Greg Lukianoff

Freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you didn't also have the right to say things that were wrong.

Because if you can't engage in idea euphoria, if you can't actually speculate, you'll never actually get to something that's right in the first place.

But it's especially galling when people who were right were censored and never actually got the credit that they deserve.

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, Mary Matsuda, et cetera,

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.

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.