Greg Lukianoff: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, there’s an article, there’s a debate. I can’t wait to watch it because I don’t think it’s available yet to watch on video. You have the attend in person. I can’t wait to see it, but FIRE was in part supporting, and then LA Times wrote a scathing article about that everybody in the debate was basically leaning right. Okay, so much to unpack there. Bari Weiss has this great project, The Free Press. I’ve been very impressed. It’s covering stories that a lot of the media, right or left, isn’t willing to cover. We hosted a debate with her and we wanted to make it as fun and controversial as possible, so FIRE and The Free press hosted a debate, “Did the sexual revolution fail?” The debate was really exciting, really fun. The side that said that sexual revolution wasn’t a failure that Grimes and Sarah Haider were on, one, it was a nice, meaty, thoughtful night. There was a review of it that was just sort of scathing about the whole thing, and it included a line saying that, “FIRE, which claims to believe in free speech but only defends viewpoints to degrees with.” I can’t believe that even made it into the magazine because it’s not just calling us because, of course, the implication, of course, is that we’re right wing, which we’re not. Actually, the staff leans decidedly more to the left than to the right. But we also defend people all over the spectrum all the time. That’s something that even the most minimal Google search would’ve solved. We’ve been giving LA Times some heat on this because it’s like, “Yeah, if you said, in my opinion, they’re right wing,” we would’ve argued back saying, “Well, here’s the following 50,000 examples of us not being,” but when you actually make the factual claim that we only defend opinions we agree with, first of all, there’s no way for us to agree with opinions because we actually have a politically diverse staff who won’t even agree on which opinions are good and what opinions we have. Yeah, one time when someone did something like this and they were just being a little bit flippant about free speech being fine, I did a 70 tweet long thread just being like, “Hey, do you really think this is fine?” I decided not to do that on this particular one, but the nice thing about it is it demonstrated two parts of the book, Canceling of the American Mind, if not more. One of them is dismissing someone because they’re conservative and because that was the implication. Don’t have to listen to FIRE because they’re conservative. But the other one is something, a termite that I invented specifically for the way people argue on Twitter, which is hypocrisy projection. “Hi, I’m person who only cares about one side of the political fence and I think everyone else is a hypocrite, and by the way, I haven’t done any actual research on this, but I assume everyone else is a hypocrite.” n who only cares about one side of the political fence and I think everyone else is a hypocrite, and by the way, I haven’t done any actual research on this, but I assume everyone else is a hypocrite.” You see this happen all the time, and this happens to FIRE a lot where someone would be like, “Where is FIRE on this case?” And we’re like, “We are literally quoted in the link you just sent but didn’t actually read,” or it’s like, “Where’s FIRE on this?” It’s like, “Here’s our lawsuit about it from six months ago.” It’s a favorite thing, and also Jon Stewart, Daily Show, the whataboutism and the idea that these people must be hypocrites is something that greatest comedy, but as far as actually a rhetorical tactic that will get you to truth, just assuming that your opponent or just accusing your opponent of always being a hypocrite is not a good tactic for truth, but by the way, it tends to always come from people who aren’t actually consistent on free speech themselves.…

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