Greg Lukianoff: prediction

Transcript context

…Hate speech is the best marketing campaign for censorship and it came from academia of the 20th century. And that, when I talked about the anti-free speech movement that was one of their first inventions. There was a lot of talk about critical race theory and being against critical race theory and FIRE will sue if you say that people can’t advocate for it or teach it or research it because you do absolutely have the right to pursue it academically. However, every time someone mentions CRT, they should also say the very first project of the people who founded CRT, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, etc., was to create this new category of unprotected speech called hate speech and to get it banned. The person who enabled this drift, of course, was Herbert Marcuse in 1965, basically questioning whether or not free speech should be a sacred value on the left and he was on the losing side for a really long time. The liberals, the way I grew up, that was basically being pro free speech was synonymous with being a liberal. But that started to be etched away on Campus and the way it was was with the idea of hate speech that essentially, “Oh, but we can designate particularly bad speech as not protected and who’s going to enforce it? Who’s going to decide what hate speech actually is?” Well, it’s usually overwhelmingly can only happen in an environment of really low viewpoint diversity because you have to actually agree on what the most hateful and wrong things are. And there’s a bedrock principle, it’s referred to this in a great case about flag burning in the First Amendment that I think all the world could benefit from. You can’t ban speech just because it’s offensive. It’s too subjective. It basically is… It’s one of the reasons why these kind of codes have been more happily adopted in places like Europe where they have a sense that there’s a modal German or a modal Englishman and, “I think this is offensive and therefore, I can say that this is wrong.” In a more multicultural, in a genuinely more diverse country that’s never actually had an honest thought that there is a single kind of American, there’s never been. We had the idea of Uncle Sam but that was always kind of a joke. Boston always knew it wasn’t. Richmond always knew it wasn’t. Georgia always knew it wasn’t. Alaska… We’ve always been a hodgepodge and we get in a society that diverse that you can’t ban things simply because they’re offensive and that’s one of the reasons why hate speech is not an unprotected category of speech. And I go further, my theory on freedom of speech is slightly different than most other constitutional lawyers. And I think that’s partially because some of these theories, although a lot of them are really good, are inadequate. They’re not expansive enough. And I sometimes call my theory the Pure Informational Theory of Freedom of Speech or sometimes when I want to be fancy, The Lab and the Looking Glass Theory. inadequate. They’re not expansive enough. And I sometimes call my theory the Pure Informational Theory of Freedom of Speech or sometimes when I want to be fancy, The Lab and the Looking Glass Theory. And its most important tenet is that if the goal is the project of human knowledge which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think and what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know. So every time you’re actually saying, “You can’t say that,” you’re actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think you’re causing… What Timer Kran, who’s on our board of advisors, calls preference falsification. You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world, which by the way, in a lot of cases, because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think that people are more prejudiced than they might be. And actually, these kind of restrictions, there was a book called Racial Paranoia that came out about 15 years ago that was making the point that the imposition of some of these codes can sometimes make people think that the only thing holding you back from being a raging racist are these codes. So it must be really, really bad. It can actually make all of these things worse. And one, which we talk about in the book, one very real practical way it makes things worse is when you censor people, it doesn’t change their opinion, it just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble. So it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with and group polarization takes off. So we have some interesting data in the book about how driving people off of Twitter, for example, in 2017, and then again I think in 2020, driving people to gab led to greater radicalization among those people. It’s a very predictable force. Censorship doesn’t actually change people’s minds and it pushes them in directions that actually, by very solid research, will actually make them more radicalized. So yeah, I think that the attempt to ban hate speech, it doesn’t really protect us from it but it gives the government such a vast weapon to use against us that we will regret giving them. Is there a way to look at extreme cases to test this idea out a little bit? So if you look on Campus, what’s your view about allowing, say, white supremacists on Campus to do speeches or KKK?…

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