to ruin someone's life for a bad tweet. Absolutely. You have that right. Do I think that's admirable or good for a democratic society where candor is really important? No. And I always have to remind people on liberty, like the most brilliant book ever written on freedom of speech by John Stuart Mill.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah. 1859.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah. Same year as Origin of Species. The same year. And also a book called Self Help. Anyway, sorry, literally called that first in the genre. Anyway, that he is very clear. He's not arguing that the state of the law was really bad in England at the time. He says very clearly that actually due to some cases in 1858, it was actually pretty good. He was worried about a conformist culture that was actually very harmful to the exchange of ideas.

[Nico Perino]

And that's actually what Alexis de Tocqueville was worried about too in colonial America when he was. It wasn't colonial America. I think it was America at that point when he was touring the country and reporting back to France. So Ricky, though, this isn't just a story of college campuses, right. I'm looking here at part three of your book. You study Cancel culture in comedy in elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, in corporate America, in the media. What was happening there.

[Ricky Schlott]

I mean I think that it really has trickled down from educational schools. So that's where it gone to. I mean I believe in many ways that is where it started, but it's trickled down all the way to. I was horrified to hear in middle schools from a lot of parents that would tell me that their kids had gotten canceled for how parent their parents had voted by their peers. And they're like in fifth grade and they don't even have political viewpoints yet.

[Nico Perino]

I hope I will not be held accountable for my parents beliefs. My parents are great. They don't have crazy beliefs, but you never know.

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah. No, truly. I mean that happened on my high school campus too. People during the 2016 election were looking at people's parents, voter registrations and stuff. And it was a big thing of like, oh, our parents are Republicans. Which is really crazy.

[Greg Lukianoff]

I didn't know the registration part. That's awful.

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah, yeah, that was a, that was a big deal on my campus. Like people that. That happened very commonly in the name of tolerance. Yeah, of course, of course. And also not to mention a lot of people who were Republicans didn't even vote for Trump. It wasn't. That aside, I would say of all the case studies that we did, the, the one on science and Medicine was the most concerning to me because that's really, like an area where you don't want conformity. And the scientific method depends on a lack of, like, ideological rigidity and people being willing to say, I don't really agree with your hypothesis. And I think in, like, the COVID 19 pandemic was a perfect moment where we would have had, I think, much better outcomes for just like, institutional trust and our social fabric if it was okay to question some things that were not yet set in stone and totally known as the pandemic was unfolding and as, like, science was discovering more and more about the pandemic. And so I think of all the case studies, that one was the most frightening.

[Nico Perino]

Well, can we talk about some specific stories? Greg, maybe I'll start with you. Is there, like, one story of a cancellation in this book that really stands out to you as being emblematic of the problem? And then, Ricky, I'd love to hear if there's one that stands out to you as well.

[Greg Lukianoff]

I mean, the short answer is no, because I've been like, overwhelmed by stories that essentially you really can't distill it into a single story. But the one that's the most emotionally the most heartbreaking one, and I talk about it in some detail, is my admittedly very conservative friend, Mike Adams, who he started at University of North Carolina Wilmington as a progressive, but then he became an evangelical Christian and became the rarest thing kind of conservative on most campuses. Not a libertarian conservative, but a full on social conservative. And he started really pushing back against things on the left. And he always credited me because someone like this, of course, is going to get in trouble a lot. So Fire defended him from the very early days when he got in trouble, but he credited me for recommending the book how to Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce.

[Nico Perino]

We are in the Lenny Bruce podcast studio.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yes, we are now, by the way, that I was reading at the time, which, contrary to Nick Gillespie, is actually a very funny book.

[Nico Perino]

The.

[Greg Lukianoff]

And I recommended it to him and Mike read it and I remember he was on like, talk radio and he was crediting me as being the person who was like, yeah, Greg told me to recommend this book. And I realized I gotta be much more in your face. Conservative much, you know, much sharper much, you know, like, I was like, dude, I created a monster. And in 2020, he posted something where he was. He was complaining about lockdowns in his state, and he posted a tweet of him and a bunch of dudes in a state that didn't have lockdowns, drinking beers, and said. And he posted, massa Governor of North Carolina. I don't remember who the name of it was. Let my people go. Insensitive, you know, for the use of the word massa. Let my people go, however, of course, is like, that's right out of, you know, the Bible, and for that matter, Ferris Bueller's day off. And there was just, like, for the rest of June and July of 2020, which was unlike anything fire had ever seen. There was campaigns of score settling with basically every professor who'd ever said something offensive. And so since I knew Mike, I thought Mike was this extremely confident dude and that he knew what he was doing. I didn't actually. To my eternal regret, I didn't actually write Mike until when I heard that he was being targeted to be fired. Because I'm like, mike can handle himself. Like, we gotta help all these other professors. And so I wrote him kind of late, and he'd already taken the severance package because students started protesting it. They demanded he be fired because Mike had actually defeated UNCW in a previous court decision. They knew they'd lose in court against him, so they gave him an okay severance package, not a particularly generous one. And he. And he stepped down. So I only talked to him after he'd signed the papers, and I had to break the news to him, like, there's not really anything we can do for you. You signed the severance. And I said, I. But he sounded bad. Like, the students were still coming to his house. They were saying, like, people were talking about his wife and child, you know, like, engaged in, like, sex acts. Like, it was really. And he was clearly scared because he called the police about it. And a week after I called him, he killed himself. And so, you know, that really. That really stuck with me, and particularly the idea that when I started talking about my friend Mike killing himself, I got a number of people basically saying, well, he was pretty terrible. And I'm like, dude, he was a person. So, yeah, that chapter was the hardest to write.

[Nico Perino]

In a culture of free speech, what would be the appropriate free speech, friendly response to Mike's tweet? If people found it offensive, how should people have responded?

[Greg Lukianoff]

Well, like I said, it is arguably even appropriate. I mean, you can demand that someone be fired. It's particularly incumbent on administrators to not humor this and that administrators must be the one saying no and fast and quickly and actually decisively.

[Nico Perino]

That outcome is not viable, that we are not following. We're a public University bound by the First Amendment, so not even not viable.

[Greg Lukianoff]

But this is not the environment for that. We don't do that. But the dirty little secret of cancel Culture is it wasn't just the students getting bad. It was the administrators. The administrators who were already bad, meeting the new students, who are much more open to settling scores with professors and students. It was this unholy alliance between these two forces meeting. There's a million ways you can protest this. I mean, you can just flat out protest it. You can write an op ed, you can respond in scathing language. But when you start calling that someone be fired for something that is clearly protected. Well, one that creates real First Amendment issues, but it also. For free speech culture, you really want to understand where people are coming from. You want to understand what they're getting at. And I think if the.

[Nico Perino]

Presumably you want to change his mind. Right. This is the story of Daryl Davis, the black man who would meet with members of the Ku Klux Klan and have conversations with them. With the idea being, hey, I'm a black man. All your preconceived notions about who I am and what I represent are wrong.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah.

[Nico Perino]

And he got. I visited his home. I saw all the Klan's robes. Dozens and dozens of crime robes from former Klansmen who gave up their robes after meeting him. None of that would have probably happened if he had just sought to get them fired, for example, as opposed to sitting down over coffee and having a conversation.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah. But also, like, if. If the administration just slowed the whole process down, this would have faded. It always, like, that's the thing about Cancel Culture campaigns is that they're very hot and they don't have a lot, and they have a lot of heat, but they don't burn for very long. And a lot of these.

[Nico Perino]

You got to write them out.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Situations would be avoided. But here's the problem. A lot of administrators didn't want to write it out. They wanted the momentum to get rid of a conservative gadfly like Mike.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah. Ricky, is there anything that stands out to you?

[Ricky Schlott]

This young woman, probably mid-20s, who was appointed editor in chief of Teen Vogue, and she had tweets that were, like, at the time, already a decade old from when she was, like, 14 or 15, that were definitely offensive and off color, that people resurfaced when she was hired and ended up. She ended up getting fired, or. I don't even know if she had been hired, but they called off her hiring. And it turns out that in the process of her. She'd already Apologized for them. A. And in the process of her getting hired, she already had said, like, these are full disclosure. These are out there. Like, I've distanced myself. So the company knew that they existed. So the only reason that she got fired was this public pressure campaign, which I think is insane to accept somebody on that basis and then fire them when, like, push comes to shove and you get shamed for it. A ton of big advertisers pulled out over that too, which I think is really shameful. And the thing that about that case, that really I think is most important is as young people today who grew up online come of age and enter the workforce, like, I had an iPhone when I was 10. Like, everybody who's now a new hire had access to technology way too early and has done something stupid at some point that probably isn't, like, great and ideal and they'd prefer not to be out there. If we have a culture that has that as, like, the status quo of like, we just fire people and major companies pull their advertising and stuff, I think that's an absolute disaster for society.

[Nico Perino]

So her name is Alexi McCammond.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yes.

[Ricky Schlott]

Okay, that's right.

[Nico Perino]

And I want to read some passage from your book here and then ask you guys about it because I think it speaks to what you were just saying. Greg. In the following days, McCammond apologized to her future co workers in private meetings and engaged in one on one talks with some of the offended Teen Vogue staffers. She also tweeted a public apology reiterating, I've apologized for my past racist and homophobic tweets and will reiterate that there's no excuse for perpetuating those awful stereotypes in any way.

[Ricky Schlott]

Also, she's not white too.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Oh, black, right?

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah, I think she's biracial.

[Nico Perino]

She added that she was so sorry to have used such hurtful and inexcusable language. Nevertheless, pressure to can McCammon continued to mount, not just from Teen Vogue staffers, but from their advertisers too. Burt's Bees, Ultra Beauty, both halted advertising campaigns in response to tweets. When the public shaming became too much to bear, McCammond resigned. So the apologies don't really work?

[Greg Lukianoff]

No, the apologies made. They're basically confessing.

[Nico Perino]

It seems like she did everything right. She had one on one meetings. She publicly apologized. She privately apologized, but the staffers were still coming after her.

[Greg Lukianoff]

It's confessing you're a witch. And I like apologies.

[Nico Perino]

Like, basically, they should work if they're heartfelt and genuine.

[Greg Lukianoff]

I always Had a policy. Like, when people ask me, like, should I apologize earlier on my career? I'm like, that's not for me to decide. Follow your conscience if you think you did something wrong. But I do sometimes remind them, don't apologize if you don't think you did anything wrong. Yeah, but unfortunately, if you do apologize in these kind of, like, moral kind of spirals, it's confessing essentially that you're a witch, and it only makes it worse.

[Nico Perino]

And that's why Donald Trump never apologizes and seemingly is Teflon Don and never gets in trouble.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah, unfortunately, that seems to be good advice.

[Ricky Schlott]

Although I have to ask you on that front, too. In that sort of instance where she did use slurs and stuff, it'd be hard for me to say she shouldn't say, I'm sorry that I used those words. Those are not reflective of me. However, I've previously apologized for that. Should she not have said. What should she say? I mean, I don't think you should do an apology tour with every single individual. I think that's a little over the top. But, like, what I mean, should she not have said sorry? Like, I've never quite figured out what the actual, like, alternative is to that.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah, no, the. And just those listeners know if the example that I'm remembering is that she used the term Asian eyes for having waking up with puffy eyes.

[Ricky Schlott]

I think there was also some homophobic slurs in there. I can't remember what was there.

[Nico Perino]

I can find them here.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah, that what she claimed was kind of like slang at the time in the black community, which is, of course, offensive. But at the same time, like, the.

[Nico Perino]

She used slurs for gay people. Homo and derogatory use of gay. I think that's what I see here. That and then the Asian guys note that you had before.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah, I mean, like, I would be inclined to apologize, too. And that's one of the reasons why it kind of breaks my heart to say that maybe you shouldn't. Or if you apologize, it's gotta be something strong. It's like, listen, I regret doing that. However, I've said this over and over again, and I do feel like I'm being treated like you have to. You're put in a position essentially where you have to push back.

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah.

[Nico Perino]

Part of me just wants to say, can I appeal to common sense and say, I was 15 years old, I was an idiot. I think most people who are 15 years old are idiots.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Oh, my God, I was such an idiot.

[Nico Perino]

And I actually do think that resonates with most people. And I think that's why you've seen the backlash to cancel culture, because people had this sort of moral awakening that like, hey, we don't want to cancel people for things that they said when they were a teenager. Right. We have in this country, presumably this belief in redemption and forgiveness. And if you can't be redeemed or forgiven for what you did at 15, what can you be redeemed or forgiven for? We, even in the criminal context, treat 15 year olds different than we treat 25 year olds, for example.

[Ricky Schlott]

Although I do think, though, we really have a crazy punitive disciplinary system in high schools and middle schools even that can change your trajectory in life. If you get in trouble in high school, like you're. You could end up at a different college. You could end up with a different job down the road like it is. There is some real permanence to that age demographic that I, I mean, I saw that go have. Maybe it's a private school situation, but I certainly saw that having gone to boarding schools, like people that made one mistake. Life changing sometimes.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah. I wonder if there are differences even between when you were in school and when I was in school in the mid 2000s. But how much did Twitter now x have to do with these cancel campaigns?

[Ricky Schlott]

I think quite a lot. I'll let you take that.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah. So actually, this is a nice chance for me to plug a different book. I'm reading mostly Al Gharbi's we have Never been Woke. And I'm already writing the review of the book in my head. And the very first line is going to be. First of all, I'd like to apologize to Musa Al Gharvey for not reading this sooner because it's excellent and it talks about how self serving a lot of the interests of elites can actually be in that. Basically describing cancel culture as a way of showing yourself socially superior at the cost of other people. Sorry.

[Nico Perino]

The role of Twitter. All you have to say. Musa's book is sitting on my bookshelf. I'm writing my own book right now, so I'm really trying not to read anything that's not for my book. But he sent it to me because he wanted to come on the podcast. So maybe you and I can have a conversation with him. That's excellent. And his agent is my agent.

[Greg Lukianoff]

And I realize one of the only things that, like, I'd really disagree with Musa about is like on two pages and the rest I'm like completely like. I think it's just. I think it's brilliant and very important. But, you know, but he does talk about. And one of the things I do disagree with is he talks about cancel culture. Well, cancel cultures happen all the time. There was trashing in the 1960s, like the 1930s in Marxist circles. They were incredibly doctrinaire, and they'd ruin your life and get you kicked out if you weren't doctrinaire. But I try to point out, incidentally.

[Nico Perino]

Ayn Rand would do that to people in her inner circle.

[Greg Lukianoff]

That's shocking. But I feel like what you're saying is ostracization, like eliminating people who aren't doctrinaire is a theme that repeats. Of course it is. But one of the arguments that Ricky and I were making was essentially the uptick in, is we're talking about scale and nature in terms of canceling, because you can't find something that really happened on this kind of crazy scale. And the thing that. And one of the defining characteristics of it that did require technology is you had to be able to almost instantaneously create the perception of, or the reality of an angry mob trying to get someone fired. And that literally was not possible until technologies like Twitter, like other social media, where. And you really could create the sense that there are tens of thousands of people who are demanding you fire Jerry or some other person in your organization in a way that when you wanted to get someone fired from their job before a lot of cases, you'd send an angry letter to the company and that would be the end of it. So it was a new phenomenon in that sense because of the technology.

[Nico Perino]

And was it primarily a left wing phenomenon? Because when you think about cancel culture, you often think about left wing excess, so to speak. And then, you know, in the current context, you often think of Trump as a backlash against that, or at least that's how it's often positioned. Do you see it as a left wing phenomenon?

[Ricky Schlott]

I mean, I think originally in terms of Twitter cancel culture, predominantly it was. But it's interesting now to see, like, now that Twitter is X, it feels like a lot of the pushback that I'm getting when I. I personally think that I'm being consistent with my viewpoints is from the right. And it's like, I thought you were more conservative. Like, there's a lot of conservative culture cancel culture going on on X. And Blue sky has become like the place where all the. The left wing cancel culture people have moved. So it's interesting to see none of those voices really interacting, and everyone's getting even more insular in Their two little camps. Although Blue sky is like a fraction of the user base.

[Greg Lukianoff]

But Blue sky doesn't believe cancel culture even happens because they're in like their little bubble where they can actually believe something like that.

[Nico Perino]

Well, in the same way that old school Twitter didn't really believe.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Absolutely. That's one of the reasons why we had to write the book, because I felt like it was so irresponsible to make that.

[Ricky Schlott]

It's interesting too, though, but like they'll, they'll throw stones at people and like centrist people and stuff, but like they don't hear them because they're just in Blue Sky. Like a lot of people just have no idea what's going on and what sort of critiques they're getting, which is interesting. They've definitely like insulated themselves and their critiques from a lot of the people that they're critiquing.

[Nico Perino]

Yes.

[Greg Lukianoff]

So basically, long story short, like the cancel culture being like the campaigns to get people fired, you know, definitely started on the left. We talk about a lot of examples of cancel culture on the right though, in the book. And if we were writing it today, we'd have a lot more examples for sure, but partially because our definition is about something that's about getting regular people into campaigns to get people fired. What's actually happening with the Trump administration has a little bit less of the campaign to get people fired and just plain old ordinary. I'm exerting federal power and sometimes in very arbitrary and sometimes completely illegal ways to get people punished. Which the only reason why I wouldn't call it necessarily cancel culture is because it's something that's even graver and more direct, which is just the exertion of the political power and just it's old fashioned censorship in a lot of.

[Nico Perino]

So this is like Chris Krebs, for example, having his global entry revoked because the Trump administration doesn't like him. Or going after these law firms because they represent or hire people that the Trump administration doesn't like. These, these are just, you know, the.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Law firm stuff scares me in particular, but it's all, it's all scary.

[Ricky Schlott]

It's almost like institutional cancel culture versus individual. Like, I feel like he's like painting with a much broader brush than like specifically going after one person, if that makes sense. It's like, let's just take it down Harvard as a whole.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah.

[Nico Perino]

And even during the Obama and Biden administrations when cancel culture was at its peak, I can't remember a president going after their political enemies in the same way, I mean, you have Biden at the podium talking about how Elon Musk should be looked into and that's a problem. But it seems much more overt now.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Oh, absolutely. And of course, like, like we're going to get. One thing actually I think is fun Ricky is fun for nerds is that we talk about in the book, we talk about this idea of there being tactics that both the right and the left use to win arguments without winning arguments beyond cancel culture. And then we talk about the left having what we call the perfect rhetorical fortress, which is just layer after layer of ways to dismiss people basically largely on identity. But then on the right we talk about the efficient rhetorical fortress, which is just this idea that if you point out, if you claim that someone is woke or a liberal or a libtard, you can dismiss them that way. But also by the final one, if they're not pro maga, you can dismiss them as well. But the one that actually really predominates now on the sort of like MAGA right to justify everything is what I've called industrial grade whataboutism. It's always pointing to where were you on this other thing that happened under the Obama administration? Now the fun thing about being at FIRE is it's almost always we were only involved in campus until 2022. But if it's anything to do with campus, it's like, yeah, we're all over it. We're perfectly consistent on this stuff. But watching kind of the backlash just always being, what about ism? But yeah, the scale of the targeting of enemies is scary. And that's one of the reasons why I think in some ways its rawest form dealing with law firms. Because in many cases these are just law firms that were, that had lawyers there who were involved in the Mueller investigation, for example.

[Nico Perino]

Or they represent Dominion Voting System.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Dominion Voting System, like real, just bad old fashioned, I guess you'd call it kind of payback and retribution for slights. And the craziest argument that they're making is one, they're threatening to withdraw security clearance from these lawyers in many cases, or I guess in this case global entry, which is not.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah, that's a separate matter, the Kris Krebs stings. But yeah, with the law firms it's security clearance, it's access to federal buildings, it's government contracts.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Access to federal buildings is the one that I think is the most like, are you freaking kidding me? You're telling lawyers they can't enter courtrooms? I honestly think that's the least well appreciated. Scary thing that the Trump administration is.

[Nico Perino]

Doing or even represent clients in mediation that happens in federal buildings, because often that mediation will happen with federal agencies. So the chill is, it seems, the point. And during the height of cancel culture, I'm sure you guys know Randall Sullivan, who was the head of a house at Harvard, represented Harvey Weinstein. He's also a. Randy Sullivan was also a Ronald Sullivan. Ronald Sullivan. Sorry, excuse me. Ronald Sullivan is also a law professor at Harvard and does what that good practitioners do, which is represent clients, give them robust defenses before the government can take away people's liberty. And he was canceled for doing this. He lost his job as the House dean or master. I forget what they call him at Harvard. I always confuse Harvard and Yale with these House.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Something offensive.

[Nico Perino]

Yes, something offensive that subsequently changed. Yeah, but that was a cancel campaign. And it was a cancel campaign that was motivated by who this lawyer represented. And now you have a cancel campaign from the other side that's motivated by who these law firms represent or even who they hire as lawyers within their firm. So what's good for the goose, I guess, is good for the gander. And I've talked about how in the Harvard context now that the Trump administration is going after Harvard for Title 6 violations and just ignoring the law in doing so. We had a lot of allies when the Obama administration was doing that in the Title IX context and the industrial grade whataboutism wasn't there. Now the whataboutism is coming from us and it's saying, like, wait, you guys were on our side during the abuses under Title IX. Why are you ignoring them now under Title 6?

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah, well, they have the argument, at least, that they think the Title VI abuses are real and at a scale of anti Semitism at scale at Harvard or these other schools. And I'm sympathetic to that. I think certainly, like Columbia and Harvard had a real problem. I've been saying for almost 10 years that there is a real antisemitism problem in elite higher ed and in schools in California and probably in other places. That being said, you have to follow process. Just because there's a bad actor, it doesn't mean you can magically make up new powers. And the Trump administration, there's all sorts of process that they have to follow, including giving the university a chance to fix things that the Trump administration is just utterly ignoring with regard to Harvard. So I think some supporters of ours get a little bit of whiplash that that fire has been very critical of Harvard. They deservedly finished twice dead last in our Campus free speech ranking. But again, that doesn't mean that suddenly the Trump administration, the executive, gets to basically say, well, now we can pull all your federal funding and even potentially your nonprofit status, basically assuming that all of this stuff is true and ignore entirely all the protections you're supposed to have.

[Ricky Schlott]

But I also mentioned so many of the demands to have nothing to do with the Title 6 violations. They're just completely, like, beside the point.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah. And that's a weird thing about this attack on Harvard, which. Yes, Greg, you're right. They've been a bad actor on the free speech economic freedom front for years. But the justifications the government's using to go after them are a mix of Title 6 violations, racial discrimination violations, but just pure ideological disagreement. Like if you look at President Trump's true social feed, he's going after them for hiring certain Democratic politicians after they're done in office or talking about their ideology or their sickness or left wing bias.

[Greg Lukianoff]

How much you spend on true social media.

[Nico Perino]

I spend far too much time. And looking at the, like Trump's truth. Social can't be good for your blood pressure. No. I have this aura ring which talks.

[Greg Lukianoff]

About how I was admiring that.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah. And I'm always at the stressed level. I don't feel stressed, but I guess if that's my baseline, then I wouldn't feel it.

[Greg Lukianoff]

It. Okay.

[Nico Perino]

But there's, there's relaxed restored. I'm just never in those. In those areas.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Fire is not a relaxing job, shall we say?

[Nico Perino]

I have fun. I don't know. I don't really. I mean, I don't want to fall asleep at the job. So I like.

[Greg Lukianoff]

They do say in psychology, reconceptualize anxiety as excitement. And I'm not always that good at that. But clearly you are.

[Nico Perino]

I don't know. Like, I also started losing my beard here.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah.

[Nico Perino]

And my doctor was like, that's usually caused by stress. It's like alopecia areata. And I said, I don't feel stressed.

[Greg Lukianoff]

I've been putting a little bit of polonium in your coffee because I am Russian.

[Nico Perino]

Oh, so that's it. I guess I gotta stop asking you.

[Greg Lukianoff]

I think we do.

[Nico Perino]

But in my defense, on the, on the Title 9 and Title 6 point. And for those who don't know, Title 9 governs sexual misconduct and federally funded education activities and programs. And Title six deals with race, color and national origin, has been interpreted to also prevent anti Semitism on campus. The Obama administration saw a rape problem on campus and they said there was a real rape problem on campus. And they tried to solve that rape problem in part by removing due process protections and implementing speech codes. And now what the Trump administration is doing, except in the Title 6 context, is removing due process protections and implementing speech codes. And that's a problem in both cases. It's just some of the arguments that I'm hearing from conservatives now about the Trump administration. It's just like, those arguments weren't ever made in the context of Title ix. It's like, it's the government's money. The government can take it away whenever it wants. I was like, that was the same issue that we were fighting in the Title 9 context, too. You never made those arguments. So I guess that's me doing whataboutism.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Well, actually, this is interesting. One thing that is interesting is that Ricky and I come from, like, kind of, like, different political directions. But I always have thought, getting to know Ricky better, that, like, in. If you'd been around in the 90s, you definitely would have been considered left of center for your overall views. Just.

[Ricky Schlott]

I think so.

[Greg Lukianoff]

But you were. But definitely you were. You felt like a conservative by comparison, you know, for a lot of. A lot of your life. Where do you. Do you feel at home anywhere now?

[Ricky Schlott]

No. I mean, I consider myself a libertarian, like, more or less, but I think I was definitely in the first Trump administration more in the camp of, like, a lot of the things that he says, like, people freak out about it. He doesn't really do a lot of them and, like, chill out. But this time I'm like, okay, he's doing them and this is really bad. So I definitely have more TDS this time around. But I would say, like, I consider myself a libertarian, but, like, because I came of age in the, like, very woke, like, iteration of what the Democratic Party looked like, I definitely considered myself more conservative when I was younger, just in kind of the same way that, like I said, I feel like you hear now about, like, so many young men saying, like, they're very conservative. I think that they're kind of having the same reaction that I at one point had, which is like, all my teachers are telling me that, like, I have to introduce myself with pronouns, even if I don't feel like that's necessary and, like, those sorts of, like, formative things. Or I'm just like, I kind of wanted to rage against that as a kid, but now I would say I'm a libertarian and probably, like, centrist politically.

[Nico Perino]

We were talking before we started rolling here, Ricky, about how the book came out, what, 10 days after October 7th. How did October 7th change all this?

[Greg Lukianoff]

Very selfishly, it was terrible for sales. It swamped everything, everything else. It was not a great time to have a book come out. But the funny thing was, so I got, as Ricky can attest, she was so much more kind of like emotionally stable than I was during this whole thing. The process of writing this depressed the living hell out of me and it made me very sad and very anxious because. And since we were talking so much about the ways that you can dismiss somebody without taking their argument seriously, I was like, okay, we just wrote about how people are going to treat this book. They're just going to be like, they're not going to actually read it and they're just going to make up things in the perfect rhetorical fortress to be like, oh, this is a right wing book or whatever. They're just going to dismiss it to not read it. But the interesting thing about October 7th is that it definitely led to a lot of behavior on campus that very quickly got people to realize, oh, wow, there's something really seriously wrong here. The ideology was so intense, particularly on the left, that it kind of freaked a lot of even centrists out. So I think that even if the book had come out just a little bit later, people would have kind of gotten that everything we were talking about in the book was relevant to how October 7th would actually pan out and how the backlash would go and all this stuff. But that's also one of the reasons why in the new paperback edition has updated data. We made a number of additions to the text itself, but it also has a 2025 campus free speech rankings at the back of it, which is nice to update, in which Harvard finishes last. But it also has an epilogue talking about how crazy things on campus because. Ricky, are you still a Columbia student?

[Ricky Schlott]

I'm enrolled, yeah. I don't really know.

[Nico Perino]

So you're not taking classes? I'm assuming that's what that means. Okay, so you were at nyu.

[Ricky Schlott]

I was at nyu. I dropped out and then I enrolled at Columbia. I took a class during the encampment semester, which is interesting. I got the pandemic at NYU and the encampment at Columbia. So really striking out with my college experience.

[Nico Perino]

If you try and transfer, I think the college is a are going to look skeptically at you. It's like, what sort of problems are.

[Ricky Schlott]

You going to bring upon us? Yeah, but it was interesting to be at Columbia with a press pass and a student ID because I had access like no one else did. Because they tried to keep press to just two hours a day at all times. So I was able to write about it in a different way. But certainly the experience of being somebody that was called to talk about cancel culture on TV and also called on to talk about campus culture after October 7th, like, there were some very clear early on cancellations that were free speech violations that did put me in a really kind of strange position sometimes on live tv trying to thread that needle, too, and certainly in areas and on shows where that wasn't really an expected take, too. So it definitely was a test of, like, are you really a free speech champion?

[Nico Perino]

Well, that's the problem with cancel culture. Right, Greg, you talk about this all the time, is when you're talking about culture, it's always going to be a little bit amorphous. Now, in the book, of course, you try and define what cancel culture is in order to quantify it and speak about the period that I think, even if you don't buy your definition or your data, I think most people in their gut feel like something significant happened. There was this culture of conformity. There was this culture of pylon. There was this mob mentality that went after people in many cases for holding widely accepted opinions or that just weren't.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Often spoken about or cracking a joke that in some cases you actually thought was actually woke but was intentionally misinterpreted because someone wanted to be outraged at you.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah, but it's also hard because there are some real transgressive, offensive, bigotive things that people get canceled for.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah.

[Nico Perino]

For example, I know for us, after Trump's assassination attempts, there were people who went on social media talking about how they wish the shooter hadn't missed, including one woman who worked, I think, at Home Depot, for example, as a cashier and had a pile on social media and got fired from her job at Home Depot.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Sorry, guys, that's cancel culture. We're pretty clear about that.

[Nico Perino]

But it's nevertheless unsympathetic. Unsympathetic. And so you're trying to define something in some cases that is not always easily definable or there's not always an easy solution or response for it.

[Greg Lukianoff]

I did have a. So in the appendix, we get in some of the. We go a little bit more in the nitty gritty and some of the law by comparison. I do think sometimes people, like, listen, a lot of people will argue something isn't cancel culture. And I try to reframe it to be kind of like what you're saying is you think canceling this person in this question was justified. And if that's your opinion, defend it. But like, don't like pretend. Like if it's a campaign to get someone fired for their speech, you're talking about something completely different.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah. So I think we can all agree that the McCarthy era is over now. Is the cancel culture era over? Even if you know it's like the Roman empire and you don't quite know when it ends or when it started?

[Greg Lukianoff]

1453.

[Nico Perino]

So do you think cancel culture is dead?

[Greg Lukianoff]

No, but I do. I think it still lives in corners. I think it is less severe. And the more pressing issue right now is actually good old fashioned exercise of state power against speech.

[Nico Perino]

What about you, Ricky, what are you thinking?

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah, I think it just is taking a different form and has new targets now. And. And I mean, I still feel in some sense that even if it is federally directed, it still is kind of cancel culture in a sense to target students over op EDS and stuff. I mean, functionally, I think it's very similar, if not definitionally exactly what we were talking about. I think it is quite similar.

[Nico Perino]

Yeah, but would you say worse because it's coming from the government as opposed to a Twitter mob?

[Ricky Schlott]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty clear to me that it's in some ways a reactionary kind of causal thing too. In some ways it's learning from example about how you take someone down for their ideas. I don't think that it came out of a vacuum that the administration thinks that you can attack people like that, because we've been doing that in different ways. It just hasn't been federally directed.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah. One of the reasons why I think this book will continue to be very useful for a long time coming is it definitely explains how we got here because I'm definitely running into a little bit on social media. Every so often someone pops up and kind of like points at one of us being kind of like, well, your advocacy led to this backlash. And I'm like, our advocacy did not lead to this backlash. Behavior largely on the left actually led to a backlash. And if you're saying we shouldn't have covered it, I think that's nuts and I think that's self indulgent.

[Nico Perino]

It's also an argument for never doing anything ever to correct any excess.

[Greg Lukianoff]

Yeah, exactly.

[Nico Perino]

It's like, I guess we're just supposed to down sit, sit here and not do anything because your advocacy against this excess could lead to a backlash that's the same or worse.

[Greg Lukianoff]

And I can't imagine if it had been some other Republican president in power that a lot of the maybe we would have a situation where some of the reforms were being in higher ed, for example, were being pursued in completely kosher ways. So I think that there's a desire to pretend like the thing that actually led to the backlash didn't really happen or wasn't that big of a deal in the first place. And it's kind of like two things can be true at the same time, is that the problem was really bad and it really alienated most Americans in a big way. And the response to it is scary.

[Nico Perino]

Well, I think we're going to leave it there, folks. The book is the Canceling of the American Mind, now out in paperback with a new what Epilogue.

[Greg Lukianoff]

That new epilogue.

[Nico Perino]

New data.

[Greg Lukianoff]

New Data. And the 2025 Campus Free Speech rankings in the back.

[Nico Perino]

And it has very big text.

[Greg Lukianoff]

I'm such a believer in that. As someone who doesn't like to have.

[Nico Perino]

To wear my glasses, and now that I have to start wearing glasses, I am very appreciative of this height and.

[Greg Lukianoff]

I are very big on, like, little details that make reading easier. It's one of the reasons why we kind of hated the British version of Coddling the American mind because it made the text too small and they thought we were being a little silly about this. And I'm like, no, you want something to like. You want to remove as many barriers to people reading your books and you make the text too small. It's difficult.

[Nico Perino]

They also spell their words wrong.

[Greg Lukianoff]

My mother is British. Thank you very much. Everything deserves a U.

[Nico Perino]

All right, Ricky Schlott, Greg Lukianoff, thanks for being here. I am Nico Perino and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my Fire colleagues, including Sam Lee, Aaron Reese, and Chris Maltby. The podcast is produced by Sam Lee, and you can learn more about so to Speak by subscribing to our YouTube channel or substack page, both of which feature video versions of this conversation. You can follow us on X by searching for the handle Free Speech Talk and you can send us feedback @sotospeak the fire.org Again, that is, so to speak@the fire.org if you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Reviews. Help us attract new listeners to the show.

[Greg Lukianoff]

And please support Fire.

[Nico Perino]

And please support Fire. And buy Greg and Ricky's future books, too. This book. This book is what? Well, so folks, until next time, I thank you all again for listening.