Plain English with Derek Thompson - How America Became a Nation of "Free Speech Hypocrites"

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

The past few weeks have marked a low point for free speech principles in America. The head of the FCC openly threatened ABC for the language of a comedian. The president told a reporter that networks that are "against" him should have their licenses revoked. The vice president went on TV and told Americans to turn in their colleagues if they spoke ill of Charlie Kirk. And many have. After Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University, posted that “if you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” Within hours, Libs of TikTok, a social media account, posted her message publicly, Elon Musk retweeted it, and, with the approval of the White House, she was fired. Conservatives claim that Democrats fired first. They say it was the campus left that got "cancel culture" rolling. It was Joe Biden who pressured—or jawboned—the social media companies to take down misinformation, in violation of free expression. It was Democrats who suppressed information on the Hunter Biden laptop. So what can we say fairly and honestly about the state of the First Amendment? Is the Trump administration uniquely perverse? Are we all hypocrites? And why does it seem like so many members of each party can’t wait to use the machinery of the state to limit the speech of their political opponent? Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, joins the show to discuss. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Greg Lukianoff Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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step of the way. Today, free speech hypocrisy in America. The last few weeks have certainly marked a low point for free speech principles. The head of the FCC openly threatened ABC for the language of a comedian. The U.S. President told the reporter that networks that are, quote, against him should have their licenses revoked. Then the Vice President went on TV and told Americans to turn in their colleagues if they spoke ill of Charlie Kirk. And many have. After Kirk was murdered, Suzanne Switz, an employee at Ball State University, posted that, quote, if you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can't be friends, end quote. Within hours, a social media, account called Libs of TikTok, posted her message publicly, Elon Musk retweeted it, and with the

approval of the White House, she was fired. These are strange and troubling times for the First Amendment, which is rather strange considering the day Donald Trump was sworn in as president, he said this. After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop or. government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Now, if you're a conservative listening to all of this, you'll have your rebuttal very ready. The Democrats fired first, he'll say. It was the campus left that got cancel culture rolling. It was Biden and his administration who pressured or jawboned the social media companies

to take down misinformation in violation of free expression. It was Democrats who suppressed information like the Hunter Biden laptop. So what can we say fairly and honestly about the state of the First Amendment today in America? Is the Trump administration uniquely perverse in its free speech violations? Or are we all just hypocrites? And why does it seem like so many members of each party cannot wait to use the machinery of the state to limit the speech of their political opponent? Today's guest is an ideal guide to these questions,

which, to be perfectly frank with you, I have not spent much of the last few years thinking about deeply. And I think that might be one reason why I think you'll hear me sort of struggle to articulate what I think is going on here, because I'm sort of working it all out in real time. Greg Lukianov is today's guest. He's the president of Fire, the foundation for individual rights and expression. Now, Greg Minces no words when he criticizes this administration and the hypocrisy of the right. But what I think makes him the right guest on this show is that Fire has, as in the last few years, been accused very often of being anti-left

for defending students and professors on college campuses whose rights, FIRE said, were being abrogated by left-wing activists. In a time when free speech principles might be at their nadir, fire truly is a principled organization. And I'm very grateful for Greg to come on this show to walk me through what's been happening for the last month. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.

Greg Lukianov, welcome back to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me again. Before we go dumpster diving into the flaming wreckage that is the State of America's First Amendment principles, what is fire, the foundation for individual rights and expression? And how did you first get involved with it? Sure, fire is 26 years old. We're best known for defending free speech and academic freedom on campus

because that's what we did for most of our existence. But in 2022, we decided to expand our mission. Actually, I mean, well before that, we decided to. And we now defend free speech nationally, you know, both on and off campus. You know, and I joined fire because I was hyper-specialized in First Amendment law. This was my reason for going to law school in the first place. And when they were looking for their first legal director, I was actually recommended by name by the dean of my law school. So, like, this is not an accidental choice for me, you know, and like a lot of people who join fire.

this is, you know, this is why they get up in the morning. So it's freedom of speech is an issue very dear to all of our hearts. And certainly the last month is why you get up in the morning. I would say the last few weeks have been a high point. What makes you want to stay in bed some days? Depending on how motivated you are by the state of those firefighters. Either a high point, either a high point for your mission or a low point for free speech principles. So just to get people all on the same page here.

In the last few weeks, we've had the FCC openly threatened a broadcaster over a comedian's monologue. The president of the United States said the broadcast networks running stories that are, quote, against him should maybe lose their licenses. The vice president encouraged Americans to turn in their colleagues if they said nasty things about Charlie Kirk. Hundreds of people have been fired for comments or social media posts about Kirk's assassination. So that's the state of play, as I see it. And I think a lot of liberals like me who in any given week aren't paying laser-like attention to free speech issues feel like some very important lines were crossed in the last few weeks. But I really do want to be humble and honest here that this is your expertise and not mine.

And so I want to know from you, what do you think is novel about the Trump administration's assault on free speech principles in the last few weeks? Does it feel as frighteningly unique and out of step with recent American history as it feels to me? Well, I would say it's not that unique because it's actually what he's been doing for eight, you know, eight months now. And it started actually even before Trump was re-inoguated. So the techniques have been similar, but was there an acceleration post-Charlie Curr? absolutely. And some of the crazy things that were coming out of Trump's own mouth or the administration were really, you know, head spinning. But I would also like to remind people, though, you know, that the reason why it got so intense over the past two weeks was because an activist was murdered for speaking on campus, which as someone who speaks on campus, and sometimes my point of view is not all that popular. And I'm kind of hated by aspects of the right on the left. you know like that was something that was that really played with people's heads pretty badly so but the turning that into an opportunity though to go against your political enemies is something

they've clearly decided to do the strangeness of it and there's a question about whether or not it's an intentional tactic is the adoption wholeheartedly of a lot of the tactics that were used, or a lot of the rationales that were used by the left on campus. So, for example, you know, Pam Bondi coming out and saying that people saying insensitive things about Charlie Kirk's murder, that that would be hate speech, you know, is a little bit jarring for us because we've been making the argument that hate speech, you know, for one thing, it's not actually an exception under the First Amendment. I also don't believe it should be.

I think it's a disastrously bad idea. But watching the not only Pambandhi adopt that, but Trump then tell a reporter, you know, who was giving him some not even particularly hostile questions, but that maybe, you know, maybe you could be found guilty of these speech was like, okay. So I wrote something in the New York Times arguing about like how there are all these arguments that were kind of made popular on the left and during the Biden administration, for example, like the embrace of misinformation as a good rationale for censorship. or hate speech again, or the use of Title IX, you know, to go after speech. And the Trump administration is repeating these right back with, you know, few variations except their preferred title is Title VI. And the hate speech that they're talking about is even more loosey-goosey than the lefts. Greg, before we get into the news, you're a free speech liberal.

I want you to defend this particular piece of real estate in this. the American political spectrum. What's so great about being a free speech liberal, especially today? Oh, man. You know, this is what I want to do in my whole career, because I think free speech is one of the most powerful and healthy forces in human history. That essentially, you know, and this is one thing that especially needs to be understood today, the way historically humans have settled who is right and what is true is through violence to the threat of violence.

the idea that we would settle it through argumentation, through a principle that essentially nobody gets to decide who is right in all circumstances, that it becomes a decentralized idea of truth, that it's a, as Jonathan Roush would put it, it is a never-ending battle with no person claiming to be the chief priest of Zeus and being able to end any argument. So I think that it's this powerful revelation in the limitations of human knowledge, for example, that has had massive outcomes in terms of peace. prosperity, innovation, artistic expression, autonomy, even mental health. Because how important the idea of actually getting to be your authentic self is to the idea of mental health, I think is badly underappreciated. Which is one of the reasons why my go-to theory is not so much the marketplace of ideas, which I think is actually a pretty good theory for places like academia. But most of actually, like what we talk about as a species are simpler, smaller things about preference and emotion. Things like I love that movie, I really miss my brother,

I, you know, all of these, like, that's my favorite book, like all of these kind of things. But here's the way I think of it. The most important value of freedom of speech is that without it you don't have a chance in hell of knowing what the world really looks like for a lot of different reasons, not just the way we dispute reality in terms of philosophy,

which is incredibly important, by the way, but also because everything a human being says, Everything that indicates what's going on in a sense internally is important knowledge to have. You are flying blind if you think you understand the world as it is and you don't actually know what people think. So I believe it's in society's interest to have a society that is so free that people actually feel free to be their authentic selves because then you can actually see honestly and deliberately what our problems are and how they can be addressed without sort of imposing on the world what it should look like. So I'm going to use a jarring word describe liberalism, which is it's an anarchical system. It basically says that no one person, no one group will be in charge of what is true. And I think the thing that's so amazing about it is it's a recognition of our own shortcomings, of our own biases, of our own blind spots, that essentially we can have a society in which you have genuinely diverse people living together, as long as within that society the systems represent.

And hopefully the individual will represent this at least to a degree as well, the sort of intellectual or epistemic humility that essentially like I know, honestly, in the grand scheme of things, I'm deceived about how clever I am. And that essentially I need to allow everyone to have their opinions. I need to allow mine to be challenged. And I need to approach my fellow citizen with respect and curiosity. One thing I love about that answer before we finally get to Donald Trump is that I typically think of the values of free speech being collective, that we need. free speech in order to reach the right political decisions together, see reality clearly together, allow for the truth to emerge together. But you offered a defense of free speech that's actually highly individual.

It's about my own ability to see reality, my own ability to understand myself. And I kind of like that idea that one can be selfish about one's free speech principles, not principled necessarily on behalf of the greater collective. So anyway, on to Trump. You said, right, the Trump administration has attacked news. media for speech, they've attacked Harvard for their politics, they've attacked law firms for their politics. It simply must be said at this point that one of many cases made for Donald Trump among conservatives was explicitly a free speech case. On day one of his presidency, Donald Trump

signed an executive order entitled, quote, restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship. He defended free speech principles in his first inaugural address. J.D. Vance in a February speech in Europe said, quote, under Donald Trump's leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree. End quote. I am not interested in getting you to tell me that some Trump defenders are hypocrites. Of course they're hypocrites. Of course.

The hypocrisy is obvious. That said. Yeah, that part of you used to is a free speech lawyer. Right. You see lots of hypocrisy wherever you look. What I want to know is, is one level deeper. why do you think in this day and age this kind of hypocrisy is so politically acceptable? Because it's not subtle.

In a way, you just said it's the kind of hypocrisy that is being bragged about online in full view of 350 million Americans. What is it, do you think, about this political climate and its relationship to the First Amendment that makes these kind of free speech hypocrisies so acceptable? Yeah. You know, it's something that Cass Sunstein, you know, Yale professor and great scholar of, you know, he like me has an intense interest in not just constitutional law, but also social psychology. And he talks a lot about group polarization, which is one of the better documented phenomena in social science, that essentially if you get like-minded people talking to each other about political issues, they tend to get more radicalized in the direction of the group. And he also really brought attention to the fact that right now, you know, party, if you affiliation is the thing that we feel the most hostility towards. That essentially people are now more upset the thought of their daughter or son marrying someone from the other political party than they are about them,

in the more traditional cases, of it being somewhat of a different race or different religion. So once you reach a high watermark of polarization, yeah, people start thinking of it as kind of a war of all against all. and it just is very unusual to have a president who fully exploits that, whose argument is, I mean, you know, for example, basket of deplorables, you know, like was a unbelievable mistake on the part of Hillary, partially because that confirmed exactly what the right thought, the left thought of them. But she didn't lean into that all the time. They're more about what the left might call dog whistles. When it comes to Trump, like this is his whole kind of bag.

Like we're in a war against the left, and it's a desperate struggle is essentially the messaging they're going for. And once you actually have this kind of warlike rhetoric, it's hard to find an opportunity to lower the temperature. The conservative case for what Trump is doing and the way he and the rest of the administration is talking is that the right didn't shoot first, the left shot first in the war against free speech. It was the left that called for silencing COVID dissenters. It was the left that called for repressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.

It was the left in the Biden administration that pressured internet companies to punish far-right publishers and de-platform them. I feel like those are the examples you're always going to hear, right? Left attacks on COVID misinformation, Hunter Biden laptop story, deplatforming far-right publishers from the internet. How seriously should free speech advocates take those claims? How serious were those free speech violations? I think since I've focused so much on campuses in my career, I think there is no getting to a good place on free speech without the left doing some reckoning with itself flat out.

And while you can point to what the Biden administration did, the Hunter laptop thing, the deeper issue is that there's been a illiberal trend on campuses that has posed a long-term threat to free speech, and the kind of things I've seen on campuses over the last 10 years are horrifying to me. But I'll give you an even darker, you know, a bit of information from Fire's latest campus free speech ranking. It used to be, and this is horrible, by the way,

that the left on campus tended to be much more accepting of shoutdowns of speakers, of blocking people's access to talks that they didn't like, and worst of all, of violence in response to freedom of speech. This is the first year where the right has caught up to the left on campus in terms of the acceptability of violence on campus. It's now about a third of students say that at least in rare cases, it can actually be acceptable.

And of course, those rare cases are when the hated other shows up on campus. Particularly when you compare that to the fact that now 50% of students all across the spectrum, think that basically no controversial speakers should be. We give them a list of like eight different controversial speakers, and now more than 50% are like, nope, none of these guys should be invited in the first place. So that's something that the left really doesn't want to take seriously about itself. Now, I consider myself a liberal, but I'm a Gen Xer liberal,

so I've always found liberal in the left are not the same thing. I have never felt that they are. I think their values are just fundamentally different on a lot of these issues. But I do think that the Trump administration and other administrations are playing this absolutely to the hilt to excuse incredibly illiberal and often really dangerous behavior. And creepily, they are behaving like they're never not going to be in power again. That essentially any argument that says, well, this will be used against you in the future, there's a little bit of like a, you know, when will that be exactly? Greg, I want to get back to college campuses in just a second because I think I'm persuaded that something has happened on college campuses that has bled into the non-campus world, into the broader world in the last decade. But before we do that, I really do want us to go back to the Biden administration because it is such a common counterargument from the right that the reason it is morally justified for Trump to do what he's,

he's doing to ABC, to the law firms, the colleges. The reason this is okay is because Biden already opened the door. Trump's just walking through it. So can we talk about the Biden years? And the Biden administration's attempt, for example, to jawbone or try to persuade the social media companies to take down what the administration thought was COVID misinformation in 2021. This is something that the right has a lot of sympathy over. And I'm just curious, as a free speech advocate, how you see this episode in American history. Was this a hair-on-fire violation of the First Amendment? Or was it a more complicated example of the government walking right up to a line but not stepping over it when it comes to

violating the First Amendment? Oh, I definitely think the government crossed a line. I'm on the other side of even some of my friends, and so was fire on the Missouri, what used to be called the Missouri v. Biden case or Murphy v. Missouri as it went up to the Supreme Court. It's a case where people who were kicked off of social media during COVID for saying things about COVID were suing the Biden administration to say that you are the but-for reason because of your job owning of these companies. That's why we were.

kicked off of social media and you are forbidden from using your exertions of power to punish speech that is protected by the First Amendment. And you can't do that directly or indirectly. The government is not as forbidden from demanding that private actors censored speech and the government itself is not allowed to censor. Now, can they say, can they have conversations with social media companies? Yes. Do I think those should be documented to be clear? Yes, actually. I also think that. And that's actually even a piece of legislation that fire has recommended. But I do think, as far as I'm concerned, from the record of Murphy v. Missouri, that there was inappropriate pressure on these social media companies to censor speakers. So what actually happened in that

case was the Supreme Court found that it wasn't sufficiently proven that that was the but-for reason, that the Biden administration pressure is why these people got kicked off social media. so those plaintiffs didn't have standing. Now, I disagree with that polling outright, and that's what puts me at odds with some of my friends. And just to be absolutely clear, because I think you covered it,

but I want to make sure that people are on the exact same page, right? In 2022, after this group of Republican-led states, sues alleging free speech censorship, as you've described it, the Supreme Court by a 6-3 vote, threw out the suit on standing grounds. That's what you're saying, because they said the plaintiffs couldn't show that they had personally been silenced due to the Biden administration's requests.

So the question the Supreme Court was ruling on was not necessarily whether the requests were constitutional or not, but basically that there was no effective silencing in the first place that would give them standing to bring this vote. And so I think it's an interesting case because it does, I think, to some people suggest that the Biden administration never actually did. cross a line that gave people standing to say, you kicked me off of this social media platform. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's really what it says, though. I think that, and here's the thing, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, has since said he regretted, you know, caving to the Biden administration. He kind of wishes he put up more of a fight. Google, you know, just came out and essentially apologize for removing people from YouTube, for example. And if,

Anybody, I mean, literally anybody from the social media universe had decided to be a plaintiff in this, they would have got standing. And I believe, Missouri v. Biden would have actually, or Murthy v. Missouri, would have been a strong decision, basically codifying this idea. The government may not censor indirectly what it cannot censor directly. So I do think that the right has real reason to be annoyed about this. I think this being used as a justification for every abuse of power that the Trump administration then engages in is, well, outrageous. And, you know, and of course, as a First Amendment person, my goal is to get off the seesaw of who's in power and who gets a censor who, not to just do that more efficiently. Greg, for everything that you're saying, I think that what I think of as the left versus the right actually have very different attitudes towards the First Amendment. or free speech in general.

I see the right often advertising itself as a defender of free speech, but once they get power, they seem to violate it. While on the left, I see lots of arguments, whether it's students on campus or left-wing professors,

in many cases saying, we don't think the First Amendment is strong enough to hold up against the social media companies which are creating genocides in some parts of the country and empowering authoritarian other parts of the country.

And we actively want and constantly say that we are supportive of measures that limit the power of the First Amendment. So I see left versus right as having somewhat distinctive attitudes towards free speech. But I wonder if you have a more sophisticated way of seeing the way that different people or different groups in America see the value of free speech today. I guess I would say I'd like to think so. And it's definitely been something that's been made brazenly, like blaringly clear in watching what happens on campus. And I think there is a big distinction between the progressive left and the liberal left.

And this comes out in polling. And there's a big distinction between the libertarian right and the populist right. And coming up, you know, like my origin story as a former ACLU guy, is that I was very much part of sort of like the civil libertarian left, which is very much part of the liberal left, you know, which I grew up with. And on the on the right, we oftentimes found really great out. in the real libertarian right. I sometimes describe this as being like the people who write for Reason magazine, for example,

like the people actually really care about free speech and care about it quite consistently, as opposed to people who call themselves libertarians that are really populist who want lower taxes. So, and this comes out to this day in the polling. The left that you're talking about is the one that was more marginalized when I was a kid. You know, the people were always talking about the weather underground and like all the excesses of the 70s. because I'm Gen X. And like I said, it does come out in the polling. So I think that the big middle, you know, of what might be now called the center left is still pretty great on free speech.

The center right is still pretty great on free speech. It is the populist that is encroached in over that is much more, this is a war of all against all. And it's the more progressive left that is much more sort of like we need enlightened censorship in some cases. And that's the way, you know, and I sometimes refer to the Hidden Tribes survey, which was done almost 10 years ago, doing a better job of sort of, I think, breaking down what the various sort of American populations are like with regards to a lot of these. But the problem is, right now, on the right, we're dominated by the populist right, which breaks down interestingly by itself. By the way, there's actually a new Hidden Tribe study coming out in a couple months that will have some very interesting and cool details about that. But on the left as well, I think that we are disproportionately dominated by a fairly upper class, you know, highly educated aspect of the left, which has its own peculiarities on a lot of these topics.

And as a kid, I never kind of thought that side would be beating out the more sort of like traditional liberal civil libertarian left, but it seems to have. I wonder if the problem is ideology or power? because it seems to me that the Biden administration, which members of fire and many civil libertarians think overstepped its bounds in terms of free speech principles, was staffed in many cases by lots of moderates. It was not, the Biden administration, and certainly Joe Biden himself,

are not far-left creatures. It wasn't a manifestation of far-left campus activism. It was a blend of a little bit of warrenism and a little bit of, you know, centrist, Democrats. And yet many of them, you know, in DOJ and throughout, you think overstepped their bounds. And now we're dealing with the Trump administration that is overstepping its bounds

and enjoys something like 90% support among Republican voters. So in a way, it seems to me like whatever the hidden tribes surveys are finding, which might be valid in the abstract, it doesn't describe what we're actually seeing in American politics, which is that, and it goes back to some of that you said earlier, for reasons that I don't think I entirely understand,

the executive branch is outfitted with an extraordinary power to litigate speech and coerce private actors to do their bidding. And because we live in a polarized climate, where the other side is always considered a greater enemy than the First Amendment is considered a great principle, that you essentially have each party supporting whatever it's doing to the other. I'm not saying this is a matter of making each side equivalent and saying that what Trump is doing is the exact same as what Biden is doing.

But it does seem to me like the issue is not a matter of ideology, but really more a matter of power. Well, I said yes because I think it's almost always both. And the thing is, I honestly don't know enough about the makeup of the Biden administration to argue with whether or not it would count as more left than sort of like center left. but definitely, you know, in the reading that I've done, you know, like Jake Tapper's original sin, it did sound like it was, you know, center-left people who wanted to please the harder left was part of it. Because, for example, the departure from the Obama administration, and even though we had big issues with the Obama administration's Department of Education,

Obama, to this day, talks a great game on freedom of speech. He says absolutely the note-per-note things. Then again, of course, the Trump administration, when it was starting up, said note-per-note, you know, good things about freedom of speech. But if your point is that we've given the executive way too much power, period, we have. We absolutely have given them too much power.

And there was a sort of an expectation that power would not be abused to the extent to which it has, which is a very, and I mean small our Republican, but anti-Republican idea. Like you're just not supposed to trust power with that much power and not expect some serious abuses. I want to talk a little bit about technology

and I want to talk a little bit about culture, in particular campus culture. On technology, there's a famous Tim Wu essay called Is the First Amendment obsolete, where he argues that these traditional doctrines are ill-suited to the modern attention economy and the troll armies that can be unleashed on social media, that essentially speech used to be scarce

and listeners were abundant. But now speech is what's abundant, and it's our ears and our listening that is scarce. And we need a new regime to think about how the state can limit the spread of speech that can be hateful, that can be violent, that can be negative and detrimental.

I wonder how you feel about this general argument that the First Amendment served its time. It served the 18th and 19th centuries, but we need a new kind of law for the 21st century given that platforms like Facebook and YouTube simply have no equivalent in what was available 200 years ago. It's just a very old-fashioned argument

that seems to misunderstand the function of the First Amendment because people made this argument with telegraph, radio, with all these other technologies, which, by the way, did come with serious social costs. I'm not one of these people who actually pretends that, like, all of these things don't produce also negative externalities. All of them do, in addition to producing benefits. But I do think, like, the argument that now is no longer the time for our antiquated system, you know, is an argument that it's a perennial argument in American history.

you know, Woodrow Wilson, you know, was particularly famous, you know, for these arguments. And a lot of, you know, his battle against freedom of speech was horrifying. So I think it comes down to, as per usual, really, you know, our constitutions mostly about who gets to decide these things. And actually to a degree who doesn't get to decide these things. And I think that the left in a lot of cases falls into this trap of thinking that, well, if my people were in charge of, of this, you know, that then we'd handle it great. You know, it's like, well, no kidding. That's what people think all the time. But our system is actually cleverer than that because it's kind of like, yes, but that's not the way you're supposed to think about it. Think about

not what the best angel philosopher king would do with that power. Think about what your worst enemy would do with that power. And I think we're listening, I think we're actually living through an object lesson of why, you know, the libertarians had a point in the form of the Trump administration to be kind of like, yeah, actually, the best way to avoid these situations is not giving the executive, for example, that much power in the first place. So I think if we had, you know, a government thumb on the scale to decide, you know, what hate speech was or where your attention should be better spent and all this kind of stuff, I think it would be, you know, the Trump administration would have even more power to decide, you know, who the winners and losers are when it comes to the production of ideas. and so with the left. So I think that Tim Wu's argument is a pretty typical historical argument

that comes up time and time again and it is an argument that power should have more power to benefit the powerless, which I think historically is naive. I feel like free speech, while it of course depends on the law, also depends on norms and expectations

that might be better thought of as culture rather than law. Yes, absolutely. And this is where I want to build the bridge back to college. You've argued in many places that the campus culture of self-censorship and cancellation and calls for punishing speech and norms of protectiveness have sort of these things got, they got baked on college campuses and then they escape containment and now they're out in the world. How long has this been going on on college campuses?

Well, you know, in various forms, as long as there been college campuses, you know, I call my subsect the eternally radical idea, because I make the point that freedom of speech is a radical idea in every generation because people stand up to oppose freedom of speech in every generation, and usually they're on the winning side. I think one of the interesting tensions, you know, on campus has been sort of like the sort of progressive left again, kind of like the Herbert Marqueuse's social justice. left and the liberal left. And I think that one thing that probably your viewers might not actually realize is that sometimes people will misrepresent some of the fire's work as being like, oh, they've defended, you know, like tons of conservatives over the years, which right now is something that gives us credibility for being consistent, and we are extremely consistent. But you should know that the primary target of a lot of the censorship from the left were

actually center-left liberal professors. That, you know, it's also because there weren't that many conservatives on campus to begin with and that that's an ugly story in some ways and also a story of momentum. But that essentially, you know, like they're being kind of pushed out, you know, to a large degree or at least, you know, made to shut up. So I would say that there was tensions right from the very beginning of the free speech movement. There were people within the free speech movement who are great on free speech like Maro Savio. There were a lot of people within the movement who thought it was free speech for me and not for thee. And then there were people

like Herbert Marcuse, who actually was very upfront about this, he thought that if we wanted truly equal society, the left should have free speech and the so-called, you know, conservatives needed to be shut down. And it's an amazingly primitive article. Like, I still don't get why people think this guy's a sophisticated thinker, but, you know, send me your hate mail about Marcos. The, so, and that thread has been interesting because, like, when you look, like, I always think that the interesting microcosm would be called, like, the great age of political correctness of, like, 1985 to 1995. Because this is one where

kind of like the Richard Delgado Critical Race Theory kind of idea of preventing hate speech really became extremely popular by 85. That's why a lot of schools passed speech codes. These were disproportionately by the way used against minorities that kind of

sullied their image to a degree. And then they also got defeated in court consistently from 1980 to 1999 to 1995, so much so that everybody you know like by 95 certainly and actually well before it, political correctness was a joke. Like people thought it was just dumb and it was like a rich kid thing and nobody took it that seriously. But here's the weird thing.

You know, Henry Lewis Gates, for example, you know, from Harvard was, in my opinion on very much the right side of this argument. And he gave a liberal argument against, you know, enlightened censorship of speech that might be offensive on the basis of race. And basically that whole contingent of like the pro free speech left actually won the day. But still, what ended up happening on campus is all of these ideas came back more ferociously later. And that's partially because people took their eyes off the ball on campus. Because I started in 2001 at fire. And I saw that literally verbatim a lot of the speech codes that were in effect on college campuses that got defeated in court. were in effect on campuses without anybody paying any attention to them.

And so I tried to warn everyone about this for a good dozen years before it became a lot more obvious to everybody that we did actually have a more serious free speech problem on campus than we were used to thinking. So I think this is a long evolution, and it's a hard one to undo. Just so I understand, how do you draw the direct connection between what's been going on in college campuses for several decades

and what's happening right now at the height of government. Are these best understood as two separate stories that are unfolding at the same time? Or is it more your view that what's been happening in college campuses for the last few decades is actually predictive of and causal of the culture of government that we're seeing right now in the news? Well, I mean, causation is always complex, but I will say this.

I think that let's go back to like the early part of the last century or even further back when maybe 3% of people had a college degree and saying that what's on campus stays on campus would be pretty persuasive unless all of your ruling class comes from that 3%. even that tiny percentage of your population if there is group think and there are illiberal values coming from that, you're going to see those reflected in your ruling class.

And those are people who are disproportionately influential, of course. And I say ruling class and does. I just mean sort of elite in the sense of like the people who tend to actually run the country. We're at now at a point where something like 35% of Americans have a BA. I think that it was long since naive

to think what happens on campus stays on campus when you have numbers like that. And the most important thing that people miss, and this is actually a disagreement I have with Musil Garby, who I love and respect, to be clear. But in his book, we have never been woke. One of the things that he talks about is, you know, is that this can't be like have recently come from campus

because students end up showing up on campus already having these attitudes. And I had to point out to him, By the way, that's what Haight and I said in 2015, as they were already showing up for it. But that misses the point that we have this K through Ph.D. situation and that so many of the problems that we're seeing, there's been a direct line, honestly, from American education schools. This is something that people have been pointing to for decades. Even fans of our education schools have been critical of the group think in education schools and the over-politization of education schools. going back to the 60s, like even 25 years ago, like the head of Teachers College was hitting similar themes about this as a problem.

So I do think that when you have certain bad ideas that both educate everyone who educates and educates their parents as well, the idea that that's going to somehow not affect the rest of society, particularly when practically all of the people who actually run that society come from institutions like that, particularly the ones that are the most ideological ones and the most upper class ones, elite education. So when people talk about elite education not mattering because that's not what our most students go to, I ask you to look at how disproportionate the representation from Harvard or Yale is among both conservative and liberal leadership.

And I would personally think we'd be a healthier country if that mattered less. I think if, you know, I have noticed that I find that there's a lot more sort of, intellectual sort of vibrancy and health, I think, in some of the big state schools. It's not a coincidence. I think that fire has found this, you know, that a lot of the big state schools tend to have better self-reported, you know, free speech environments. So I do think it's a long progression, but I do think that ultimately the idea that what stays on campus, what happens on campus is going to stay on campus has been a wishful thinking for at least 40, 50 years now. You know, listening to you, I had a little theory that sort of bubble up in my head, and I wonder

what you think about this. It's that campus culture influenced internet culture and internet culture became American politics, right? Pylons, you know, John Ronson's book, so you've been publicly shamed, appealing to the mods or moderators to kick off the people we don't want to protect people within the subreddit, within the social media timeline, the ability to shame, to curate, to call our social media followings, to appeal directly to the people in charge of our social media platforms in order to say you have to kick this person off, I'm reporting this person, I'm blocking this person. A certain culture that was more punitive around speech merged with politics. And in particular, under Trump, merged with a specific conservative movement,

well articulated in Project 2025, to empower the executive branch at the expense of the career bureaucrats and essentially allow the enormous powers of the president to essentially run roughshod over the rest of government, that that has created or contributed to, I don't want to say it's entirely causal, contributed to this moment where in many ways you have this strange combination of a president empowered by a political movement, but also in many ways acting as the protagonist of the internet, right? In many ways, acting out in internet culture that has been bubbling up for the last few decades. So that's one way that I kind of see your, the history of your work on campuses and internet

culture and movements that are discreet to politics, all sort of coming together in this delta of the Trump administration, really giving us the whirlwind that we're dealing with right now. I still haven't found, like, a book that I feel like does this justice. There was one that I read, it came from somewhere awful that I couldn't quite, it ended up being, it's the one I'm remembering, right, it just ended up being like two. theoretical and and um but like the the combination of actually what you saw you know on tumbler and four chan about like that was sort of the codification of a lot of these argumentation techniques

from college campuses from the 90s you know becoming the way people would actually battle each other in these environments and how nasty that could become. Yeah I'm familiar with a vague argument that essentially says a debate style from college campuses became an argumentative style on Tumblr and this sort of germ of a n-forchan and this germ of a tumbler-focan style infected the entire internet and now we're living with it both on the digital world and physical world i'm familiar with the general idea but i'm not saying that tumbler and four-chan did it i just think that they're representative of symptoms no yeah and i i don't think the internet or certainly college campuses explained uh trump entirely but i do think that one thing i'm trying to get my head around here

is there is something, I think, specific to this moment, especially, where both sides, you know, and I don't want to both sides it in a way that that blames Democrats and Republicans equally for what's happening right now. But we clearly live in a period where punitive attitudes towards speech are broadly popular. That's how I want to put it, right? Not that the blame is shared equally, that there is a broad popularity for a punitive relationship towards speech that flies directly in the face of historical First Amendment principles. And that's one thing that just makes this period somewhat interesting. I want to end on, you know, if not a note of hope, you know, given polarization trends

and given that Trump has this really spooky ability to turn a majority of the country against whatever he happens to be doing at the moment, right? Like he goes to the right on immigration and then immigration politics become more liberal. He goes to the right on trade and survey show that free trade is now more popular than it's been for 30 years. Is there a similar possibility that Trump's movement to the illiberal right on free speech principles? Could in a strange way open up space for a revolution of liberal thinking on free speech? There absolutely is. And the only part of me that where it sticks in my craw is that the,

there were people on the right saying, the only way that the left is going to appreciate free speech again is if they have their own weapons used against them. And I always hated that argument, and I still hate that argument. But could it potentially be a situation where people need their rights threatened to appreciate why everyone needs them

is unfortunately a phenomenon that repeats throughout history? But that could be the bright side of it, that essentially it is very easy to take things like free speech for granted until you actually genuinely feel like yours is under threat. I wish it didn't have to be like this. And I think maybe in earlier societies it was so ingrained as a sort of paramount value, both on the left and the right,

that we didn't quite have to get there. But unfortunately, I think we need, I think there's this periodic war against liberalism. liberalism is a very sophisticated concept. The idea that nobody's truly in charge, but it still works, is something that is very hard for people to grok and at some level people really revolt against it. So sometimes it has to be made extra material for people.

And so if one of the side effects, and actually it gives me at least a little bit of hope because the last eight months have been so exhausting, that the idea is maybe we do end up in a better place with regards to some of these fundamental values, especially free speech, I think is actually a real possibility. And I'm very much hoping that will be the actual outcome

rather than a new legitimization of a war against all, you know, all against all in which whoever's, you know, in power gets to call all of the shots. Greg Vukyanaf, thank you very much. Thank you. That was fun. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Beraldi, and we are back to our twice-a-week schedule. We'll talk to you soon.