Greg Lukianoff, FIRE’s president, traces America’s free speech decline from left-wing campus activism to right-wing threats in 2024, including Trump’s administration targeting critics with unconstitutional measures like Larry Bushart’s 37-day arrest over a meme. His book The War on Words debunks myths—words aren’t violence, hate speech remains protected unless severe, and lies vs. hyperbole are legally distinct—while warning against government suppression via media control or campaign funding restrictions. Lukianoff argues Trump’s verbal dominance, though rude, is protected but reflects a broader erosion of open discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
This morning we continue with our annual Holiday Authors Week and nine days of conversations with America's top writers from across the political spectrum on a variety of public policy and political topics.
This morning's featured author is Greg Lukianov, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
He's discussing his new book, The War on Words, 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail.
Mr. Lukianov, let's just begin with the state of free speech in America today.
Well, you know, fire's been around for 26 years, my organization.
We mostly focus on campus at first, but then we expanded what we do to beyond campus.
So we have tons of data to look at the situation.
And a lot of the threats, for example, on campus, you know, used to come from the left, the, you know, what might be called wokeness or political correctness.
This year, the majority of the threats have actually come from the right.
They've come from the off-campus.
They've come from the Trump administration.
They've come from individual politicians.
So right now on campus, it's the worst of both worlds.
But also off campus, I have seen cases.
We are currently, we just filed a lawsuit this past week in defense of an ex-cop named Larry Bushart.
He was arrested and held for 37 days for a meme, basically making fun of Trump while also being somewhat dismissive about a vigil being held for Charlie Kirk after he died.
Now, you can dislike him for that.
You can think that was inappropriate or whatever, but it's unquestionably protected.
And if you're looking at 37 days in jail for clearly protected speech, you have to go back to the 1920s to see something like that.
You know, he came in with very big promises of freedom of speech.
JD Vance, he took a lot of criticism for when he went to Europe and pointed out how bad the situation is in Europe.
And by the way, JD Vance is entirely right.
It's been a disastrous scenario, both in the EU and in the UK.
And they made big promises of protecting freedom of speech.
But since being in office, they have targeted law firms, they have targeted media, they have targeted higher education in blatantly unconstitutional ways over and over again, including actually picking up some of the weapons that they used to decry on the left, like the use of hate speech, in order to punish speech that the current president hates.
Well, the most important thing about the book is this was my opportunity to write with one of my heroes, the former president of the ACLU, who I met as a fanboy back when I was in law school, the great Nadine Strawson.
And we have spent our careers, hers much longer than mine, answering specific questions about freedom of speech so many times that we figured, okay, we're just going to write these down and put them in a book.
And by the way, relating to your previous question, one of the questions we answer is what we hear a lot of times is people on the left claiming that free speech is a right-wing value.
And of course, that's all flipping over right now.
And basically, it's because there's so much misinformation about freedom of speech.
Nadine and I thought just putting it in a simple collection of responses to the most common arguments against free speech and pointing out why they're not as strong as you might think they are was a really good use of our time.
Words are violence was something that I saw early in my career, starting back in 2001, as kind of a rhetorical escalation, a way of basically saying, I want to censor you, but that sounds bad.
So I'm going to recast your harsh words or allegedly harsh words as violence.
But I think as the years went on, younger people consistently began to sort of believe this, that there's no real distinction between speech and action.
And we'll point out that it's a societal decision, for example, that we draw a bright line distinction thanks to the First Amendment in the United States, but traditions of free speech everywhere else, between speech and action.
And I say, yeah, I mean, to a degree, everything's a subjective reality.
But at the same time, that distinction is one of the best technologies, really, that we've ever developed for peace, for prosperity, for innovation, and for authenticity.
The First Amendment was passed and it's respected under the misunderstanding that words can't be dangerous.
And our answer to that is nonsense.
Words are protected precisely because they're powerful, because they can change minds, because they can move democracies, because they can change hearts.
If words weren't powerful, there'd be no reason to protect them.
But solving things through speech and argumentation and persuasion is infinitely better than the way societies have done this traditionally, which is violence or the threat of violence.
The greatest marketing success of the censorship movement of the last 50 years has been trying to recast mean-spirited, sometimes bigoted, sometimes sexist speech as hate speech.
And if you're wondering why in the UK, they are arresting something like 12,000 people a year is one of the estimates for speech, for online speech, it's because of the success of hate speech theory.
That's what happens when essentially you say, well, you know, if we're offended, if we think what you're saying is highly offensive, you end up with selective prosecution of opinions that the people in power are uncomfortable with.
So hate speech isn't an exception to free speech in the United States, to be very clear.
And there are tens of millions of young people who think it is.
And we have to debunk this argument all the time.
We have something very clever in First Amendment law called the bedrock principle that came out of the famous Texas v. Johnson flag burning case, that in the U.S., you cannot ban speech simply because it's offensive.
And with that bedrock principle, there's no such thing as a hate speech exception in the United States.
Well, it started on campus back in the 1970s and 80s.
And I think that in the K-through PhD educational system, this is reinforced over and over again.
I don't think students are taught good lessons about freedom of speech.
In fact, my first book was called Unlearning Liberty, because I actually thought that we were teaching students to think like censors, not like equal citizens in a free society.
So I think that the misinformation on hate speech goes deep.
I do think it ultimately started on campus.
But the K-3 PhD system has not been doing a good job or really much of an effort at all to correct this misapprehension.
The way we're able to have a democracy is that we can speak with candor and honesty.
And what people really tend to forget is that laws are enforced by people.
There's this idea, the very, to be honest, naive idea, no offense, Timbo, but that essentially all you have to do is pass a law, and of course it's going to be enforced in the way intended.
That's nonsense.
That's never the way it works.
If you give power a special exception to free speech and you just call it something really nice and they're going to call it something nice because they need to have a PR victory on that, you end up having a situation where the government then gets to pick and choose who to punish and when and why.
So for example, right now, one of the things that's going on in the UK is people who are getting arrested oftentimes are people who are complaining, sometimes nastily, sometimes not, about problems created by mass immigration.
About radioactive topic, sure.
And make people uncomfortable?
Sure.
Important to be able to discuss honestly and fairly in a democracy?
You bet it is.
So do not give power more power in hopes that that will work out to your or anyone else's benefit.
This is also something that a lot of students don't seem to understand.
Some do and don't care.
But 2023 and 2024 were the two worst years for shoutdowns, as best we can tell in American campus history.
And we don't mean like heckling or just someone saying, boo, and someone takes the stage.
We're talking about when students show up and they make sure that no one else can hear the speaker because they don't want that speaker to be heard.
And that is the most primitive, most basic form of censorship in probably in human history.
A crowd of angry people deciding you cannot hear this speaker because I don't approve of them.
It is, you know, it's mob authoritarianism.
It is the kind of mob censorship that the First Amendment was inspired to protect, what was inspired to not protect, to avoid these kind of conclusions.
So I do think that the problem of shoutdowns, when people try to claim, oh, it's just us exercising our free speech to make sure no one else hears the speaker, it's nonsense.
Mark, our first caller here on our line for Democrats.
Mark, what do you say about free speech?
unidentified
Well, the first thing is I think free speech is under the worst attack that I've seen in my lifetime.
And I think that we definitely need fire involved now.
Mom Dami got elected in New York City despite the fact that all these Jewish groups and all these Israel lobby groups came out against him.
In New York State, you have mob rule when you go against certain groups and we were sending $30 billion to Israel, but we're cutting the VA and people aren't getting their Medicaid and Medicare.
You cannot criticize certain people like Jews in Israel lobby and criticism of what's going on in the Middle East without being called an anti-Semite.
That is the one thing that they did to Jesus 2,000 years ago and now they're doing to Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk who was assassinated because his free speech was offending people.
I do think the Trump administration has relied on using the argument that essentially they're cracking down on anti-Semitism on campus to expand its power and to use that argument against higher ed.
However, I want to be really clear here.
I've been doing this for 25 years almost.
There is a real anti-Semitism problem on college campuses, but it's not defined as mere criticism of Israel.
It's defined as anti-Semitic harassment, which means a pattern of discriminatory behavior directed at individuals because of a protected characteristic that is severe, persistent, and pervasive.
And that's not protected.
And that was happening, by the way, in 2023 and 2024.
The shoutdowns that I mentioned, by the way, were overwhelmingly, I think all but about three of those examples were pro-Palestinian students.
So I and the argument that you can't criticize Israel, I see an awful lot of criticism of Israel at the moment.
I've seen among certain cohorts of students more discomfort in criticizing Hamas.
I really like how this author has talked about the sort of fiction or this exception for hate speech.
You know, the speech that needs to be protected is always disliked.
Speech that's pretty, that everyone likes needs no protection.
So by definition, if we're going to have freedom of speech, it's always going to be hated speech.
And then I would like to dig in a little bit more to just some of the issues, I think, with free speech in the country.
One is just the concentration of media.
You know, it's like five companies that own it.
And so I think that is creating a situation where there's so many false narratives, right?
So you can almost harm free speech by just putting out so much filth and garbage so that people are arguing and bickering about stuff that's nonsense anyway.
It's really interesting.
The previous caller had talked about Israel.
And there's no doubt in my mind that there is hatred toward different groups, Asians, African Americans, and even Jews.
But what I see happening on college campuses is not a hatred toward Jews.
In fact, I see many of the students that are protesting, they are Jewish students, and what they're protesting is something very specific.
And I think the news gets this wrong a lot.
They're protesting Zionism, which is a form of nationalism.
It's very dangerous.
And what Israel has been doing is not a war.
It's a genocide.
The rest of the world pretty much agrees.
It wasn't ever a war.
It was a genocide.
We don't have a current ceasefire.
Israel is violating that daily.
And so I do agree with that previous caller that there is a way in which we're not allowed to criticize Israel.
And then Israel's lobby is really strong here.
It's something called AIPAC.
Everyone's afraid of them if you're a politician.
That's changing now.
I think the recent, he talked about the recent election in New York where Mamdani won.
That was with, and the previous caller had said that there was a lot of Jewish people acting against that.
Actually, Mamdani won a majority of the Jewish vote.
And so again, this conflating Zionism and Jewish is a very, very violent thing.
So I'm not Jewish, but I do see a lot of people saying it's not anti-Semitic, it's anti-Zionist.
And then the next thing is a series of anti-Semitic sort of stereotypes, you know, about them controlling everything and them being super powerful and even like even cruder stereotypes.
So I'm a little less sympathetic to just the all-purpose, oh, this isn't anti-Semitic, this is anti-Zionist.
But that's a personal opinion.
I do think that when we talk about powerful lobbies, one of the more powerful lobbies that's underappreciated is Qatari, for example, is some of the Middle Eastern money that's coming in.
China's power influence on campuses is huge.
My colleague Sarah McLaughlin wrote a great book called Authoritarians in the Academy, specifically about how much Chinese policy harms free speech on American campuses.
But also, the next runner up there is Qatar.
So I do think the, but when he opened up by talking about media consolidation, I'm a civil libertarian.
So I want to make sure that the number one opponent of human freedom historically doesn't get too much power.
So yes, corporations can abuse their powers and all that kind of stuff.
What I'm the most worried about, though, is governmental control over those institutions, governmental abuse of those institutions, governmental takeovers of those institutions.
So what Trump has been doing, for example, with the mergers and holding that very explicitly over the groups, over Paramount and CBS and all these other groups' heads to try to get them to change their coverage, that's unlike anything I've seen in American history.
And if you're worried about corporations, you should be much more worried about state-controlled corporations.
Yeah, that's an argument that we get that essentially free speech, free speech might have all been well and good in 1792, but we're facing a different time now.
We're facing different circumstances.
And I get that this argument sounds maybe initially persuasive, but people, if you study human history, this argument gets made for every new innovation, whether it's radio, television, the internet, certainly social media, that free speech time has essentially passed.
But people then very quickly jump and the government needs to do something about it.
That essentially the government needs to have greater power over social media companies, like as they're doing in the EU to a ridiculous extent.
That essentially the solution is going to be new laws and new powers over speech.
And again, that is going to accrue to the benefit of power.
That's going to accrue to the policy preferences of the Trump administration or the bureaucrats in Brussels or whatever's going on in the UK.
We'll go to Greg, who's in Glen Allen, Virginia, Independent.
Greg, you're next.
unidentified
Yeah, good morning.
So I think that the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court has to go down as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions because it made this weak or unnatural connection between free speech and political donations.
And that has led now to all this political corruption in Washington, D.C. and the amount of money that it takes to run for office.
It's just created a huge, I think it's been damaging to our country in a big way because the amount of money now that's involved in politics.
So I wonder if you could comment.
You probably disagree.
I wonder if you could comment on this unnatural and weak connection between freedom of speech and campaign finance.
Well, first of all, fire largely stays out of campaign finance.
Like we're pretty, we have a pretty broad ambit, but there are other organizations that entirely specialize in that.
So that's not our area of specialization.
However, I do think Citizens United is consistently a misrepresented and misunderstood case.
The law that was challenged under Citizens United for McCain Feingold required lawyers to go into the Supreme Court and argue, and this was a real question.
They were asked a question by one of the justices.
Would this law require you to ban, say, an unflattering book about Hillary Clinton that was released during the election season?
And the answer was yes.
That is unquestionably a violation of the First Amendment.
So people need to remember that the law at issue in Citizens United, and it had everything from like whether or not you could put up like campaign posters and nonsense like that, it was laughably unconstitutional.
Am I sympathetic to the argument that Citizens United went far further than it needed to?
I get that.
I do get that.
But I do think like the problem of money in politics has to meet the problem of what if government has the power to control how much money you spend?
Because you can destroy entire causes if you want to, if suddenly the government can decide how much money goes to that cause or to that person or to that, well, actually to that cause or organization.
As far as the law is concerned, they don't really draw a perfect distinction between those two things.
Because the truth is, lies are protected speech in the United States.
Not in all circumstances, to be very, very clear.
So for example, if I were to say that I know for a fact that you engaged in the, that you've sexually abused a child, you know, that could easily be defamation, depending on the way I put it.
So that's a case where a lie is not protected.
But we have seen cases where people say, oh, you know, I won the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Well, in the U.S., you don't go to jail for that.
You're a jerk.
But at the same time, it's not a crime to claim that.
So lying can be fraud in some cases, but lying can be protected in other cases as well.
Now, what's the difference between that and exaggeration?
Exaggeration is usually understood, like the word that we use a lot in law is hyperbole.
And if it's really clear that you're saying, you know, that, you know, President Lyndon Johnson was the worst president of the last, you know, 60 billion years, obviously you're kidding.
Also, it's an expression of opinions.
There's lots of reasons why that's protected as well.
But that essentially it's a way of signaling that you're not to be taken seriously.
So if someone said the same thing that I opened up with that I call defamation, but in a way to make it really clear that you're exaggerating to a degree that signals people, I'm not making an actual factual statement.
I'm just expressing that I'm really mad about something.
That is also makes our jobs easier because if it's hyperbolic, it's clearly protected.
Nobody can be meant to be defrauded by something saying that, you know, like these diet pills will help you lose 120 pounds a day.
Greg Lukianov is part of our series, Author Series Week here on C-SPAN's Washington Journal: Nine Days of Conversations with America's Top Writers from Across Political Spectrums.
Greg Lukianov is the CEO and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the author of the book, The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail.
We want to get your thoughts on free speech this morning.
Republicans dial in at 202-748-8001.
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And Independents, 202-748-8002.
You can text if you don't want to call at 202-748-8003.
Here's a text from Ann in Pittsburgh.
Your speaker says shutdowns are censorship.
What does he say about Mr. Trump's tactic of speaking over people until they shut up, like he did with Zelensky and so many women journalists?