Greg Lukianoff: observation

Transcript context

…Every time you say something I always have a million thoughts and a million questions that pop up. Since you mentioned there’s a drift as you write about in the book and you mentioned now there’s a drift towards the left in academia. We should also maybe draw a distinction here between the left and the right, and a cancel culture as you present in your book, is not necessarily associated with any one political viewpoint that there’s mechanisms on both sides that result in cancellation and censorship in violation of freedom of speech. One thing I want to be really clear about is the book takes on both right and left cancel culture. They’re different in a lot of ways and definitely cancel culture from the left is more important in academia where the left dominates. We talk a lot about cancel culture coming from legislatures. We talk a lot about cancel culture on campus as well because even though most of the attempts that come from on campus to get people canceled are still from the left, there are a lot of attacks that come from the right, that come from attempts by different organizations. Sometimes when there are stories in Fox News, they’ll go after professors and about one third of the attempts to get professors punished that are successful actually do come from the right. We talk about attempts to get books banned. In the book, we talk about and talk about suing the Florida legislature, Ron DeSantis had something called the Stop WOKE Act, which we told everyone this is laughably unconstitutional. They tried to ban particular topics in higher ed. We’re like, “No, this is a joke. This will be laughed out of court.” They didn’t listen to us and they brought it, they passed it and we sued and we won. Now, they’re trying again with something that’s equally as unconstitutional and we will sue again and we will win. Can you elaborate on Stop WOKE Act? This is presumably trying to limit certain topics from being taught in school?…

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