 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. I'm Jason Kuznicki, research fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of Cato One Mount. Joining us today is Greg Lukyanov, president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, and author of 2012's Unlearning Liberty, Campus Censorship in the End of American Debate, and author of the forthcoming Freedom from Speech. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Greg. Thanks for having me. So, first of all, for our listeners who maybe aren't familiar, what is FIRE? Sure. Well, this year is our 15th anniversary. FIRE was founded in 1999 by Alan Charles Cores and Harvey Silverglade to libertarian-leaning people from sort of different political sides of the spectrum at the same time. And they founded it in order to battle restrictions on speech on campuses. You know, Alan and Harvey were both very active in the early age of speech codes in the 80s and 90s, leading the fight against them. You might have heard of the Water Buffalo Incident at University of Pennsylvania, where a student was brought up on harassment charges. For calling the volleyball players Water Buffalo, is it? A sorority. A sorority, okay. Go home, you Water Buffaloes. And the fight against that prosecution of the student was led by Alan Cores. So, they wrote a book in 1998 called The Shadow University that just catalogs case after case of student getting in trouble for what they say, or faculty member getting in trouble for their research or for what they say, do process violations, religious liberty violations. And they kind of thought that you expose this, universities really take their identity as a marketplace of ideas really seriously, and you expose it and, you know, we're done here. We can wrap this up, you know, as of the expose book. And unfortunately, that's not what happened. What happened was they started getting request after request from student and faculty members alike for help, for being prosecuted for what they said, for being punished for what they said on campus. So, realizing that they needed a bigger job, they founded Fire in 1999. I joined in 2001. I was a First Amendment Specialized Lawyer. I worked for the ACLU of Northern California. First Amendment in free speech was my passion. And despite the fact that I spent a lot of law school studying the history of freedom of speech, both in the U.S. and abroad, I was not prepared for the kind of things that can get you in trouble on the modern college campus. And one of the interesting things about Fire is, you know, we're libertarian here at Cato, and I know you do a lot of work with very libertarian organizations, but it's not a libertarian organization per se. It actually is a mixture of a bunch of different ideological perspective. And it's something we're very proud of at Fire. I've never even heard of an organization that's internally as politically and ideologically diverse as Fire. I mean, we have atheists working with Christians, working with people who are raised Muslim, people who are raised Jewish, people who can describe as liberals, some who even describe themselves as progressive, some who describe as libertarians, and some who describe themselves as Republicans. And it's great because the one thing we all agree on is freedom of speech. So it means that we have awesome debates in the office, and we'll hear each other out, and sometimes we'll be like, oh, okay, you know, you know, we try to model, in a sense, what we preach. I have a quick question for you. I'm actually a huge fan of Alan Charles' course for two reasons. First is for his work in campus freedom of speech. The other is for his academic work, which is in the area of the origins of religious skepticism and of atheism, which actually turned out to be sort of inside Christianity itself, which I find very, very interesting. But I do have a question for you. Sure. Weren't all of these campus speech codes that were so controversial back in the 90s, weren't they all essentially done away with? I mean, isn't this sort of a settled issue now? Yeah, didn't we get rid of it with a little bit of education by Dennis de Souza and Alan Bloom's closing of American Mind? We heard about this so much. Rush Limbaugh talked about it a lot in 1994, and then we fixed it, right? Yeah, it's funny you should ask that because that's a really – it was probably the single most popular misconception that we run into because what happened was these speech codes, they start popping up on campuses that even five, 10 years before had been touting how radical they were with regards to freedom of speech, and suddenly you start having speech codes on campus where they say it's like the only way to actually the sort of Herbert Marcuse idea of the only way to have a truly tolerant environment is to start repressing a speech that is discriminatory or hurtful or harmful as far as they're concerned. And when this got out to the large republic, this was a scandal. This united editorial boards of everything from the New York Times to the New York Post, to the Washington Post, Walter Journal, of course. And the public really was horrified at this. So it lost in the court of public opinion, but then when universities, public universities started passing speech codes, they all got shot down in a court of law. And the last of the first sort of series of it was actually at a private university, my alma mater, two years before I started there, Stanford Law School. They passed actually the, California was so incensed about it, they passed a law applying First Amendment standards to nonsectarian private colleges. This was in the late 90s. This was in 1995. And a student, Robert Corey, challenged the speech code and that was shot down. So you end up having even experts like Robert O'Neill write a book that says, oh, well, you know, they were sort of an embarrassment. Speech codes came and it was embarrassing and they were sort of given a proper barrier. That's a nice way to look at it, but also entirely wrong. Unfortunately, the sense that we had won this battle sort of developed a sense of complacency around the issue. So by the time FIRE was able to, big enough to be able to do serious research, we found in one of our first major studies of speech codes on close to 400 campuses that around at the worst, 75% of them had what we call red light speech codes as in laughably unconstitutional codes. Now, a lot of these places though will say, we don't have a speech code. Look through our regulations. There's nothing that says it's a speech code. We're not restricting your speech. What do you say to that? That is one of the things that did come out of the huge failure of the speech codes movement in the 80s and 90s. It wasn't very effective for the battle for hearts and minds for universities to call them speech codes. So in the late 80s, early 90s, it was much more okay for the true believers of this movement to say, these are restrictions on speech. They had sort of the zeal of the radical. Although that being said, all of those codes, they were all harassment-based codes. They redefined harassment as anything that offends anybody on the basis of race or gender or religion or one of 17 categories. Well, what's harassment in the law as opposed to in some of these campus regulations? Harassment in the law, it fires really radical point, I say sarcastically, is that universities should follow a Supreme Court case called Davis v. Monroe County that dealt with harassment of K-12 students that talks about harassment and describes harassment as something that sounds a lot more like what the term harassment means colloquially, that it's severe, persistent, pervasive, that it effectively denies someone in education, that it's discriminatory and unwelcome. You follow the Supreme Court's definition of harassment in Davis. Fires got no problem with you. That no longer looks like speech, that looks like a course of harassing behavior that's discriminatory. Fine, that's what we think the definition should be. Meanwhile, at these universities that passed them in the late 80s and 90s, you end up having this incredibly vague and broad language being used and probably like the laugh line that came out of this, the most ridiculous one, was University of Connecticut actually passed a ban on quote-unquote inappropriately directed laughter. Watch where you're directing that. But what's shocking about it was this was defeated and this was laughed at in the court of public opinion, this was defeated in the court of law. But amazingly, this policy was adopted wholesale by Drexel University more than 10 years later at Drexel University in Philadelphia, more than 10 years later. The only way they could have found this code, by the way, to my knowledge would have been to look for codes that have been overturned. There are several Monty Python skits and the only one coming to mind is so vulgar that I don't want to bring it up right now. But several of them that point out that one of the funniest things in the world is prohibiting laughter. And when laughter is prohibited, that immediately elicits laughter. Absolutely. So I may, probably many of our listeners are quite familiar with some of these horror stories because it has become sort of part of the just general cultural knowledge that campuses are quite repulsive and some pretty crazy things happen. Of course, conservatives and libertarians might be more aware of that than people on the left. But just to give us an example, is there one that just you like to tell? There are so many. There are so many, I know. Is there one that maybe recently been working on or just your all-time favorite classic example of a student or a professor getting... Can I go through a couple? Please, absolutely. Okay. On Learning Liberty opens up with talking about one of the all-time most terrible cases I've seen, which involves a student who protested a parking garage via the really threatening device of a Facebook collage and was kicked out of college for it. Because the student referred to it as the president's Akari Memorial parking garage and that was a joke on the fact that the president had constantly, somewhat pathetically, referred to this as being part of his legacy. That's what the joke was. This is going to be your legacy. And what's amazing is when you... Because we got to get a lot of discovery on this case, you know, from the entire background of what you see is that this was an attempt to justify... The president didn't like the fact this guy was critical of his beloved parking garage program and he'd been looking for an excuse to kick him out. He finds this thin reed of argument that, wait, that's a threat on my life. Memorials usually happen when people are dead. So this guy wanted to kill me. Now, nobody... He goes and tells his theory to his other employees. They all go, that's... No, you have to... Freedom of speech is guaranteed. This is a public college. Due process is guaranteed. You can't kick this kid out for this. But he kicks him out anyway, citing him as a quote-unquote clear and present danger, which is adorable from a constitutional standpoint. Now, wait a minute. Political cartoonists routinely will use devices like putting somebody's name on a tombstone without it being a threat. That's a very common trope. The sincerity of the belief that this was a threat is something that I just entirely reject. And I think probably the most telling part is when they kicked this student out of school, they slipped a note under his door, telling him he had 48 hours to get off campus. It's like, come on. If you think this guy's going to be the next campus shooter, they also... You don't slip a note under his door. That's crazy. But some of the things that made it even funnier was this guy is a decorated EMT. He's a Shambhala Buddhist, a believer... He's about as nice of a kid as you could imagine. So I spent a lot of time on that case, but the reason why I bring it up again in particular is because that case is not fully resolved yet. And it's going again in front of the 11th Circuit. Now, the student has won basically at every step of this case, but the university has fought back and there's been some weird decisions about... Because that seemed kind of like Good Old Boy Network type Georgia type decisions where it's like, fine, President Zachary violated the Constitution badly enough that your peers qualified immunity, which is a big deal. But because this is... Basically, a judge said that, well, you know, this has been going on a long time, so why don't you just split the damages? And so basically making the winning side pay for the lawsuit, the legal costs of the losing side, which is insane. So that's going in front of the 11th Circuit. The attorney in charge of that is Bob Corne Revere, so it's destined to be a very important legal case. But more recently, just to give an example of how crazy these cases have become, and I know that you're a fan of the show Firefly. Of course. I assume you're a fan of Game of Thrones. Yes, of course, I do. We currently have a case where a professor at Berging Community College in northern New Jersey posted a picture on Google Plus of his daughter wearing a Game of Thrones t-shirt that quotes the wonderful and powerful Daenerys Targaryen saying that, I will take what is mine with fire and blood. This is a great triumphant moment for Daenerys. She's discovering her strength. And it's on a t-shirt. So this was posted on Facebook, a picture of... On Google Plus. Google Plus. Okay, so even... Yeah, even weird. So somebody managed to find that? What's funny is that... The first of all they put it on Google Plus. Second of all, that what it did is it notified the five people who followed this professor, Professor Schmidt, and an administrator received this as an email, looked at the picture, didn't realize that he thought he'd been... He was being sent the picture directly as opposed to just getting a notification that something was weirdly posted on Google Plus, and he decided that this must be a threat upon his life. Because it has the words fire and blood in it, because it sounds very bellicose. The professor is suspended. Sentenced to mandatory psychological counseling. This case is still ongoing. And there's no process involved. It was just summarily suspended. Yeah, and it's downright comic, because you end up having the spectacle of the administrators involved inviting staff in to go like, is there really this Game of Thrones show? It's like, yes. It's one of the most popular shows in the country. And does it promote violence on campuses? In some way, maybe not on campuses. It ain't for the fan of heart. But what's amazing is, I get used to these cases involving pop culture. We had a case that was very similar to this, involving our Trevor and my beloved show Firefly, which was a short-lived sci-fi western that was the best show that ever got handled. I fully agree, actually. I should add that. I fully agree. And just to diverge for a second, when you think of any Joss Whedon show, the first six episodes tend to be pretty weak. And the idea that the first six episodes of Firefly were that good, just imagine where we were headed. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I totally agree. But anyway, so there's a professor at University of Wisconsin Stout discovers Firefly. And he's like, this is the best written show I think I've ever seen in my life. And he's a drama professor. And there's this great line from the pilot in which the doctor who's about to join the crew of basically these sort of like space outlaws asked the captain of the ship, saying I was like, I don't mean to be rude here, but how do I know you're not going to kill me in my sleep? And this is kind of insulting to the captain. He's a very big honorable man. In fairness to the doctor, he did seem a bit threatened. It's true. And so the captain responds, you don't know me, son. So let me explain this to you once. If I ever kill you, you'll be awake, you'll be facing me, and you'll be armed. So let it sink in. What that means is it's a really tough guy way of saying you can trust me unless you wrong me. Very great western line. He puts this picture of Mal who's Nathan Fillian, Nathan Fillian's first major role on his front door. Of his office, it gets torn down immediately by campus police saying that someone put this on your door. It's clearly a threat. And it's like, okay, first of all, I put this on my door. I'm a drama professor. This is a great line. Nobody was threatened. And this is like a nice little dude. He's an adorable little professor. But he's mad. He's mad that they also stole a sign, and they threw it out. So he puts up a sign, really poking him, saying, fascism not welcome here, attention fascism. Keep fascism away from children. And the university, and this is one of the reasons why you gotta protect free speech so much, is because people are so skilled. They're so good at figuring out the logic by which it's like, oh, no, I believe in free speech and all, but that crosses the line. They tried to claim that this anti-fascist statement was actually pro-fascism, pro-violence. And it's really what they were saying was, it's like, you know, I believe in free speech and all, but I draw the line in criticizing me. And so they brought him up on charges. He was gonna go in front of the threat assessment board. He believed, he was certain he was gonna lose his job. So fire gets involved. We're like, I can't believe we have a firefly case. This is amazing. I'm a huge fan of the show. But the university really digs in its heels. They basically, more or less, tries to make the argument that we have to overreact to anything that could be threatening. In a lot of these cases, they'll cite like 9-11 and Virginia Tech, and it's like, yes, because those were caused by quotes from sci-fi shows. Now what would have happened if it had been Julius Caesar in the Shakespeare play? Honestly, from what I do, I could very easily imagine someone getting in trouble for having a quote from Shakespeare on their door. There's nothing, almost nothing would surprise me when it sounds like that. And the thing is, I say almost nothing would surprise me, but they genuinely find a way to surprise me. But this case had a happy ending. Thanks to the wonderful help of both Nathan Fillion, who retweeted this a number of times, and Neil Gaiman, who knew the professor and tweeted a lot about this, the university under the siege of brown coats, which is the name for fans of the show Firefly, it just had to give up. Well, now that does sound fascist. Yeah, the brown coats. So let's take a step back here and talk a little bit about these speech codes and what they look like, we've had some examples, what their terms are, the rating system of fire, how these speech codes are being created and applied in dangerous ways. Well, definitely the sort of classic speech code, it has been since the late 80s, has been a sort of morphing of the definition of harassment to apply to one of the first speech codes extended to any language that quote-unquote victimized or stigmatized someone on the basis of protected classes. And that makes it entirely subjective on the other person's side. Exactly. Because it's like they can invoke it at their belief that something is doing this to them. And it makes it really broad, it makes it really vague. So that was overturned by 1989 in a court in Dove, Michigan, but you still have cases, you still have codes like that. And you'll have the really linear ones, the ones that just ban offending people on campus. Jacksonville State University, for example, had a code that just banned offending people on university property, which was, of course, laughably unconstitutional, incredibly broad. But there are other kinds of codes. There are, certainly, there are restrictions on email policies, for example. And some of my favorite are the forwarding of offensive jokes, is a pretty common one that you see, which is like, what else do you forward? My dad would get in a lot of trouble for that. I think a lot of people's dads would. My wife's dads would, definitely. But then there's also the free speech zones. I'm sure you've heard of this, but you haven't. When I first started Fire back in 2001, within a couple weeks I got my first free speech zone case, and it was West Virginia University where they were telling students that they could protest. Sure. But they had to keep it in these two little tiny zones on campus. And what I didn't know was these things were incredibly common on college campuses. I think we've found about one-fifth of universities have what we consider to be wildly unconstitutional free speech zones. And among the worst, the one I talk about probably the most is Texas Tech University had a lone free speech gazebo that was 20 feet wide for all 28,000 students that you still had to apply in advance to use. As I always point out, I had a friend did the dimensional analysis of this, work out how densely you'd have to crush down the students if you wanted to pack them all into this roofed gazebo, and he worked out about the density of uranium-238. But there's even worse ones. We just launched a major litigation campaign with Bob Cornrevere and Davis Wright Tremaine. We launched four lawsuits in one morning on July 1st of this year, and it includes a number of challenges to free speech zones. And you might have heard about some of these ridiculous applications more recently, because we had three different cases involving chapters of Young Americans for Liberty. One probably the most famous one so far was a student who was trying to hand out copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day. And he was smart enough to bring his video camera. Dangerously subversive, isn't that? They were Cato Constitutions. Really? Yeah, right. Well, I heard they were Heritage Constitutions. Oh, were they Heritage Constitutions? Yeah. Well, I'll say the same thing. Thanks. They don't really belong there. Constitution is the Constitution. Yes, lost to no one. So he gets us all on tape, because we're used to this stuff, but seeing it actually acted out in real time was kind of amazing. First, a campus police officer comes up and says, you have to be a registered organization. And then he's told to go to a – and he's given all sorts of excuses for why he can't hand out constitutions. And this is a military vet. It's wrong on so many different levels. But then when he goes to an administrator to find out if he can hand out constitutions, he's told that he has to use the little free speech zone, but it's not available today, Constitution Day. He could use it in a couple of days, but he could use it sometime in October. And it's beyond parity. The same thing happened at University of Hawaii at Hilo. Students were told that they couldn't approach students to hand them constitutions. And on Constitution Day at another campus, Citrus College, a student was told he could not protest the NSA outside of the free speech zone, which is just – That's just ironic. Yeah, so many levels. Now, let me just briefly play devil's advocate. I know that in free speech law it is permitted to place restrictions on speech as regards time, place, and manner. What is wrong with time, place, and manner restrictions as you see it? Or how would you qualify that further? Or are the free speech zones just time, place, and manner restrictions? People always leave out an important word on the time, place, and manner restriction. And it's the first word that always appears when you talk about them in law. Reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. And there's nothing reasonable. No court will ever accept when you turn – And in some cases we're talking about areas on campus that are tiny, tiny points of a percentage point of the open area on campus. So, you know, I think we had one that was like 0.2 percent – 0.2 percent of a campus 0.3 percent. When these go in front of courts they go, come on. Reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions generally mean things like we'll have restrictions on when you can use amplified equipment. We see those kind of restrictions. We're saying that time, place, and manner restrictions allow us to restrict speech from 99.8 percent of campus. No court in the world will uphold that. And they're right. These are shameful attempts to take an area of law that actually makes a fair amount of sense. Saying reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions include, you know, decibel level type restrictions. Certainly any policy that says you can't impede the flow or work of the university, those are always fine. Fire has no objection to them whatsoever. But when you try to morph this, you know, relatively common sense area of law into something that says that I can now free the overwhelming majority of my campus from freedom of speech, that will never hold up in court nor should it. Now, okay, so having established the problem, looking at the crazy cases, free street zones, it might be obvious to some people, even fighting this for so long and talking to these people and debating people. What is the theory that is coming behind of why this should be done? And then secondly, how is that theory, and this is sort of the broader point of your book, which I highly suggest by the way, but secondly how is that theory affecting students' ideas of what a free society is and should be? So this two-part question, like why are they doing this and then how is it affecting these students? What a terrific and thoughtful question. So I'm going to talk about the author's Jonathan Rausch, who wrote a great free speech book called Kindly Inquisitors, also back in 1993. And he doesn't see as much of the sort of zealotry around free speech restrictions that he saw in the late 80s and 90s, where it's kind of like it's this moral purity crusade. And I think he has something of a freedom, is that yes, it's just become part of the nervous system of the university. They don't even know why they're applying these things anymore. So a lot of the cases where you're dealing with it's that these speech restrictions got legitimized by eroding the sort of moral force of freedom of speech in the 80s and 90s, and that just allows people to fill it up with whatever kind of like thin rationale, whether it's some kind of vague concern for order that justify these free speech sounds. So the sort of intellectual usually is really not really, really thin. There's not a lot there. You still do have the true believers who believe that hateful, hurtful, harmful speech should be stopped at all costs. And I'm always happy to debate them. Jeremy Waldron's a big proponent of this. Eric Posner very much admires the European system for hate speech codes. So there still is something of a philosophical backing. It's just not, I don't think, the primary motivation. So what does this do to our society? So in unlearning liberty the second title is a campus censorship in the end of American debate. And what I think censorship generally does is it doesn't really change people's mind. At least it doesn't make them any less sure that they are right to begin with. And it does encourage people to talk to those people they already agree with. And the problem with this is this has polarizing effects. It means that you sort of, you don't bother having discussions with people you talk to the people you agree with. You become much more confident in what you believe. And the social science behind these polarization effects are very, very robust. You can take a group of ten people, you break them into groups with people that they agree with, have them come back and talk after talking to the people that they agree with, and they come back much more radicalized. And this can be replicated over and over again. So I think that this polarization, that's in part comes out of very good things. That we have greater ability to move to where we'd like to live. And we are increasingly moving to counties and even blocks that are more politically homogeneous. And said in a nicer way, blocks that share our own values. But also in the world of the interwebs we can surround ourselves all day long with opinions that just reflect what we already believe. So we have this. And I think of these of being very positive things in a lot of different ways. They're the results of very positive things, but I think the net effect is that we end up having a more alienated, sort of more polarized country. Now I think that was going to happen with or without higher education. I think that this is, you know, the Ronald Ankelhart talks about sort of like heading towards the post-materialist society. And he talks about as a positive thing. And I think there's a lot to be said for being able to live in values, in communities that reflect your values. But unfortunately it's not necessarily good for your intellectual development. It can actually kind of be poisoned to it. And the institution that's there to teach us good intellectual habits is higher education. It's the single best tool in our society. With a possible exception of K through 12, which I don't think is really up for it. Not really totally suited for it. So yeah, higher education I think is probably the best. To teach us habits like seek out the person you disagree with. Engage debate. Argue fair. All of these kind of checks on confirmation bias and this kind of stuff. But the problem is they're not just not teaching those things effectively. They're teaching us some of the opposite habits. Talk to the people you agree with. Keep your mouth shut if you have anything disagreeable to say. Don't engage in thought of experimentation if it might offend. Don't engage in devil's accuracy. All of these things that, again, the social science on how they improve debate and discussion is very, very robust. But universities are falling down on the job. And that leads me to the book that I'm coming out with on September 9th. Freedom from Speech, which is a short encounter book's broadside. You can read it in one sitting. But it's me talking about what I've seen in the last six or seven months. In the last six or seven months, I've spent my career defending the rights of students primarily to speak their minds. And I've been generally optimistic and pleased with what students come from. They were generally much better on free speech issues than professors or certainly administrators by a long shot. But lately, over the last six or seven months, I've just seen a lot of pushes that are motivated by students to get things, restrictions on speech or to get speakers disinvited because they don't like their point of view or to gather trigger warnings added onto articles. I mean, there was student records who argued that you needed to put a trigger warning on the great Gatsby because of domestic violence and frunkiness or misogyny and all these different things. And it's weird because I don't like having to debate students on these things. I believe in students' rights, but watching them believe that they have a right not to have a speaker they disagree with on campus is just completely wrongheaded, in my opinion. And the trigger warning stuff, it definitely comes from, well, I don't think anything is ever entirely motivated by either good or bad intentions. I think it's usually what there is some good intentions in this. But what they don't get is that professors are already getting calls from their parents. They're already getting calls from administrators saying, you did not put a trigger warning on this book and therefore you can face disciplinary charges or you're on warning for not providing trigger warnings. This creates an impossible expectation because keep in mind trigger warnings by their own definition you can be triggered if you suffer from PTSD, you can potentially be triggered by anything. Now, keeping that in mind and then putting on the professor to say I have to warn my students about anything that might trigger them but anything could trigger them, you put professors in an impossible situation that I think kind of freezer door if I can say it wrong. The sort of a downward spiral of people saying, oh, my issue is not receiving enough respect, my issue doesn't get a trigger warning and it's and I can tell you it will predictably lead to a lot of professors getting in trouble and a lot of professors keeping quiet and in that case sort of really to the harm of the marketplace of ideas that's supposed to be higher education. And that seems very disturbing now that free speech, the meaning of it maybe you always have to keep it burning but you like to think in America you don't have to remind people about the values of free speech but maybe if you look at the history of the world it seems like it actually is not as common for people to believe in free speech in a really robust way as to believe in restrictions on speech. One thing I'm acutely aware of is that 20th century American ideas of freedom of speech are very rare in human history. I always talk about freedom of speech as sort of a technology and one of the greatest innovations we ever came up with. I mean I agree with John Roush on thinking of it as more or less an 18th century 17th century invention that was the bigger boolean circle around the scientific method. The idea that you debate things out, that you hear other sides out that you don't trust your intuitions all of this kind of like what John Roush calls liberal science explains this brilliantly in his book. But you can't take it for granted because one of the reasons why it's such a brilliant system is because it's realistic about human nature. If I don't like what you're going to say and I can figure out a way to punish you the human mind is incredibly skilled at figuring out some rationale. If you've deposed enough of these administrators you can find out, right? It's amazing. And it really does go in a lot of cases. I don't like what you said and in some cases it happens literally this way. And I will get back to you in a couple months with charges but you're on charge with something. I don't know yet but I'll get back to you because it shows this sort of post-hoc rationalization model that I see. But in freedom from speech my larger point is that Kato's a good audience for this. I talk a lot to libertarians and there's this libertarian optimism that I admire and when it comes to science I agree with to a large degree. But part of my argument in freedom from speech is I believe that there is a class of things that will get worse not just as other things are getting better but because other things are getting better. And one of them is this idea that we go out and we seek comfort. And I think that we have the options of being more comfortable than we ever have in our entire life. In human history whether it's from pharmaceuticals or choosing your neighborhood or choosing what media you follow but I think what comes along with that is the expectation of physical comfort and also intellectual comfort. And I talk a lot about the seductive power of intellectual comfort. It's one of the reasons why I talk a lot about trigger warnings and disinvitation season in the book because what I'm afraid that what you're going to see is not so much people demanding freedom of speech but freedom from speech. I might be tempted to disagree with you slightly about freedom of speech being a technology because I think in the history of freedom of speech very often the case that press freedom in particular arose by accident. So during the English Civil War there was this tremendous outpouring of pamphlets and newspapers and debate in print but that's because there was a civil war going on and there was no effective social control that would allow censorship. Similar thing happens during the French Revolution. These tend to be two very interesting periods in the history of freedom of speech because there was a breakdown of control and it just sort of happened by accident and I might suggest that when people come along and establish freedom of speech they're doing so in reference to these sort of earlier accidents and we owe in a sense some of our freedom to being able to learn from a happy chaos. A happy chaos or a positive side effect of what were two otherwise fairly ugly events in history. It also seems that another point about that era of time that I think is lost in the terms of freedom of speech helping us live better together because Jason and I were talking about this before and it's what we're seeing the exact opposite. Freedom of speech saying that I will occasionally offend you. I will let you occasionally offend me if you will let me occasionally offend you ends up just being a good way of just living together because you sort of say disarm I will take away my ability to squelch your to squelch your speech that offends me if you take away your ability and therefore we will live better together but on the campuses right now it's just combative constantly. Everyone has the right not to be offended and so you just have a battle as opposed to peace. With regards to it being a technology it's definitely something that it's a term I like to use. I'm happy to be convinced out of it but as you were explaining that I'm like that actually makes it sound even more like a technology to me because basically so many innovations come out of accidents happening but then someone learning from it later on and then applying it. So yes you have this sort of Yeah you have this sort of accidental period where free speech sort of flourished couldn't be stopped because people were printing presses and caves and there was no central authority but later generations turned that into a virtue they adopted it in a situation where the crown was probably powerful enough by the 18th century to clamp down a lot on this stuff but it chose not to because it saw genuine benefit in that benefit in that. The point about pluralism and peace this is entirely left out. This is something that students do not get and it breaks my heart that you have to explain that yes one of the reasons why freedom of speech was called a great innovation why it's such a great innovation for peace is that you have to remind people do you know the way people settled things about who was right about God or who was right about authority or who was right about what things weighed or what system, you know the way they settled it in the past? The 30 years war The 30 years war you were ostracized, you were kicked out of the community you were hanged, you were beheaded that's the standard way of dealing with this agreement for an awful awful lot of human history. It is a radical idea to say it's like wow we're going to peacefully disagree and we're going to settle this through disagreement using words not actual physical violence. So in that sense freedom of speech is this great victory for it has these great side effects but it's this great victory for peace for peaceful resolution of issues. Meanwhile when you have that's why it just blows my mind to see after the Benghazi attacks he had a little spate of American academics coming out saying ha ha this is why you should have hate speech laws and I wrote a long piece explaining it's like no no you're not actually talking about hate speech laws after because they were trying to blame the Benghazi attacks it was actual violence in Benghazi. Oh but they were trying to blame it on the video on the right but that had nothing to do with it. It was really not. So they're also wrong and none of them have apologized for it yet but trying to point out it's like guys you're not just if you're saying that that Mohammed video shouldn't should be illegal you're not just advocating hate speech laws you're advocating blasphemy laws and those were things that it's like and you don't want to put it this starkly but it's kind of like and do you know who the first people would be beheaded you would you would. Like even out of your own self-interest they think this through but it's amazing how basic First Amendment basic free speech basic history of ideas is stuff that's not taught where I have to actually talk to professors about like you know what would be a great idea blasphemy laws like oh geez really like we have to go with this basic on this stuff yeah that's the point I always make and in many elements actually it's a political point it's a point about principle one of the reasons you have principles like free speech is because if you advocate controlling speech that's a fight that you might lose when someone else takes over and power and you know if it's the French Revolution you'll go back between this people to these people and one day you might be beheaded the next day you might be the beheader but you don't want to generally advocate that as a principle yeah there's this very great phrase Daniel Dennett likes to use in in the history of basically the evolution of ideas that it used to be that organisms would live or die based on their genetic fitness and you know an organism that's genetically unfit doesn't survive and it does not reproduce and it dies and so whatever idea was encoded in its genes dies and nowadays because we have ideas and we innovate at the level of ideas rather than at the level of genes we allow our ideas to die in our stead and he was drawing on Popper for that yes he's specifically he is referencing Popper in there yeah and I really feel like you know Dennett and Popper and all of these philosophers are people are things are philosophers people really need to read more of but when I think about what I want to write next I honestly think I'm getting increasingly sort of like have to get back to fundamentals and explain the basics of this stuff because the theory that I've been falling back a lot more on is one that I sort of fleshed out in in in in an article for CNET about sort of the spread of hate speech laws in Europe and just making the very humble point that there's a value in knowing what people actually think or are willing to say it's a really important value to have and and and when people will sort of paint the free speech you know advocate as being sort of naive it's like so your polite dinner table theory of like let's just not talk about it approach how sophisticated is that that's your repressed family problem so you haven't talked about it in 20 years exactly it's not about to boil over yes meanwhile what is up happening when you suppress speeches you end up with two different kinds of distortions probably more than two in particular one is the overly optimistic hey I cured racism because now it's illegal to say racist stuff yeah good luck with that see how the you know the anti-Semitism laws are working on in Europe right now I think actually they're probably making things worse particularly when you're playing into a narrative about there being a conspiracy to shut me up don't create a conspiracy to shut the crazies up give their ridiculous theories I mean there's no theory that does worse when explained in public than holocaust now for example like people try to bring that up as being like the ultimate thing that should not be allowed I'm like you know when you research this stuff you end up finding it's like oh so Jewish specific yellow fever is a compelling argument for why all those people disappeared oh and by the way we have tens and tens of thousands of pictures of this but it's absurdity is on its face and it's best exposed by letting but just this value this informational value of speech just knowing it's it's you know Harvey Silvergate really puts it well and I've been really teasing this this idea because I think it's actually kind of profound but he puts it very simply it's valuable for me to know who the Nazis in the room are definitely I mean I want people who have bad ideas to air them so that I know who I can personally disassociate myself from I mean I don't want to be I don't want to be around people like whether they're talking or not I don't like the thought that I might be around but people also forget I mean there was this guy who used to like to poke I always give this example at Stanford when I was there there was sort of this conservative who would always like poke the very liberal sort of campus body on the on the listserv and he was picking on us for you know our opinion on second amendment issues that sort of like the collective campus opinion on it and you know it was kind of you made a couple kind of crude jokes and you know a lot of people start writing into listserv and they start talking about Supreme Court cases lower court cases I never heard of they start talking about philosophers I've never heard of they start talking about historical incidents I never heard of they start telling personal stories about people they've lost to gun violence they start talking about personal stories about people who defended themselves with guns and we start sharing things with each other that we never ever would have discussed otherwise and at the time I never should have said that in the first place and I just I just go like do you see what just happened here though like that that that that that moment of speech that you all thought had no value was the only reason why we're discussing some serious stuff right now so you can never know where wisdom is going to come from it can come from comedians it can come from failed jokes it can come from someone saying something incredibly stupid that leads you to think of something incredibly creative but it's always but the system so it seems you had said earlier that that perhaps you have some lack about amount of pessimism some lack of optimism about sort of the correlation or inverse correlation between material well-being and and how much you want your mental furniture to be organized by laws like free speech free speech destroying laws but so the two questions to I think sort of close this out here are where are we going where are we going next from here and is there any hope you know I'm an optimist in a lot of different ways you know like but of course I'm a Russian optimist which means you know like I'm always thinking about it's like oh yay my village was not destroyed by Nazi it is good day so you know your parents are Russian right oh yeah my dad he's adorable Russian man my mom's actually adorable British woman like it's a very very funny mix and so yeah I don't think of myself too much as a pessimist but on this issue I do think that I think it's almost like a historical force that if you can expect more comfort and you can expect more you have sort of an expectation of confirmation in the media you consume and a and you're being and you and you can expect people to dislike the emotional pain of hearing things they dislike or to having having arguments all that kind of stuff that's all kind of predictable and if that is part of human nature which I think it is without serious education people will drift more towards wanting freedom from speech than freedom of speech so I think this has a little bit of a character of sort of a historical force that we're going to have to fight but I think it's important for and I could be wrong I could I could absolutely be wrong I'd like to be wrong on this but I think that when people dismiss threats to freedom of speech it's simply being quote-unquote political correctness or quote-unquote political group think I think they're underestimating what we're up against there's a reason why speech restrictions dominate the world and why America's weird I'm afraid in its protection free speech and I'm afraid that's not going to last that much longer if we don't if we misdiagnose the problem is there hope yes there's a singularity that essentially I think that part of the hope is that freedom of speech works it's a very effective system for not just figuring out not just big t-truths not just the objective truth but the small t-truths the important ones are being like do I like you what's the price of wine where should I go for dinner like all of these kind of things like should I trust you what are your opinions on this free speech is an incredibly effective system so I think it's robustness and what it can deliver particularly as we become better able to take advantage of information technologies will realize that having the data out there knowing what people actually think knowing what they actually are willing to say will be something that its usefulness will far far far outstrip any alleged benefit of suppression so that's my big hope is that free speech is a working brilliant system that hopefully will go on because of its inherent value but it's going to require people constantly reminding the population of that thanks for listening if you have any questions or comments about today's episode you can find us on twitter at free thoughts pod that's free thoughts pod free thoughts is a project of libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks to learn more you can find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org