145. Greg Lukianoff — How Free is Free Speech?

In this wide ranging conversation focused on Greg Lukianoff’s co-authored (with Jonathan Haidt) book The Coddling of the American Mind, and his new documentary film Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story, about the free speech champion Ira Glassner, who headed the ACLU for decades, he and Shermer discuss: • the state of free speech today, • how coddled today’s students are, • the data on rates of depression and anxiety in students today, • possible causes of the coddling of the American mind: social media, screen time, culture of safetyism, culture of victimhood, helicopter parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, • cancel culture and its effect on self-censorship and silencing speech, • current rates of deplatforming and canceling in academia, • the polarization of politics, • when self-censorship is healthy, • default to truth theory vs. default to skepticism theory, • How gullible are we, really? • how to combat the negative influencers on social media, • a brief history of free speech in the 20 th • and 21 th • centuries, • why people in power want to silence dissenters (even free speech advocates in power), and • the value of viewpoint diversity. Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Lukianoff is a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School. He specializes in free speech and First Amendment issues in higher education. He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom From Speech. Read about his new film: Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story.

Release date

Lydbog: 1. december 2020