Greg Lukianoff

But its positive duty is that if I want to say awful things or, for that matter, great things that aren't popular in a public park, you can't let the crowd just shout me down.

You can't allow what's called a heckler's veto.

I'm thinking a lot about that.

And that's one of the things we talk about in Canceling of the American Mind is arguing towards truth and that cancel culture is cruel, it's merciless, it's anti-intellectual, but it also will never get you anywhere in your truth.

And you are going to waste so much time destroying your opponents in something that can actually never get you to truth through the process, of course, of you never actually get directly at truth.

You just chip away at falsity.

We try to make three major points in the book.

One is just simply cancel culture is real.

It's a historic era, and it's on a historic scale.

The second one is you should think of cancel culture as part of a –

rhetorical as a larger lazy rhetorical approach to what we refer to as winning arguments without winning arguments.

We mean that in two senses, without having winning arguments or without actually having won arguments.

We talk about all the different what we call rhetorical fortresses that both the left and the right have that prevent you from – that allow you to just dismiss the person

Um, or dodge the argument without actually ever getting to the substance of the argument.

Third part is just, you know, how, how do we fix it?

But the rhetorical fortress stuff is actually something I've been, I'm very passionate about because it, it, it interferes with our ability to get at truth and it wastes time.

And, and frankly, it also kind of, since cancel culture is part of that rhetorical tactic, it can also ruin lives.

October 17th.

I want to make little cards of these, of all of these tactics and start using them on X all the time because they are so commonly deployed and whataboutism I put first for a reason.

Yeah, I actually, when I was thinking about ways that X could be used to argue towards truth, I wouldn't want to have it so that, you know, everybody would be bound to that.