Rob Henderson

Some half of students, maybe a few more than half.

Whereas now, depending on this survey you look at, it's anywhere between 80 and 90% of students say they self-censor.

So why has it jumped so much?

You know, if this has always existed, what's changed between now versus 15 years ago?

And, you know, I think a lot of people are aware the political currents have changed and people are growing

uh fearful although there does seem to be maybe a little bit of you know what people call the the vibe change the vibe shift over the last maybe year or two um you know elon musk taking over x has been um a great thing i think for for free speech um and for some of the other platforms as well uh substack which i'm active on you can actually speak your mind and um actually compete in the marketplace of ideas and um you know share your actual thoughts and opinions

yeah well and this is something that that people you know we have a short memory uh it's astonishing to me because back during the peak of uh wokeness and cancel culture uh you know 2020 2021 people were digging up old social media posts from 10 15 years prior and saying

Oh, you posted this thing 10 years ago, and so we're going to cancel you now.

And now that we have this vibe change and people are being honest again, or at least more honest than they were, they seem unbothered by the possibility that five years from now, 10 years from now, if the pendulum swings, everything you're saying right now in this moment might be used against you once the vibe shifts once again.

And so you have maybe this temporary freedom.

yeah yeah you have this temporary freedom but a lot of it comes from young people so i mentioned earlier that you know yes students will um misrepresent their views to please their professors but you're also seeing professors misrepresent their views to please their students because they're terrified of being cancelled or hounded off campus or being pressured to resign um and so you're seeing it in in every direction and it's it's concerning what's happening with young people

that it's young people who are the most enthusiastic seemingly about a lot of this stuff.

There was a survey from Eric Hoffman, who's a political scientist who found that even when you control for political orientation, academics under 30 are far more censorious than academics who are older in their middle age and above.

And so even though they both might identify politically as being the same in terms of their willingness to de-platform or silence or even go to extreme measures like coercion or physical intimidation or violence, it's young people who are pushing this and who are promoting it.

I think it's very mixed, where young people just seem to be more polarized in each direction, where you have some faction of young people who are as enthusiastic as ever for cancel culture, but then you have this backlash within that young segment who are very much against it, and in some ways maybe taking it too far, where they'll say things that are extremely offensive just for the sake of it,

But I would rather live in a world where people can say anything than fear expressing themselves.

i think that's what's what's been happening um where you know fuentes himself and a lot of his fans will say things like well we're sick of being told what to say or what to believe so we're just going to say everything and anything um regardless of whether or not it's true or whether they believe it um i think there's just this thrill and that kind of gleefulness i think has always existed among young people of being um saying things for shock value or for um

uh attention or to uh get a rise out of people or to upset you know older people uh who you know they claim that they don't get it or they don't understand um so i think there's there's an element of that but the thing is i think in decades past people understood to some extent that this was a performance when entertainers would say things that were outlandish so you know when i was growing up 15 20 years ago

You'd have the kind of hysteria around hip-hop artists and rappers, but you knew that they were entertainers on some level.

And when they were making their music, they would explain that this was kind of a caricatured version of reality for entertainment value.