← UnHerd with Freddie Sayers
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- [00:00]
Greg Lukianoff
El programa Nacional de Vecas a Serde McDonald's a beneficiado mas de dieciente mil estudian tes con maze trentai cinco missiones de casas otorgadas esta esmeraciones de. Uno paral siguerte capitul los cribes and McDonald's punta com yagonal hacer.
- [00:32]
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- [01:06]
Freddie Sayers
Hello and welcome back to Unherd. As we look back on 2025, has the question of free speech got better or worse? A big part of the Trump campaign, part of the success of that Republican movement was was that free speech was going to be restored. They shared our outrage that during 20202021 normal ideas considered controversial around things like COVID 19, around questions of gender, around all sorts of taboo topics became censored, institutions were shutting people down, people were cancelled throughout that period and it was an outrage. It was a transgression of the right to free speech and free expression. That energy, that outrage and the promise to make it better and put it right was a big part of Donald Trump's success and part of why he was re elected. So how has it actually gone? Well, a report out last week from fire, the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, makes really sobering reading because what they conclude is that 2025, looking back on it, was worse for infringements of academic and individual freedom of expression worse than 2020, known throughout the western world as the peak point of woke craziness of the censorship cancel culture movement that peaked in 2020 and now, according to Fire, 2025 was worse. They conduct an ongoing survey and they retain a database of individual definite infringements of free expression. And by their calculations, during 2025, the year we are just coming to an end of, there were 273 documented attempts to sanction student speech on campuses, breaking the 2020 record of 252. And even more frighteningly, the report also finds that there were 309 attempts, an all time high, to sanction and Silence scholars, that is people in academic positions, in universities from speaking their mind. Now, to me, this should be front page news. This is a really shocking finding because what it does is it undermines the central claim of the Trump administration and that whole movement that they are restoring free speech. This was a big part of the energy which brought Donald Trump to victory and to re election last year. So why have you probably not heard about it until this? Well, a lot of the media and a lot of the campaigners and activists who like to talk about free speech, who have devoted apparently much of the last few years to fighting back against the censorious instincts of the left, are kind of not very comfortable when they see the political right doing the same things. And so they don't talk about it, they make arguments to complexify it and say, oh, this is not a free speech issue, it's something else. And so weirdly, the voices that purport to care most about free speech in many cases go easy on the Trump administration and what is happening now. We wanted to get to the bottom of this unherd. We have no interest in partisan loyalties. We want to see the truth. And for us, we have been campaigning for free speech for years. We ourselves on this channel were censored. We've been shadow banned on questions of COVID on questions of gender, all sorts of taboo topics. They have tried to censor us and we, we have pushed back and we're still here. So we are not planning to go silent when we see incursions on free speech coming from the political right. To help understand this and to dig into the truth, I'm really delighted that we are joined today by Greg Lukianoff. He is a lawyer, a best selling author and the president of fire, the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And before I bring him on, I just want to say that FIRE is the perfect institution to adjudicate on questions of free speech. They have been attacked by the political left for years for defending people who said things that were considered so controversial they should be censored. 2020, 2021, 2022. Throughout those years, they were coded as a right wing organization by many critics because they dared to push back against Sen. Censorship and infringements on free expression. Now the same organization headed by the same individual who you're about to hear from is pointing the finger very clearly at the political right and the atmosphere that has transpired since Donald Trump's election. So, uncomfortable as it may be for some of the viewers of this channel, I think we need to pay attention Greg Lukianoff, welcome to Unherd.
- [06:14]
Greg Lukianoff
Thanks for having me.
- [06:16]
Freddie Sayers
So fire, the organization which you lead has put out some statistics in the past week which I haven't seen as widely reported as I would expect, but to me are absolute front page news. And the first is that in the year 2025, and it's worth saying the year isn't even over yet. You've counted more individual attempts to sanction student speech, I.e. free speech issues on campus, 273 in your database even than in 2020, which to most people was the high point of censorship and cancel culture. That number was 252. I'm also seeing here that what you call scholar sanctions, I.e. attempts to restrict the free expression of academics, has also reached a record high in the past year, 309 attempts, which is pretty much a scholar a day. First of all, give us the broad picture. What are these restrictions on free speech and how has 2025 been different from previous years?
- [07:20]
Greg Lukianoff
Well, we've been doing the SCHOLAR under FIRE database. We go back a good two decades looking at cases, because fire is about 26 years old. And the trend line had been that in 2020 and 2021, two of the worst years for free speech on campus. I'm familiar with, at least since the law was established, strongly protecting free speech on campus, which was really kind of settled by about 1972. We hadn't seen anything like it. And I wrote a book called Canceling the American Mind, talking about how bad it's gotten on campus since 2014. Now, that was overwhelmingly censorship coming from the left, the on campus left. What's happened in 2025 is that the off campus right, especially politicians, especially local government and federal officials, have pressured campuses to punish people on the left. However, and here's the worst thing, the censorship from the left hasn't stopped. It's decreased somewhat, but it hasn't stopped. So we're kind of dealing with a worst of both worlds situation now, as opposed to free speech reigns everywhere. We're actually seeing a much more aggressive right and a left acting like it's. I keep on making the joke, a left that thinks it's forever 2021.
- [08:37]
Freddie Sayers
Because you put here in one of the reports that while 2020 was defined by things like the pandemic, the George Floyd protests, the culmination, the real peak in this past year was around the assassination of Charlie Kirk. So tell us about that. What changed then?
- [08:53]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, I was obviously horrified by the murder of Charlie Kirk. And I think that from what we know, now it's clearly about speech. It's clearly about him going to argue with students on campus. Something that, even if I disagreed with Charlie about any number of things, I respected that. The ability to go and actually face people who hate your guts and argue with them, oftentimes very civilly. But after he was murdered, even though Charlie was very much on the record opposing hate speech, opposing saying that, like, cancel culture, when people try to like is one thing, but people trying to, you know, make fun of you, who cares? The campaign that then erupted, coming largely from the Trump administration, but also from local and state governments, to go after people who said insensitive things about the death of Charlie Kirk. Even, like, as tame as what I just said, essentially saying that I disagreed with him on any number of things. You saw people losing their jobs over that kind of stuff. And when you compare the number of people who got in trouble for saying any dissenting opinion on race in 2020, the Charlie Kirk assassination comments, they compare. They're almost at the same rate that we're seeing people get canceled for saying insensitive things about the death of Charlie Kirk. Now, I'm not saying it's nice to say things like you think someone had it coming, but you certainly have the right to say that unquestionably in American law, to be clear. And it led to the worst case I have seen in my career, almost certainly, which is an off campus case, by the way. But nonetheless, this is worth spending a little bit of time on. Larry Buschaert is an ex cop living in Tennessee. He became kind of like a liberal sort of gadfly in this kind of conservative Tennessee town. And when there was an email sent out to attend a vigil for Charlie Kirk, he sent out a meme saying, I think this is relevant today. And it was a picture of Trump saying, in response to a school shooting in Perry, I believe Indiana, saying that we need to get over it. Now, people disagree about whether or not what Trump was really saying there, but a lot of people took that as him being insensitive to, to the murder of people at the high school. And I'm going to explain what the logic was for putting him in jail. And it's not going to make any sense. And I can promise you, as a First Amendment lawyer, you're correct, it doesn't make any sense. The argument was this. There was a Perry county high school in Tennessee, not even the same name, but somehow the sheriff tried to argue that because the name was similar Perry High School, that the meme was related to that that was a threat potentially on the lives of the students at Perry County High School. And therefore, a judge agreed because this guy was a local gas lie. And they set a $2 million bond on this guy that he couldn't pay, obviously. And he spent 37 days in jail for this meme. Really making fun of Trump more than anything else. And I have to tell you, I can't really find a case as severe as that in American history since at least the 1920s, for someone being in jail for speech that is that clearly protected.
- [12:11]
Freddie Sayers
So it's a local official pushing that law suit, but clearly inspired by the atmosphere that he was seeing from higher up in the administration, using what appears to be a completely specious legal argument.
- [12:24]
Greg Lukianoff
Yes.
- [12:25]
Freddie Sayers
To basically put a political enemy in jail.
- [12:28]
Greg Lukianoff
That's exactly right. And it's horrifying.
- [12:31]
Freddie Sayers
The direct involvement of the government in this new wave of censorship efforts is also a new thing, isn't it? I mean, in that case, it was a little bit more indirect, but there's a chart here in one of your reports that I can put on the screen for our YouTube viewers that shows the number of student sanction attempts directly involving politicians or government officials in the past five years. So 2020. Very few. Almost none.
- [12:57]
Greg Lukianoff
Almost none.
- [12:58]
Freddie Sayers
Of course, we remember that there were government officials having correspondence with social media networks and serving takedown notices and so on. So, you know, people can rightly point that out. But there is something really brazen about this.
- [13:11]
Greg Lukianoff
Which we oppose, too, of course.
- [13:12]
Freddie Sayers
Which, of course, which FIRE opposed as well. Yeah. But the sheer numbers here, you're going to nearly 90 documented. And these are just the ones. FIRE has documented individual cases of politicians and government officials sanctioning students. That's about 30% of the total of the past year. So it's. The new wave of censorship is explicitly political in a way that even the 2020 madness was not. Yeah.
- [13:40]
Greg Lukianoff
It is a bizarre shift, and it's something I. How sort of naked the partisanship has been. Now, to be clear, I understand people on the right will always say, but the left started it. And to a degree, that's an argument that doesn't faze me very much. We've been very consistent in defending people all over the spectrum my entire career. Everybody else thinks the other guy started it, and I don't care as much. I've been battling censorship on campus for 26 years. I'm villainized by the left all the time. But what's been going on in the past year is only making the problem that much Worse.
- [14:20]
Freddie Sayers
Let's just give some specific examples then, that people can get a sense of what kinds of things we're talking about. So a lot of it is cloaked in or appears to be part of a pushback on dei, on anti Israel sentiment that the government has obviously prioritized. So a lot of incidents here. For example, the U.S. naval Academy, the Defense Secretary's office ordered all DEI related content to be reviewed, which led to 164 scholar sanctions in the Naval Academy. Now, I'm guessing if we had Pete Heth here on the show sitting next to you, he would say, well, this is not censorship. This is stripping out censorious and illiberal ideas that were allowed to pervade the academy in recent years. And so this isn't censorship, this is a return to sanity. What would you say to that?
- [15:18]
Greg Lukianoff
I would say if you're removing books, if you're banning books at a Naval Academy, it's censorship. I disagree with all sorts of aspects of dei. Now, of course, in America, we've increasingly confused it with affirmative action, and affirmative action has been ruled to be essentially unconstitutional on campus. And that wasn't a surprise. Definitely saw that coming. But the ideology of DEI focused heavily on intersectionality is something I've been very critical of, but it's also something worth studying and understanding. The idea that you can actually win an argument by getting rid of the arguer is treating people like children and government like it's their mommy.
- [15:56]
Freddie Sayers
So in other words, you would say there should be counter speech or there should be the better opposing argument by the administration rather than just trying to pull the individuals who think a certain way.
- [16:07]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, let's take a very concrete example. It is shocking that Emir X Kendi had a book that was a number one bestseller for probably, I think, months in the United States. And in that book, Kendi argues for a kind of totalitarian government. Essentially, the idea would be that you would create a constitutional amendment to have a special department within the United States, the Department of Race Equality or something like that, that would have like extra constitutional powers to make America anti racist, which means prevent outcomes that weren't equally distributed against race. I mean, that's a formula for totalitarianism, for a kind of fascist communist, kind of, kind of dictatorship, essentially. And I know that sounds exaggerated, but you really have to read it. That's what he's proposing now does. Is anyone helped by not being able to read that? That's nuts. Again, this is treating people like they are children. It's treating potential naval officers like they're children that they can't read that and go, oh my God, this is. It's kind of like when people think banning Mein Kampf is somehow like going to do someone a favor. When you actually read the book, by the way, I came away with it being like, wow, Hitler's kind of a dimwit who's obsessed with really sort of midwit ideas. You can't actually decide for other people what they're allowed to read on the basis of thinking that somehow they'll be infected with that idea and go carry it around like it's smallpox.
- [17:36]
Freddie Sayers
And so the difference between you and many people who have been campaigning under the kind of banner of free speech in recent years is that you may find Ibram X Kendi's ideas ridiculous. And I guess I would share that. But you would defend his right to say them and publish them because you think they should be eventually self defeating.
- [17:56]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, exactly. The thing I come back to about the central value of free speech, to me, well, actually has so many values. But to me, the one that I really try to emphasize to people is it's always valuable to know what people really think. Not even if it's troubling, but especially if it's troubling and if it has ramifications for your life, you better know it.
- [18:16]
Freddie Sayers
The other big theme of the past year, really the whole time since the tragic events of October 7, has been the political rights response to anti Israeli sentiment. And a lot of people, I will say this completely frankly, people who I know well and who we have campaigned alongside on a lot of issues in the past few years, have really turned on the issue of Israel. And their previous principles about free speech appear to have been thrown out the window. And they seem very keen to ban protest, to ban certain slogans that they deem to be, you know, speech as violence, which was, I thought, was the concept that we were against. How much of the censorship and the anti free speech stuff you're seeing over the past year is Israel connected.
- [19:06]
Greg Lukianoff
The last three years have been dominated by Israel, Palestine on campus. And it's been a tension that's been interesting because to go backwards a fair amount, one of the reasons why the cancel culture explosion happened, and this is very badly underappreciated, is because there was an administrative class that was hired over the last several decades in the U.S. that was highly ideological. And for the first 12 years of FIRE's existence, that was pretty much all we were fighting were these mid level ideological administrators. Oftentimes, by the way, what are now called DEI administrators who wanted to impose their will. But the thing at the time was the students were good on free speech and they didn't really. They were kind of rolling their eyes at the adults like young people should be. 2014 was when you started having a critical mass of highly rigid, highly ideological students who were willing to kind of play ball with the ideological administrators. And when those two teams got together, you have cancel culture, you have the ideological disaster that was the age of cancel culture, which lasted, I'd say, until about, as I define it, until about 2024. What happened after October 7, though was that the administrators and the ideological students broke because the administrators actually tended to be a little bit more. I would describe as a little more sane on some of these issues. But, you know, that's a value judgment on my part. But the sort of pro Palestinian students, they were having none of it. And it led to protests that were shut down wrongly. It also led to a lot of things by the pro Palestinian students that were, that should have been shut down more often, including the fact that for those two years, for 2023 and 2024, the pro Palestinian students were responsible for almost all of the shout downs of speakers during the two worst years for mob censorship of speakers that I know of in American history. But the backlash to it has been to go after students and professors so aggressively for clear, protected speech. And I would say the single worst example of this was Ramesa Ozturk at Tufts University in Massachusetts. This is a student. She was on a student visa from Turkey. She wrote an op ed saying that she thinks that Tufts should divest from Israel. It was not a bomb throwing op ed. It was someone making a point that was pretty considered almost middle of the road on a lot of campuses. I may have disagreed with it, but who cares? She was arrested by ununiformed officers on the streets of Boston. There's video of it. It's horrifying. And then she's flown to Louisiana where she's held in prison while they decide whether or not she's going to be deported for writing an op ed that any American would be 100% within their rights to say. And that one even got the attention of Joe Rogan, for example, being like, okay, this is not what we want here. We don't want to be kicking out people who are here on student visas for having opinions that every American have the right to.
- [22:14]
Freddie Sayers
I mean, that leads to this really important detail which I think is what you, the argument you pick up when you mention those kind of examples, which is these two enthusiasms of the administration, a kind of nominal commitment to free speech, but also this huge emphasis on immigration, cultural assimilation, the threat of importing foreign cultures that are hostile to the interests of the United States. And their argument, as I understand it, is that people who do not yet have full citizenship, whether they be on student visas or whether they be on green cards or basically being in the country for any, in any way prior to being a full citizen, should not be afforded the First Amendment, should not have full free speech rights because they're kind of on trial, they are semi in the country, but not properly, and they should be expelled if they say things that are inimical to the flourishing of the nation. What do you say to that argument?
- [23:08]
Greg Lukianoff
Well, I'd say that this is a point that almost sometimes I think is too subtle for people to really get what we're saying here. But can you be subjective? And indeed should you be subjective about who you let in, given there's not unlimited seats and that essentially you want people who are going to uphold your country's values? Yes, you can and should be subjective in the granting of the visas in the first place and certainly the granting of citizenship. And I can pull some rank on this. Both my parents are immigrants. My mom from England, by the way, my dad, Russia by way of Yugoslavia. And if my anti communist father lost his seat, who loves America and Lionel Trilling lost his seat to someone who was like, yes, I hate the Americans, but let me in, I'd have been mad. So you can be subjective. Indeed you should be to make sure that you're not going to actually destroy your country's values by importing people who despise small liberalism. But when, when they are here, during the time that they are here, it's a big difference between not granting them to go further in their citizenship and saying, you have to get out now, even though you're here on a legitimate visa because of. You said something that every other person here can say. And I always apply this. I remember I was on Megyn Kelly's show, for example, and she was so upset about the Graham Linehan thing, about Graham Linehan being arrested at the airport. And so was I, to be clear. That was horrifying. But, but him being arrested, you know, in the UK and you know, having to point out, it's like, yeah, no, it is, it is pretty horrible when, when people, you know, but he was in the United States, he had just come from the United States and like the idea that like, would you have Liked if America expelled him, you know, to, you know, to send him back to be arrested in England because it's one think about Jordan Peterson for ex example, can you imagine under a democratic presidency like if it gets sufficiently radical then being like I'm sorry, we don't like your transphobic points of view. Go back to, you know, face face tribunals in places where you can actually go to jail for this stuff. It is, it is an important value because we don't want to become the kind of country that people, when they come here, they can't. They have to watch what they say politically to make sure that the powers that be don't kick them out.
- [25:30]
Freddie Sayers
So what you're saying is that the argument you probably would hear from senior people in the administration, which is we are still upholding the values of free speech and the first Amendment, but we are defending the homeland properly and getting rid of people who are our cultural enemies.
- [25:50]
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- [26:07]
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- [26:38]
Freddie Sayers
Those two things are not both true. They can't really hold both positions by, by going about it in the way they are. So you know, the central claim that they are still a free speech government doesn't really hold up anymore.
- [26:53]
Greg Lukianoff
No. And, and it's a shame because they came in with I came in. Of course I'm always skeptical of power. That's the role of the civil libertarian. But there are many things that they said at the beginning of the administration that I thought were great. I thought, you know, J.D. vance laying into censorship in Europe was like right on. You know, like that's, that's absolutely correct. But then to turn around and engage in such blatant violations of the first Amendment, both towards media holding, mergers over media companies that you consider your enemies heads in order to influence content. I don't know of any parallel to that. At least the one that's done so openly going after comedians, like I said, deporting people for opinions that are mainstream on campus. It's been a bad year on this.
- [27:41]
Freddie Sayers
Specific visa question or the question of how to treat people who are not full citizens and whether they should be afforded the First Amendment. My understanding is constitutionally they do have the First Amendment just like full citizens. So legally speaking they should be allowed to say what they like.
- [27:56]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, that's a case called Bridget B. Wixon from 1945. So the law is decided. But if you notice, I try to argue it from a philosophical standpoint as opposed to just saying, by the way, also the First Amendment requires it.
- [28:07]
Freddie Sayers
But even from a philosophical standpoint, the practical effect of continuing in the way that this administration is is for a kind of two tier society where some people sitting around a bar having a chat can say what they like and other people, if they're here on a green card or anything short of full citizenship, can't. It would be a very strange new world and it doesn't feel like a free speech world.
- [28:31]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, I always give the example. I grew up in a heavily Irish part of the US and explaining to my friends back home, it's like, yeah, listen, if you'd like. And there were people and I didn't agree with them, but there are people who supported the ira, like the great greater Boston area and like the idea that like you could have 10 people at like at a protest at Harvard or something like that, and the one person who's actually there on a visa would immediately get scooped away like something doesn't. Shouldn't sit right with you, that essentially the speech that everyone else can engage in, in an environment that's supposed to be about heavily relying on expression, that you can be removed for having an opinion that every other American has the right to. It doesn't sound very American. It sounds downright un American.
- [29:17]
Freddie Sayers
What's your view of the kind of so called free speech activist community, many of whom I guess you will know. Well, I would say I'm not going to name names, but I would say I have been really surprised that some of them who have big channels, big followerships and are really apparently committed to free speech, have remained pretty much silent on most of this. They would occasionally say something very modest, but they are in a very calculated way not criticizing the administration on free speech points. Have you observed that? And why do you think it is?
- [29:54]
Greg Lukianoff
There's always been a relatively limited number of people I've really counted among the real free speech people. There are Activists that some people point to as being, oh, this so called free speech person. I mean, remember they used to say this about Milo Yiannopoulos. Like Milo Yiannopoulos says he's great on free speech, but look, he's hypocritical on this kind of stuff. I'm like, was never serious about freedom of speech. There's a whole category of sort of, you know, right wing pundit who would argue free speech in some circumstances, but they never would care if it was the left getting in trouble. So I've never taken those people very seriously to begin with. Same thing on the left, to be honest. Like, to be, and to be very clear, there are people who really get pissed off when it's censorship on the right. Don't say a damn thing when it's censorship from the left. So I'm unfortunately quite used to that. And I haven't really been surprised by some of the people who've been inconsistent.
- [30:49]
Freddie Sayers
That's a very elegant way of answering it. But there are people who actually are running organizations. I'm not talking about Milo Yiannopoulos or random bloggers and pundits. There are people who are running organizations that are theoretically there to defend free speech, who get very excited and happy when there are examples of, you know, left based threats, the old woke wars. They're very happy to continue fighting anything that feels 2021ish. But the rising threat from the administration, they seem to be a little bit blind to. I mean, do you observe that as well?
- [31:23]
Greg Lukianoff
Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. That is 100% a real thing. And I sense something that is fundamentally different than I've seen in my career. And I mentioned this when I spoke at Utah Valley University about a month after, maybe a little bit longer after Charlie was murdered there. And I said, listen, I was scared to come here initially, and I'll just be totally honest about it. I was scared because someone was murdered here. And I'm certainly less controversial than Charlie Kirk. But I'm not uncontroversial and both the left and the right hate me. So. And in America, I should never be scared of visiting a college campus. But there's another thing I should never be scared at. I'm in court with the Trump administration right now. I'm in court with Trump himself right now over free speech issues. And I am a little scared he's going to come after fire because he's gone after every other law firm, every other organization that has ever opposed him. So am I counting the days until maybe, you know, Just like they went after Harvard's nonprofit status, they go after fires. Yeah. Do I think that's a real possibility? Unfortunately, yes, I do. And I should not feel that in the United States. So I do actually think that in some cases these are just opportunists that don't want to take on the Trump administration because they really just hated wokeness, but don't really care about threats from the other side. I do think that some percentage of these people are actually a little scared.
- [32:49]
Freddie Sayers
So the so called chilling effect is real. Yeah. It's sometimes dismissed, but actually you're a living example of someone who's experiencing it.
- [32:58]
Greg Lukianoff
Oh, yeah. I mean, even just on the most basic grounds, like we had to, we lost a lot of funding taking on the Trump administration because there were a lot of people who loved us when we were fighting wokeness. And I don't like left wing authoritarianism, which is essentially what wokeness is. But when we really had to dig in and fight Trump hard because it was something new every week that he was doing, sometimes every day, they took their millions and went elsewhere. And was I shocked. No, I'm used to that. Fire is a group that's unique and that we're willing to lose donors to do the right thing. But is that something that other organizations or other individuals wouldn't tolerate? Couldn't put up with the stress or anxiety of that? Yeah, they wouldn't.
- [33:45]
Freddie Sayers
I guess it's which you find more sinister, isn't it? I often hear the argument that, yeah, Trump is a bit of a gangster. He wants to accumulate as much power to his own personal whimsy as possible. That's his style. But at least it's not the former version of the threat that was all hidden in algorithms and masqueraded by so called liberal language and sort of made itself out to be virtuous, but actually was really sinister, whilst at least with a visible gangster, you know, it's kind of out there in the open. What do you say to that? I mean, to me that's. That's special pleading.
- [34:22]
Greg Lukianoff
Oh. I mean, I actually feel even more strongly about it than that. I do see a pernicious threat from the left. I think it's very, you know, obvious in the European Union and the Anglosphere how bad it's gotten. However, if you want to fight it, you don't fight it in the way the Trump administration is doing by abandoning liberalism, essentially. But also there's a foolishness to constantly trying to fix these issues in a way that's blatantly against the Constitution of the United States because you're also going to fail. Take, for example, higher education reform. I believe higher education badly needs reform. It was one of my priorities for 2025 was to have fire, contribute a lot more thought leadership and how higher education can reform. But guess what? Instead we were fighting the Trump administration constantly doing things that were laughably unconstitutional, particularly in its approach to places like Harvard. And what's maddening about it is that one, yes, you have to follow the Constitution because it's right. Yes, you have to respect free speech because it's right and it's principled. But also, if you want to effectively fix anything for the long haul, you also have to do it in a smart way. So it's again, just like I said in another context, it's the worst of both worlds. It's not going be effective against the threat. It's going to give the other side more powers and more excuses next time that they are in power. It's unprincipled and it's incredibly foolish.
- [35:54]
Freddie Sayers
Right. In just the same way that the right is basically mimicking and worsening the tactics of the left. Next time the left wins, the whole thing will get even worse again. Yep. Let's talk about Europe and the UK for a moment because I will. We may disagree now, Greg, because I will confess that to getting a little bit pissed off by the constant, relentless focus on the UK and its free speech failures from the Donald Trump administration. I mean, X is a particular kind of hotspot for this, but it's almost like they want to believe that here in the UK we can't leave the house before getting arrested by some policeman. And my honest appraisal of that is that we have serious issues. Most of it is a hangover from the 2021 era. I do believe it's getting better. I think some of the statistics that are bandied around are slightly dubious. Most of the famous cases of UK infringements on free speech, like for example, the lady who prays outside abortion clinics and tries to get arrested successfully for doing so. And that's a case that J.D. vance talked about in his Munich speech and seems to be talking about again recently, are again, much more borderline cases than the Republicans appear to want to consider. So, yeah, I think, frankly, this is I'm interviewing you here, but I'm just going to put it out there. I think the UK is in a better position with regard to free speech net net than the US right now because there is still an atmosphere of common sense. So when you get these outrages like Graham Linehan being arrested. The police themselves disavow it. They feel embarrassed by it. The police chief says we need to stop doing this. The prime minister disavows it. All the political parties disavow it. We still fundamentally just about have a liberal settlement where the principle of free speech is there and we're trying to correct it. That's what I feel, and I worry that the situation in the US Is much worse.
- [38:01]
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- [38:33]
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- [39:03]
Greg Lukianoff
Well, I appreciate that, Freddy and I and I respect you very much, but we fundamentally disagree on that. And he also caught me at a time where I've been doing a lot of research into cases in the UK and the European Union that are just simply insane. And I'm working on a comprehensive piece for my substack, the eternally radical idea of just shocking cases. And especially like in the last couple of months coming out of the uk.
- [39:32]
Freddie Sayers
Are you talking about that abortion center case or is that not one of your examples?
- [39:37]
Greg Lukianoff
That's not one of my examples.
- [39:38]
Freddie Sayers
And our best point viewers, I interviewed the lady in question, Isabel Vaughan Spruce, who has been campaigning against abortion for decades and has made this tactic of visibly praying right outside abortion centers where there is an exclusion zone for protest, trying to get arrested. You can take a view on it, but it's not, to me, the clear case of an outrage that someone was just praying quietly and the state sort of intervened. It's a little bit more complicated than that. What are the cases that you would draw our attention to, like the Darren.
- [40:11]
Greg Lukianoff
Brady case, for example. You know, that's the guy who Arranged the pride flags into, into a swastika. If you actually, if you actually see it, you know, he's actually literally just poking them together to make the, make the point that essentially he believes that the LGBT movement has become fascist in its own way. And, and he was, you know, had cops come to his place to say that people have been caused anxiety and.
- [40:37]
Freddie Sayers
That'S why he's being arrested, which is outrageous and ridiculous. And I think if you did an opinion poll of citizens here, 95 of people would agree with that.
- [40:48]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah. Another, you know, fight with trans activists, with Carolyn Farrow, you know, for example, where she was when she was making dinner for her kids. On suspicious of malicious communications. You know, that was a private communication. Oh, Elizabeth Kinney, this is, this is a crazy case. This is, this is a 34 year old mother who was beaten badly enough by a man to require hospital treatment. Her friend called the person who did it and called him a faggot and was arrested and got more time than the assaulter. That's, by the way, basically identical to a case, actually a slightly worse case in Germany. And this piece is on the UK and the EU where someone was raped by a young man because he was under 18. It was a gang rape, she was raped. He got almost no jail time. He got basically time served and she got jail time for insulting her rapist.
- [41:47]
Freddie Sayers
Again, I just want to be very clear here. These are outrageous cases and I think you're doing the Lord's work in drawing attention to them and we should fight every single one of them. So there's no space between us on that.
- [42:01]
Greg Lukianoff
And you should know, Freddie, just a couple of them are pretty new. Like when I was starting to look into this, like, there seemed to be a new one every couple of days. So like. But I'm happy to share them and if you want to pre bunk them, you know, if you think we're getting some of these wrong, but we have been triple checking them because we are aware of the fact that some of some of the stuff out there is bs.
- [42:22]
Freddie Sayers
I guess the question is whether the kind of fundamental potential throwing away of the whole idea of a small l liberal way of governing where power by the executive is limited by institutions that have real teeth, that are independent, and that it doesn't all come to the whim of a single individual. To me, that is potentially, and we're already seeing it this year, by your numbers, an even graver threat to the whole concept of free expression. Because if you have 30 or 40% of voters who are Just not even interested in it, or maybe even 50. That's a very vulnerable situation. More so, I would say, than places like the uk, where we've got this absurd hangover and there are still these endless, really despicable examples happening. But I feel like most people are against them.
- [43:14]
Greg Lukianoff
Yeah, you know, I think that most people don't understand how bad Trump has been overall. But when it comes to someone going to jail, which we see plenty of examples of in the UK and Germany being arrested, that's something that we have seen, one horrible one, and that's the Larry Bushar case. But thankfully, when people found out about that, believe me, they were horrified. I think Europe's in much worse shape. The United States and you think that America's probably much worshiped. But one thing we definitely agree on, free speech is in trouble. We can disagree on who's in bigger trouble. But I'm worried about this and I think that it does require a deep, free philosophical defense of small l liberalism. This idea that executive power should be limited, the idea that powers should be separated, the process should be slow, that rights should be equal, that there's a value in letting everybody have basic human rights, like the ability to express their point of view. And also the concern about making sure that you maintain those kind of small l liberal values, which is the source of some of the tension I think, in a lot of these societies right now is can this be sustained in an environment where some people seem to not really want liberalism anymore. So I do think the problem is global and the so called free world at the moment is not exactly covering itself in glory.
- [44:36]
Freddie Sayers
This is a final question for you and it's a really bit of a. It's a broad one. Yeah. The whole settlement that you've just been talking about, you've been describing it as small L liberalism. It's unfashionable right now. I can almost count on one hand the number of people who are effectively making a case for it and are getting any audience, it feels like on the political left and the political right, the whole conversation we've just had would probably just sound a bit like arguing over details or at some sort of process point. I can imagine lots of viewers and listeners listening, thinking these two guys are all, you know, they're focused on these process principles about free speech. Really, we've got a bigger problem here, which is that, you know, we're being invaded by migrants or that the economy is failing or that, you know, the west is losing its power. We need to reassert ourselves Those kind of things and arguments about free speech just get lost. I mean, how. And this is what you're doing every day. So I can't think of anyone better to ask how do you make that issue sound urgent enough for people to care about it?
- [45:40]
Greg Lukianoff
I've been, you know, getting increasingly frustrated over the years and definitely I've always tried to be sort of politic and I always remind people at FIRE that our goal is to bring people along, you know, and I still believe that. But I've been increasingly arguing for a fiercer liberalism, you know, because I, I come from left of center, you know, but I've watched my own side become re enamored in a way that was not fashionable in the 90s with the kind of harder left. And among center lefters there's still an idea that the sort of hard progressive, like neo Marxist kind of left is essentially a more extreme version of us Nonsense. And I've been saying this a lot to people who are getting from the center left, who are liberals, who are getting increasingly troubled by this. I'm like, no, we are liberals. That is a badass idea. It's about the limitations on human ability.
- [46:37]
Freddie Sayers
Which by the way is a fact.
- [46:39]
Greg Lukianoff
We know this is true. We know that we're not good at the following things. We know there are structures for making us wiser, for making us smarter, that acknowledge human bias that can actually lead us to a better society. We don't have anything to apologize for. And there's the worst thing of all for a lot of people, we have more in common, honestly with the center right than we do with the hard.
- [47:00]
Freddie Sayers
Left, with the so called classical liberals.
- [47:03]
Greg Lukianoff
Exactly. And here's the reason why, when you make the point that most people oppose it, but it's still happening anyway with regard to some of the stuff that's happening in the uk, it is true. You look at the polling, the massive small l liberal center in both Europe and in the United States is very large. But we're sort of victims of our extremes. And on the right, by the way, the idea of that people who believe in, I would say libertarian rightists, they should know they have nothing in common with the populace, nothing at all. And so I've been advocating for a fiercer liberalism the same way liberals had to advocate for this in say the early 19th century. To be like, yes, I know human freedom sounds crazy, yes, I know it sounds unsafe, yes I know it sounds unsettling and some primitive part of your brain still thinks a king should be telling us what to do. Because that's safer somehow. But guess what? Freedom actually works well. It works better. And you need some bravery, you need some sophistication, because this is actually the only system that worked. And I don't want us to learn the hard lessons of what centralized government and overweening power of an oligarchy actually result in. Again, because we've learned it before.
- [48:18]
Freddie Sayers
Greg, that is a rousing note to end on, and we'll see from the comments whether people agree. Thanks for your time today.
- [48:25]
Greg Lukianoff
Thanks, Freddie. Take care.
- [48:27]
Freddie Sayers
That was Greg Lukianoff, constitutional lawyer, writer, activist, the president of fire, the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, someone who has great clarity and great coherence on this issue and I thought spoke very impressively about just how bad things have got in the last year. Those numbers speak for themselves, and the United States is by no means a shining beacon on free speech right now. We had a little bit of a disagreement as to the situation here in the UK and I just want to be clear before I get pounced on in the comments. Every one of the examples he is talking about we should be opposing extremely vigorously. There are people throughout the government and throughout the kind of state generally who are still way too comfortable with policing free speech and we need to fight every single example of it. The question for me is which is the greater danger? Is it the fundamental throwing away of the liberal settlement or is it this endless list of egregious examples? We might disagree about that, but in any case, there's a lot to worry about and it's a big project for us next year. Join us and thanks for joining today. This was Unherd.
- [49:42]
Greg Lukianoff
Foreign.
- [49:49]
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- [50:21]
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Treat a free thinker in your life to one year of unlimited digital access to UnHerd for just $48.50 with a digital subscription, they can read every unmissable article from our star columnists, watch all of our amazing events and video interviews, and join the debate with other subscribers. They can also download the Unherd app to get the whole world of Unherd from wherever they are. I think that beats the old pair of socks, don't you? Go to unherd.com gift to claim this very special offer.
- [50:51]
Greg Lukianoff
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Freddie Sayers
This.
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