I was surprised & choked up by the shout out to me & @TheFIREorg!
"One of my favorite people in all of the [US] is my liberal civil libertarian friend Greg Lukianoff. Greg is the president of [FIRE], one of the last truly non-partisan civil liberties [orgs] in the [US]." 2/5
David is indeed one of my favorite people as well & I learned so much from working with him. FIRE tries to model genuine viewpoint diversity internally & I have learned endless lessons from working with smart, thoughtful folks on the other side of the political spectrum. 3/5
As a practical matter having people on staff helps you see controversies from a completely different POV & has kept us from making mistakes in judgment.
At a deeper level it’s increased my compassion & understanding for people with profoundly different beliefs. 4/5
I normally hate “there are two kind of people in the world” arguments, but I am increasingly thinking there are 2 camps: one that wants to win the culture war & those of us who want to protect & sustain the republic.
David & I are very much in the latter camp. 5/5
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THREAD: My latest Eternally Radical Idea newsletter responded to @DavidColeACLU’s review of my & @RIKKISCHLOTT’s newest book, The Canceling of the American Mind in @nybooks. 1/16
David says Rikki & I claim #CancelCulture was worse than McCarthyism. The closest comparison we make is between Cancel Culture on campus & the 1st & 2nd Red Scare. We found that neither Red Scare threatened profs or students as much as Cancel Culture (check out the post for the numbers) & nothing comes VAGUELY close to it since the law was established between 1957 & 1973. 3/16
THREAD: With FIRE’s expansion to off-campus work, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about #freespeech philosophy. My series with former ACLU President, the great Nadine Strossen answers common arguments against free speech. 1/18
Part 1: Free speech does NOT equal violence. We discuss whether freedom of speech rests on a false notion that words & violence are distinct. SPOILER: It doesn’t!. 2/18
Much virtual ink is spilled over the term “cancel culture.” Conservatives complain about it while perpetuating it, some progressives deny that it exists. @TheFIREorg’s @Komi_Tea & I explain in our recent piece for @thedailybeast. 1/12
Last week, @nytimes published an editorial on America’s “#FreeSpeech problem,” citing a poll that showed that over the past year, 55% of respondents self-censored for fear of retaliation or harsh criticism. 2/12
Former @TheFIREorg intern @emmma_camp’s @nytimes op-ed on self-censorship at @UVA provoked some unhinged reactions, demonstrating the censorial behavior Emma warned of. 3/12
THREAD: Free speech culture didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s been built on the foundation of centuries of conflict, philosophy & law. If you want to brush up on the history, look no further than my #FreeSpeech Culture Study List. 1/18
With a unique & international perspective, @JMchangama’s timely & thorough “Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media” shows how ancient & global the fight for free speech has been. 2/18
The most important book of 2021 IMO was @jon_rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge. Jon covers crises in our knowledge producing fields, higher education & journalism, & reveals the true value of The Enlightenment: the discovery of our profound ignorance. 3/18 amzn.to/2RyyxtS
THREAD: Former @TheFIREorg intern @emmma_camp_ published a terrific essay in @nytimes about the stifling climate on college campuses. As if to prove her point, her piece was met with outrage & denial in a predictable culture war pattern. 1/16
As @JordanmHowell & Sean argue, most of the critiques of the survey data @emmma_camp_ cited are baseless. The detractors misrepresent the cited campus free speech survey’s methodology. 3/16
THREAD: This week I am in @reason Magazine with a feature on ‘The Second Great Age of Political Correctness.’ By the mid-90s “PC” had become a joke, derided across the political spectrum See: the (not good) Jeremy Piven movie PCU. 1/14
Many students stopped calling it “PC,” but the trend it described didn’t disappear, it just went off the public radar in the “ignored years” of campus #freespeech. During that time problems persisted & got worse. 2/14
Stanford’s infamous speech code banning insults & stigmatization was struck down in court in 1995, one of a half dozen losses for speech codes, but they STILL proliferated. By 2009 74% of universities had extremely restrictive speech codes. 3/14