Greg Lukianoff

So I'm a First Amendment lawyer, as I mentioned, and that's my passion.

That's what I studied, and I think American First Amendment law is incredibly interesting.

In one sentence, the First Amendment is trying to get rid of basically all the reasons why humankind had been killing each other for its entire existence.

That we weren't going to fight anymore over opinion.

We weren't going to fight anymore over religion.

That you have the right to approach your government for redressing grievances.

That you have the freedom to associate.

That all of these things in one sentence were like, nope, the government will no longer interfere with your right to have these fundamental human rights.

And so one thing that makes FIRE a little different from other organizations is, however, we're not just a First Amendment organization.

We are a free speech organization.

But at the same time, a lot of what I think free speech is—

can be well explained with reference to a lot of First Amendment law, partially because in American history, some of our smartest people have been thinking about what the parameters of freedom of speech are in relationship to the First Amendment.

And a lot of those principles, they transfer very well just as pragmatic ideas.

So like the biggest sin in terms of censorship is called viewpoint discrimination, that essentially you allow freedom of speech except for that opinion.

Now, it's – and it's found to be kind of more defensible and I think this makes sense that if you set up a forum and like we're only going to talk about economics to exclude people who want to talk about a different topic.

But it's considered rightfully a bigger deal if you set up a forum for economics.

But we're not going to let people talk about that kind of economics or have that opinion on economics, most particularly.

So a lot of the principles from First Amendment law actually make a lot of philosophical sense as good principles for when – like what is protected and unprotected speech, what should get you in trouble, how you actually analyze it, which is why we actually try in our definition of cancel culture to work in some of the First Amendment norms just in the definition so we don't have to bog down on them as well.

Yeah.

If you're saying that something is or is not economics, well, you can say everything's economics, and therefore I want to talk about poetry.