Greg Lukianoff

You can't ban speech just because it's offensive.

It's too subjective.

It basically – 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 like 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 –

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 – like 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.

Like 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.

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.