Greg Lukianoff
What this covers
Greg Lukianoff and Lex Fridman examine the mechanics and consequences of contemporary censorship, with Lukianoff arguing that cancel culture represents a historically unprecedented shift in how dissent is suppressed. Rather than state censorship imposed from above, the current landscape involves distributed enforcement—administrators, activists, and institutions collectively narrowing the range of speakable opinion. The conversation treats free speech as epistemology, grounding the argument not in abstract rights but in the practical problem that censorship distorts reality: when people cannot say what they think, society loses access to genuine belief, generating a falsified map of the world that compounds error and misalignment.
The discussion ranges across how rhetorical shortcuts—dismissing opponents rather than engaging them, deploying unfalsifiable accusations, deploying viewpoint diversity as a concept—replace actual argument. Lukianoff traces group polarization to low political diversity in institutions, particularly academia, where the absence of respected dissenters causes tribal thinking and the emergence of "sacred ideas" immune to criticism. He draws on historical parallels (the printing press analogy: initial chaos before cultural adaptation) and contemporary data (faculty self-censorship rising from 9% to 90% across domains) to establish scope. The conversation also addresses elite contempt for working-class Americans, the way labeling functions as a weapon that bypasses thought, and the asymmetry in how canceled figures—even when eventually vindicated—never recover social standing. Throughout, the core tension remains: whether suppressing "dangerous" speech produces short-term safety or long-term ignorance.
Lukianoff argues that cancel culture is a real, historically unprecedented phenomenon driven by lazy rhetorical tactics that let people 'win arguments without winning arguments,' and that free speech matters primarily as an epistemological tool for reaching truth rather than merely a legal right.
- Censorship deprives society of knowledge of what people really think, causing preference falsification and group polarization
- Both left and right deploy 'rhetorical fortresses' that dismiss opponents without engaging their arguments
- Low viewpoint diversity in academia produces tribal thinking and sacred ideas that cannot be questioned
Cancel culture represents unprecedented successful punishment of constitutionally protected speech through mob enforcement.
- Beginning around 2017 cancellation campaigns started being directed at professors, and the number of professors targeted and losing their jobs is unlike anything seen in 22 years of doing this work.
“When it comes to the number of professors that we’ve seen be targeted and lose their jobs, I’ve been doing this for 22 years and I’ve seen nothing like it.”
- Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns, especially successful ones starting around 2014, to get people fired, expelled, or de-platformed for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment, plus the resulting climate of fear that you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion.
“Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns starting around 2014 to get people fired, expelled, de-platformed, et cetera, for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment.”
- In FIRE's college free speech rankings, Harvard scored a negative 10.69 (rounded to zero), the only school to receive an 'abysmal' rating and dead last, while Michigan Technological University ranked first and the University of Chicago, formerly top-ranked, fell to 13th after refusing to recognize a Turning Point USA chapter.
“The school that did not do so well at a negative 10.69, negative 10.69, and we rounded up to zero, was Harvard.”
- Cancel culture takes different forms on left and right: the left dominates on campus where it leads most cancellation attempts, but roughly one-third of successful attempts to punish professors come from the right, often via off-campus organizations, legislatures, and outlets like Fox News, and through book bans.
“about one third of the attempts to get professors punished that are successful actually do come from the right”
- Cancel culture is cruel, merciless, and anti-intellectual, and will never get you anywhere near truth—you waste time destroying opponents in a process that cannot get at truth, because you never get directly at truth, you only chip away at falsity.
“cancel culture is cruel, it’s merciless, it’s anti-intellectual, but it also will never get you anywhere near truth.”
- Cancel culture as a way of winning arguments without winning arguments works by running out the clock: by the time you get a few steps into the perfect rhetorical fortress, the time is gone and you give up trying to have the argument, never reaching the actual substance.
“you should think of cancel culture as part of a rhetorical, as a larger, lazy, rhetorical approach to what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments.”
- So much societal energy is spent on nasty primal desires to find new justifications for who one is allowed to hate and where one can legitimately be cruel; this understandable human failing can sometimes be used to defend justice, but it will never get you anywhere near the truth.
“a lot of it’s like, “Please tell me who I’m allowed to hate. Where can I legitimately be cruel? Where can I actually exercise some aggression against somebody?””
- The pain of cancellation can be intense even without job loss—a relatively small number of people online saying bad things can be a powerful, surprisingly damaging force on the human psyche, and the 'sticks and stones' saying was never meant to claim words don't hurt but to give oneself strength against bullies; words can hurt, which is why cruelty online can drive people to harm themselves.
“just some number of people on the internet, and that number can be small, saying bad things to you, that can be a pretty powerful force to the human psyche”
Free speech enables truth discovery; suppressing speech prevents knowledge discovery and distorts reality.
- If the goal is the project of human knowledge—to know the world as it is—you cannot know it without knowing what people really think; every time you say 'you can't say that' you deprive yourself of that knowledge and cause preference falsification, ending up with an inaccurate picture of the world.
“Every time you’re actually saying, “You can’t say that,” you’re actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think. You’re causing what [inaudible], who’s on our Board of advisors calls preference falsification.”
- When you censor people it doesn't change their opinion; it just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble, leading them to talk only to people they already agree with, and group polarization takes off.
“when you censor people, it doesn’t change their opinion. It just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble. It leads them to talk to people who they already agree with and group polarization takes off.”
- Whereas the most comprehensive study of the Red Scare found 9% of professors self-censoring their research and speech, FIRE's latest faculty survey found that when you combine self-censorship in research, class, and online, about 90% of professors report self-censoring—making the current environment historic in how scared people are of expressing controversial views.
“9% of professors said that they were self-censoring their research... When we did this question for professors on our latest faculty survey... it was 90% of professors.”
- Protesters have every right to protest and even devote their lives to ending free speech, but universities cannot let protesters win by firing speakers, and shout-downs constitute mob censorship; the government's positive duty is to prevent a heckler's veto where a crowd silences an unpopular speaker.
“you can’t let the protestors win if they’re demanding someone be fired for their freedom of speech.”
- Inviting someone to a conference or interview is not an endorsement of their views—you can't possibly agree with all the opinions of everyone at an event—and it is valuable to be curious about what figures like Steve Bannon or even a jihadi think, because curiosity is the cure and we need far more curiosity and far less unwarranted certainty.
“you don’t have people to your conference because you agree with them. We have to get out of this idea that... that’s an endorsement of Steve Bannon, that’s nonsense.”
- You should be able to study what even bad actors like white supremacists or QAnon believers think—their origins, motivations, and ideas—because it's important for understanding history and modern politics, and for your own safety it's arguably more important to know what the bad people in your society actually think; Daryl Davis even deradicalized Klan members through befriending them.
“it’s still really important to know what the bad people in your society think. Honestly, in some ways, for your own safety, it’s probably more important to know what the bad people in your society actually think.”
- Allowing the Nazis to speak at Skokie took the wind out of their sails—they came off as the racist fools they were, even mocked by the Blues Brothers, and the whole movement dissolved after that—demonstrating that letting extremists speak can defuse rather than empower them.
“allowing the Nazis to speak at Skokie took the wind out of their sails... The whole movement, it all dissolved after that because they looked like racist fools that they were”
Low viewpoint diversity encourages tribal thinking and delegitimization rather than substantive engagement with opposing ideas.
- When you have low viewpoint diversity, people start thinking in a very tribal way; without respected dissenters you can point to as smart, reasonable people you disagree with, you start seeing opponents as only bad people or heretics.
“when you have low viewpoint diversity, people start thinking in a very tribal way. If you don’t have the respected dissenters... You start getting much more only bad people, only heretics”
- Labeling someone conservative—you only have to claim they are, rightly or wrongly—has become so effective a way to delegitimize thinkers that even the ACLU and the New York Times get called right-wing, because it functions as a perfect weapon you can use uncritically to avoid having to think about a person.
“if you could designate something conservative, then you didn’t really have to think about it very much anymore or take it particularly seriously.”
- Herbert Marcuse's 1965 'Repressive Tolerance' declared that the left should have free speech but only for itself, framing conservatives as regressive thinkers who need to be repressed—reducing to the old tribal idea that 'our people are good, they get free speech; the other side is bad and we have to retrain society.'
“In ’65 you have Repressive Tolerance by Herbert Marcuse, which was a declaration of, “By the way, we on the left, we should have free speech, but we should have free speech for us.””
- John Huss was essentially Luther before the printing press and was burned at the stake because he couldn't get his word out, whereas a century later, thanks to the printing press, everyone could know what Luther thought—illustrating how communication technology determines whether dissent spreads.
“Before Luther could get his word out, he didn’t stand a chance and that was exactly what John Huss was. A century later, thanks to the printing press, everyone could know what Luther thought, and boy did they.”
- Although businesses have the First Amendment right of association to fire employees for political opinions, if every business in America became an expressive association in addition to a profit-maximizing organization, it would be a disaster for democracy because people would feel they cannot say what they think and keep their jobs.
“if every business in America becomes an expressive association in addition to being a profit maximizing organization, that would be a disaster for democracy.”
- Public schools could legitimately teach the Bible as a historical document, but in practice attempts always turn into advocating for a particular religious read (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox), which crosses into the establishment clause, so it's probably better learned outside public school.
“every time I saw people trying this, it always turned into them actually advocating for a Catholic or a Protestant or some or Orthodox even read on religion.”
- The biggest sin in censorship is viewpoint discrimination—allowing free speech except for a particular opinion; it is rightfully considered a bigger deal to set up a forum on a topic but forbid a certain opinion within it than to merely restrict the forum to that topic.
“The biggest sin in terms of censorship is called viewpoint discrimination, that essentially you allow freedom of speech except for that opinion.”
- Drawing on Fukuyama's 'repatrimonialization'—the reversion to societies that favor family and friends—Lukianoff worries America is undergoing this process (near-dynastic elections like Bush vs. Clinton, legacy admissions, perpetual upper-class families), which fuels public anger and explains worry about elite colleges that produce the 'ruling class.'
“I actually think a lot of what I’m seeing in the United States, it makes me worried that we might be going through a little bit of a process of repatrimonialization. And I think that’s one of the reasons why people are so angry.”
- Whataboutism—defending against criticism of your side by bringing up the other side's alleged wrongdoing—is everywhere on social media; it's not always illegitimate, but it tends to happen every time someone makes an assertion, becoming increasingly attenuated from the actual argument, as when January 6th's seriousness was deflected by pointing to social justice riots.
“what about-ism is defending against criticism of your side by bringing up the other side’s alleged wrongdoing.”
- Strawmanning misrepresents the opposing perspective, while steelmanning—stating the opponent's view at its strongest—requires empathy, eloquence, and research; the related 'star-manning' technique reframes a position by detaching from it and recognizing how typical it actually is (e.g., 'hating Kansas' reframed as hating your dominant religious minority).
“steel-manning requires empathy or requires eloquence. It requires understanding, actually doing the research and understanding the alternative perspective.”
Cancel culture operates through rhetorical avoidance and administrative enforcement rather than honest argumentation.
- Cancel culture is part of a larger, lazy rhetorical approach the book calls 'winning arguments without winning arguments'—meaning both winning without having good arguments and seeming to win without actually having won—achieved through 'rhetorical fortresses' that let you dismiss the person or dodge the argument without engaging its substance.
“you should think of cancel culture as part of a rhetorical, as a larger, lazy, rhetorical approach to what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments.”
- When a university president puts their foot down early and refuses to fire a professor or expel a student, it often ends the issue very fast—and when takeovers of a president's office occur, the fact that they are sometimes catered by the university signals the administration's tacit friendliness toward the protest.
“a university president who puts their foot down early and says, nope, we are not entertaining firing this professor... It ends the issue often very fast.”
- A shameful new trend is professors demanding their fellow professors be punished, with the same people who publicly sign petitions to get a colleague fired privately sending sympathetic letters—a cliche within FIRE that reveals a failure of integrity.
“another big uptick has been fellow professors demanding that their fellow professors get punished.”
- A small number of administrators—sometimes a single DEI administrator—can empower and organize shout-downs and de-platforming, as evidenced by the Stanford Kyle Duncan incident where an administrator delivered a prepared seven-minute speech, and a University of Washington case where administrators bought tickets for angry students and trained them to disrupt a play.
“an administrator, a DI administrator, gets up with a prepared speech that she’s written that’s a seven-minute-long speech where she talks about free speech, maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
- One of the big problems in higher education today is hyper-bureaucratization, with administrators rather than faculty often driving censorship—and historically attempts to punish professors were overwhelmingly led by administrators until students began driving them in 2014.
“it’s a good excuse to cut down on one of the big problems in higher education today, which is hyper bureaucratization.”
State censorship, mandatory ideological speech, and administrative enforcement in higher education violate academic freedom.
- The right way to fight teaching you disagree with in higher education is to make the case that it's not a good idea for the curriculum, not to ban it, because the state lacks the power to ban what professors teach in higher education; this differs from K-12 where the state has legitimate democratic oversight.
“the state doesn’t have the power to simply say to ban what professors in higher education teach. Now, it gets a little more complicated when you talk about K-12 because the state has a role”
- Florida's Stop WOKE Act, which tried to ban particular race- and gender-related topics in higher education, is unconstitutional because the law is well established that the state cannot tell higher education what it may teach without violating the First Amendment; a judge called it dystopian and FIRE won the suit.
“the law is really well established that you can’t tell higher education what they’re allowed to teach without violating the First Amendment.”
- California Community Colleges' DEI policy requiring even chemistry professors to incorporate intersectionality and anti-racism into their syllabi is a gross violation of academic freedom; while banning what professors can say is bad, compelling what they must say is even worse and downright totalitarian.
“It is as bad as it is to tell professors what they can’t say like we fought and defeated in Florida. It’s even worse to tell them what they must say. That’s downright totalitarian”
Free speech survives as law only through cultural norms that defend it across generations despite human cognitive limits.
- Freedom of speech is necessary because humans are creatures of incredibly limited knowledge and are deeply self-deceiving; the early history of free speech coincided with the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment's 'discovery of ignorance,' since both rest on recognizing that intuitions and folk wisdom are frequently wrong.
“From a pragmatic standpoint, it is necessary because we’re creatures of incredibly limited knowledge. We are incredibly self-deceiving.”
- Free speech law is a reflection of cultural norms, so a culture that doesn't appreciate free speech philosophically cannot protect it in law for the long haul; thus generations of law students who think there's no higher goal than shouting down opponents threaten the durability of First Amendment protections.
“If you actually have a culture that doesn’t appreciate free speech from a philosophical standpoint, it’s not going to be able to protect free speech for the long haul even in the law”
Intellectual humility, curiosity, and political diversity in institutions produce better outcomes than ideological conformity.
- To build a free speech culture, the first quality to cultivate in children is curiosity and awareness of the vast unknown, giving a sense of intellectual humility early on, since only fools think they know everything and sometimes dangerous fools at that; facing scary things rather than turning them off also teaches that unfaced fear grows bigger in your head than the reality.
“the first quality you should be cultivating in your children if you want to have a free speech culture is curiosity and an awareness of the vastness that will always be unknown.”
- Research on group polarization (associated with Cass Sunstein) shows that groups with political diversity, observable even in judges, reliably produce more moderate outcomes, whereas groups with low political diversity spiral off in their own direction—so a supermajority from one political perspective is a problem for the production of ideas and creates sacred ideas.
“when you have groups with political diversity, and you can see this actually in judges... it tends to produce reliably more moderate outcomes, whereas groups that have low political diversity tend to sort of spiral off in their own direction.”
- Just as the printing press let extra millions of eyes tear down any institution, person, or idea (some of which needed tearing down), social media now lets billions of eyes tear down anything but it cannot build yet; it has exposed how thin our knowledge was—driving awareness of the replication crisis and the arrogance of the expert class—but we are not yet at the stage where it can build.
“an extra billions of eyes on every problem can tear down any person idea or institution, and again, some of those things needed to be torn down, but it can’t build yet.”
- We are in an unavoidably anarchical period analogous to the era after the printing press: the press initially caused witch hunts, religious wars, and misinformation, and Henry VIII tried in vain to put the genie back in the bottle, but it ultimately became the best tool for disconfirmation and underpinned the scientific revolution—so attempts to censor social media top-down (banning TikTok, age limits) cannot fix what requires cultural adaptation.
“in the short term, the witch hunts went up like crazy because the printing press allowed you to get that manual on how to find witches... eventually, it became the best tool for disconfirmation, for getting rid of falsity”
Cultural resilience and authenticity will ultimately reject censorship and create alternative paths to institutional excellence.
- Ira Glasser's story about Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers—seeing an African American literally on their team got fans excited about racial equality—is a metaphor that expanding your circle and seeing more people as quite literally on your team is the solution to many of these problems, whereas America increasingly sees each other as enemy camps.
“expanding your circle and seeing more people as being quite literally on your team is the solution to so many of these problems.”
- A sad aspect of cancel culture is that people forget why you were canceled and just know they hate you, so even when the canceled person turns out to be right—like Jennifer Sey on school closures harming disadvantaged kids—they never get the credit they deserve, which is especially galling when correct people were censored.
“one of the really sad aspects of cancel culture is people forget why you were canceled and they just know they hate you.”
- Generation Z hates cancel culture the most—because so much of young people's lives are online, everybody becomes cancel-worthy—which serves as evidence against those who claim cancel culture isn't happening, and may function like a cultural immune system waking up against it.
“Generation Z hates cancel culture the most and that’s another reason why it’s like people are still claiming this isn’t even happening.”
- Hope comes from people being sick of not being able to be authentic, because that's what censorship really is—telling you not to be yourself, not to say what you think, not to show your personality, not to dissent, not to be weird, not to be wrong—and that is not sustainable.
“that’s really what censorship is, it’s basically telling you don’t be yourself, don’t actually say what you think, don’t show your personality, don’t dissent, don’t be weird, don’t be wrong, and that’s not sustainable.”
- The most positive thing to address these problems would be highly respected, extremely difficult, low-cost ways to prove you're smart and hardworking that rival Harvard and Yale—such as a 'super BA' test only one in a hundred could pass—creating alternative streams of respected excellence so leadership and admiration are no longer monopolized by a few elite schools.
“if there were highly respected, let’s say extremely difficult ways to prove that you’re extremely smart and hardworking, that cost little or nothing, that actually can give the Harvards and the Yales of the world a run for their money, I think that might be the most positive thing we could do”
- Alan Charles Kors is a leading expert on the Enlightenment and Voltaire and has a Great Courses lecture on Blaise Pascal, famous for Pascal's wager.
“he has a lecture on Blaise Pascal. Blaise, of course is famous for the Pascal’s wager.”
- Lukianoff's near-suicide and hospitalization at the Belmont Psychiatric Facility in 2007 was significantly worsened by being in the culture war constantly—defending people on the left who would never forgive him for also defending people on the right—illustrating how the social isolation of cancellation-adjacent work damages mental health.
“the main thing was being in the culture world all the time... they’d be like, “Oh, that’s good that you’re defending someone on the left,” but they still would never forgive me for defending someone”
- The statistics on mental health among young people are bad, and Lukianoff is persuaded that social media is part of that—specifically the constant exposure that hasn't been good for people's mental health—so users should remember to get off it sometimes.
“The stats are pretty bad on mental health with young people, and I’m definitely in the camp of people who think that social media is part of that”
Leftist strategies dismiss opponents as bad-faith actors, making disagreement unfalsifiable and dialogue impossible.
- The perfect rhetorical fortress is the left's layered method for never reaching an opponent's actual argument: dismiss if you can label them conservative (you only have to say they are), then dismiss for being white, straight, or male, until even a person in the most intersectional 0.4% of the population with the wrong opinion is dismissed as a heretic and hated even more.
“the perfect rhetorical fortress is the way that’s been developed on the left to not ever get to someone’s actual argument.”
- Every prominent Black conservative and moderate Lukianoff asked had been told they're 'not really Black' for holding a dissenting opinion, demonstrating that the rhetorical fortress is unfalsifiable: a Black person's opinion is said to derive legitimacy from being Black, yet dissent triggers the claim they aren't really Black (Coleman Hughes's observation).
“asking every prominent Black conservative and moderate that we knew personally, “Have you been told that you’re not really Black for an opinion you had?” Every single one of them was like, “Oh, yeah.””
- Because people don't want to live in a world without authorities they respect, individuals and institutions will increasingly establish themselves as high-integrity and always honest (Lukianoff cites Fridman as an example and FIRE's 'if it's free speech, we will defend it, period' stance), and a rules-bound truth-focused stream on X—barring the rhetorical fortresses—could meaningfully speed up the separation of truth from falsity.
“people are going to establish themselves as being high integrity, that they’ll always be honest... people need to have authorities that they can actually trust.”
DEI and critical race theory ideology alienate by ranking people by oppression rather than treating all as legitimate.
- Although DEI practitioners genuinely want to create bonds of understanding and compassion, the research on what DEI actually does is often the opposite, partly because the ideology drawn from critical race theory bakes in assumptions that make people feel more alienated—reflecting the difference between common humanity and common enemy identity politics.
“the research on what a lot of DEI actually does, there’s oftentimes the opposite of that.”
- Elite education is insulting to the working class because the dominant ideology treats nearly 70% of the American public as somehow illegitimate and unworthy of respect or compassion, leaving the right feeling constantly gaslit; this elitism masquerades as infinite compassion but rests on an oversimple ideology of ranking people by oppression and intersecting identities.
“Elite education is really insulting to the working class. Part of the ideology that is dominant right now kind of treats almost 70% of the American public like they’re... to some way illegitimate and not worthy of respect or compassion.”
- 'Hate speech' is the best marketing campaign for censorship, invented in 20th-century academia—the founders of critical race theory (Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda) sought to create a new category of unprotected speech called hate speech and ban it—but you can't ban speech merely because it's offensive, as offense is too subjective, which is why such codes are more readily adopted in Europe.
“Hate speech is the best marketing campaign for censorship and it came from academia of the 20th century.”
Students shifted from defending free speech to advocating censorship around 2014 with administrator collaboration.
- The big change in 2014 was that students—who for most of Lukianoff's career until about 2013-2014 were the best, most unambiguous constituency for free speech—suddenly became the ones advocating for de-platforming and new speech codes, in collaboration with a handful of administrators.
“for most of my career, students were great on freedom of speech. They were the best constituency for free speech, absolutely unambiguously until about 2013, 2014.”