Greg Lukianoff on Cancel Culture and Free Speech
Defining cancel culture and the case for free speech
Greg Lukianoff describes cancel culture as an increase in campaigns—especially successful ones—to get people fired, expelled, or deplatformed for speech, alongside a climate of fear about expressing the wrong opinion. He says the trend became visible on campuses around 2014 and later increasingly targeted professors. He explains that FIRE, which he leads, defends freedom of expression, and connects free speech to epistemology: because people are fallible and self-deceiving, open disagreement helps test ideas and identify error.
Lukianoff distinguishes the First Amendment’s legal limits on government from the broader cultural and philosophical value of free speech. He argues that viewpoint discrimination—allowing discussion of a topic but excluding a particular opinion—is especially concerning. He also warns that a society in which employers are legally free to fire people for political views may still face a wider problem if people become afraid to speak honestly at work.
Cancellation across politics and education
The guests discuss how cancellation can come from both the left and the right. Lukianoff says left-wing campaigns are more prominent in academia, while right-wing campaigns also target professors and contribute to book bans and legislative restrictions. He describes FIRE’s lawsuit against Florida’s Stop Woke Act, which he says restricted topics that could be taught in higher education, and argues that opposing ideas should be challenged through argument rather than bans.
They discuss curriculum decisions in K–12 schools, religious texts in public education, and the First Amendment’s paired protections against government-established religion and government interference with religious practice. Lukianoff says religious texts could be studied as historical documents, but teaching them in a way that advocates for a particular faith raises establishment-clause concerns.
The conversation turns to FIRE’s college free-speech rankings. Lukianoff explains that the methodology considers campus policies, deplatforming attempts, punishment of professors, and student responses about speech and disagreement. He discusses the rankings’ examples, including Michigan Technological University, Auburn, the University of Chicago, and Harvard, and says deplatforming attempts are more often successful at schools near the bottom of the rankings.
Lukianoff describes cases in which students and administrators both contributed to disruptions, including a shout-down of Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford and a University of Washington play where administrators were documented arranging for students to interrupt it. He argues that universities should examine administrators’ roles in such incidents. He distinguishes the right to protest from universities acting on demands to fire or silence speakers, and describes shout-downs as a form of heckler’s veto.
Rhetorical tactics, viewpoint diversity, and DEI
Lukianoff says cancel culture is part of a broader habit of “winning arguments without winning arguments”: dismissing people or evading their claims instead of engaging with them. He and the host discuss whataboutism, straw-manning and steel-manning, and Lukianoff’s idea of “starmanning”—examining an idea from a more detached perspective. He also describes “perfect” and “efficient” rhetorical fortresses: tactics he associates with the left and right respectively for dismissing people based on political labels or other characteristics.
The discussion covers viewpoint diversity in academia, the effects of ideological clustering, and the risk that political litmus tests can narrow debate. Lukianoff argues that DEI statements can be used to evaluate applicants’ politics, and describes an experiment comparing statements focused on identity politics, viewpoint, religion, and socioeconomic diversity. He says he is particularly concerned about limited socioeconomic diversity in higher education. The speakers also discuss DEI’s stated aim of building understanding and Lukianoff’s concern that some approaches may instead increase division.
Speech, hate speech, and social media
Lukianoff opposes creating a general category of unprotected “hate speech,” arguing that deciding what counts as hateful is subjective and that censorship can conceal what people actually think. He says restrictions may encourage preference falsification, push people into like-minded groups, and contribute to polarization. He argues that studying views such as QAnon or white supremacy can help people understand their origins; the conversation also considers the risks and responsibilities involved in interviewing controversial figures.
The speakers compare social media with the disruptive effects of the printing press, describing today’s online environment as a difficult period of rapid information exchange and conflict. They consider whether platforms could support more constructive, truth-focused discussion, and discuss Wikipedia’s strengths and limitations, including editorial transparency and political bias. The conversation also touches on social media’s possible effects on mental health and the challenge of designing systems that support learning and long-term well-being rather than engagement alone.
Personal experience, parenting, and possible responses
Lukianoff describes his experience with depression, including a suicide attempt in 2007, and says cognitive behavioral therapy helped him recognize and challenge distorted thinking. He connects the pressures of culture-war work and cancellation campaigns to his mental health, and describes how speaking openly with colleagues helped while writing his book. He also discusses the death by suicide of a friend who had faced a cancellation campaign, and the emotional harm that online cruelty can cause.
As a parent, Lukianoff says he tries to foster curiosity, intellectual humility, enjoyment of learning, and the willingness to face manageable fears. He says he hopes people are increasingly tired of feeling unable to speak authentically. For wider change, he suggests creating respected ways to demonstrate ability outside elite universities, building new routes for people to solve problems, and improving access to education. The conversation closes with thanks and a quotation from Noam Chomsky about defending freedom of speech for views one dislikes.