The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine


EPISODE # 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 20th and 21th 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.

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This episode was released on December 1, 2020.

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