Greg Lukianoff
About
Free-speech advocate; co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind
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Claims by Greg Lukianoff (20 of 82)
European Speech Laws Rest on Modal-Citizen Fiction
European hate-speech regimes lack a bedrock principle and instead implicitly assume a 'modal' national citizen (a John Bull figure) whose list of offensive things can be enforced for everyone; this was always somewhat asinine given class differences and has become untenable as these nations grow more diverse, producing arbitrary and unfair enforcement.
Private Platforms May Refuse Harmful Speech
Even where speech is legally protected (as most of what Alex Jones says should be), any private platform should be free to refuse to host it; the legal protection of speech does not obligate a business to amplify a maniac who harms people who have already suffered the worst thing on earth.
Stop WOKE Act Was Open Viewpoint Discrimination
Florida's Stop WOKE Act, supported by DeSantis, was outright unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination because it would have allowed a professor to argue against affirmative action but ban arguing in favor of it; FIRE and the ACLU sued and won, in what was not even a close call.
Reputational Damage Deters Schools More Than Lawsuits
Class-action lawsuits against wealthy universities are hard to bring and unlikely to win meaningful money, and private colleges aren't bound by the First Amendment outside California; what schools—especially wealthy, influential ones—fear far more is reputational damage that turns donors off, which is the lever FIRE has used effectively.
Cancel Culture Destroyed Expert Credibility
Cancel culture and the campus calamities have been a well-deserved disaster for the credibility of the academic and expert class, because once a professor can lose their job for saying something like 'biological sex is real,' no one will trust that class to be objective—they know the experts cannot give an unbiased answer when their job depends on the 'right' answer.
Alex Jones Deplatforming Was Justified Defamation
Deplatforming Alex Jones was appropriate not because his opinions were odious but because his Sandy Hook claims were textbook defamation—asserting that bereaved parents were part of a conspiracy and hadn't lost their kids—which led to those parents being targeted; once a defamation finding exists, any platform is justified in refusing to host or help such a person.
Cancel Culture Defined as Punishment for Protected Speech
Cancel culture is defined as the uptick (beginning around 2014) of campaigns to get people fired, deplatformed, expelled, or otherwise punished for speech that would be protected under the First Amendment, plus the resulting culture of fear, with nuance imported by analogy to public-employee law.
Social Media Created Epistemic Anarchy Like Printing Press
Just as the printing press added millions of people to a faster global conversation and caused short-run devastation (witch trials, religious and political unrest, the Thirty Years War) before becoming a long-run boon enabling the scientific revolution, social media has added billions to an instantaneous global conversation, unavoidably producing a current period of 'epistemic anarchy' in which old authorities are destroyed before new trusted ones can establish themselves.
Free-Speech-Friendly Schools Skew Technical and Diverse
FIRE's campus free-speech ranking shows that the schools that do best on free speech tend to be technical colleges and schools attracting more economically diverse students (e.g., Michigan Technological University first, Auburn third, University of Virginia, University of Chicago), while none of the Ivy League ranks well—with Dartmouth the only one Lukianoff is somewhat confident is genuinely trying to change.
2014 Marked a Sharp Shift in Student Attitudes
Around 2014 there was a sudden, unsubtle shift on campus from students being very good on free speech (roughly 2001-2014) to demanding deplatformings and signing petitions to fire professors for protected and even factually accurate speech, with the worst escalation between 2017-2018 and last year being the worst on record for deplatformings, overwhelmingly driven by pro-Palestinian shout-downs since October 7th.
Viewpoint Diversity Collapsed in Late 1990s
Although political correctness appeared to fade as a public concern by the mid-1990s, the viewpoint diversity of professor hirings actually plummeted in the late 1990s and got much worse precisely while people had taken their eye off the ball.
First Great Age of Political Correctness 1985-1995
What Lukianoff calls the 'first great age of political correctness' ran roughly 1985-1995, when campus speech codes came into vogue, before the professoriate fell out of love with censorship and the codes were widely seen as a defeated joke by the mid-1990s.
FIRE Founded to Defend Campus Speech
FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) was founded in 1999 by Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors after their 1998 book The Shadow University revealed that students were increasingly punished for what they said rather than what they did, prompting an onslaught of requests for help in free-speech and academic-freedom cases.
Opinion Absolutism vs Unprotected Conduct
There is no such thing as a serious free-speech absolutist, but one can be an 'opinion absolutist': the mere expression of an opinion, however repugnant, must be protected, while categories like discriminatory harassment (severe, persistent, pervasive targeting), true threats/intimidation, and defamation are and should be unprotected because they are something more than mere opinion.
Holocaust Denial Laws Are Counterproductive
Laws against Holocaust denial and other 'wrong' opinions are wrong-headed and backfire because they fail to make people understand the truth; suppression instead signals to conspiracy theorists they're onto something and leaves believers in the truth holding it brittlely, like a prejudice, without ever confronting the overwhelming evidence.
Bedrock Principle Suits Multicultural Society
The First Amendment's 'bedrock principle'—that you cannot ban speech simply because it's offensive (from Texas v. Johnson, 1989)—is an especially sensible rule for a genuinely multicultural society because different cultures have radically different notions of what is offensive, so any offense-based standard would be arbitrary.
Pure Informational Theory of Free Speech
Because the goal of human knowledge is to know the world as it is, and you cannot know the world without knowing what people actually think, terrifying people into silence deprives society of crucial information; even false conspiracy beliefs are valuable to know because knowing what your uncle or neighbor actually believes is important information about the world.
Mill's Trident Justifies Free Discussion
In a truth-seeking discussion there are only three possibilities—you are completely wrong, partially right/partially wrong (the most common case), or completely right—and in every case free speech helps: it exposes error, it sifts the wrong parts from a mixed opinion, and it prevents even true beliefs from being held brittlely like prejudices.
Truth Is Arduous and Provisional
Objective truth exists but is very hard to know and even harder to prove to others; the truth about truth is that it is an arduous, non-stop, provisional process, which is why anyone who appoints themselves arbiter of truth is dangerous—as shown by how often things labeled 'disinformation' (like the COVID lab-leak hypothesis) were later not so clearly false.
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