Greg Lukianoff

But it kind of points out how just labeling someone bad is kind of meaningless.

So for that matter, labeling someone, I don't know, like woke or fascist or libtard or grifter, it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not they are right.

The way we figure out truth is a process of checking and rechecking, and it doesn't work if you just talk to people you already agree with.

And think about the poster boy for questioning his society's sacred cows and certainties.

This is, of course, the great Socrates.

He was so good at questioning certainties and sacred cows that he angered his society so much, they made him poison himself to death.

Socrates embodied the idea that certainty is the mind killer.

Young people used to be the great drivers of free speech, and they can be again.

But for that to happen, we all must remember that to understand the world, it's crucial to know what people really think.

And that is only going to happen in a situation in which people feel like they can be their authentic selves.

And for that, we need free speech.

Thank you.

Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns, starting around 2014 to get people fired.

fired, expelled, deplatformed, et cetera, for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment.

And I say would be protected because we're talking about circumstances in which it isn't necessarily where the First Amendment applies.

But what I mean is like as an analog to, say, things you couldn't lose your job as a public employee for.

And also the climate of fear that's resulted from that phenomenon, the fact that you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion.

And it wasn't subtle that there was an uptick in this, particularly on campus around 2014.

John Ronson wrote a book called So You've Been Publicly Shamed.

It came out in 2015, already documenting this phenomenon.