Rob Henderson

and then went off to the University of Cambridge and got a PhD with the support of the Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

And now I'm a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and I write regularly on Substack and for various other outlets as well.

And yeah, I mentioned in the book, I was a huge fan of Loveline as a teenager.

I mentioned Dr. Drew in one of the middle chapters.

So every time I join you on your show, it's a surreal experience.

Yeah, well, it's an interesting question.

I'm interested in the self-censorship component.

So, of course, there's the overt censorship where you can get deplatformed or suspended or demonetized and that kind of thing.

And as we increasingly live our lives online, that matters.

If you're silenced, if you're deplatformed, you're no longer able to communicate your thoughts and your ideas.

But you also see this rise in self-censorship.

So I spend a lot of time in and around academia, and you can see the rise in the number of students and faculty members who say they don't express their true opinions out of some fear of being penalized or ostracized.

There was a stat in the New York Times a few months ago, which indicated that 80% of students have concealed or misrepresented their political views because they were afraid of getting a bad grade from their professor in class.

But then when I speak to college students, they say that their main fear comes from their peers, from other students.

So they self-censor and stifle because they don't want to be ostracized or

insulted on social media or unpersoned in some way.

And when I speak with some academics who are unbothered by this, they say things like, well, self-censorship has always existed.

There have always been taboo things that we haven't been allowed to say and this kind of thing.

But my response to them is always, well, why is it increasing?

you know, if you go back to 2011, something like 50, 60% of students said that they would self-censor their views.