Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Andrew Ross Sorkin, the founder of Dealbook. Every year, I interview some of the world's most influential leaders across politics, culture, and business at the Dealbook Summit, a live event in New York City. On this year's podcast, you'll hear my unfiltered conversations with Gavin Newsom, the CEO of Palantir and Anthropic, and Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk.
Listen to Dealbook Summit wherever you get your podcasts. From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittroff. This is The Daily. After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. President Trump began his term with a promise.
He would restore free speech in America after what he said were the left's attempts to limit it. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. But over the past year, the federal government has taken a series of actions widely seen as direct attacks on the First Amendment.
Trump threatened to deport non-citizen college students and other international visitors who take part in pro-Palestinian protests. Donald Trump declared on social media that comedian Seth Meyers jokes. about him were, quote, 100 percent anti-Trump, which is probably illegal. Moves that supercharged a furious debate over free speech in the United States.
A staunch proponent of free speech, Charlie Kirk openly debated hot button issues. But in the wake of his death, that fundamental right is being challenged. If you're going to spread hateful shit and you're going to target marginalized groups of people, don't be all, oh, my God, I've been shot. So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out. In hell, call their employer.
You believe in canceling and deplatforming people who platform people that you do not like. And that goes against all of the principles of conservatism. So this fall, I spoke with Greg Lukianoff, the head of a legal defense group called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.
Greg has taken on high-profile cases that have pitted him and his organization against progressive campus culture and the Trump administration. And in the process, he's made a name for himself as a free speech true believer. We talked about what freedom of speech really means and why both the left and the right end up betraying it. It's Friday, December 5th. Greg.
Is it better if I have my headphones on or do you care? In many ways, Greg Lukianoff is not what you'd expect when you picture the kind of lawyer who's gone to battle with some of the most powerful politicians and institutions in the country. I always had this never look the part ethos, which was like, listen, if I'm going to a rave in Eastern Europe, I'm wearing like a lumberjack shirt.
The child of a British mother and a Russian father, he comes from a working class background in Connecticut. And I had a train running through my backyard. So I grew up in like the poorer part of town in an immigrant neighborhood. And to him, the First Amendment isn't just a constitutional framework, but more of a philosophy on which he's based his life.
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Chapter 2: What recent actions have been seen as attacks on free speech?
Actually, yeah. See, that's a free speech issue I can get behind. We should be able to say, I want to pick your brain, you know? I was just like, okay guys, like my mother's British. So I got like these kind of like semi-Victorian norms kind of shoved down my throat. And it's kind of like, just try to figure out what people are trying to say.
The polite censorship is often kind of like what I jokingly call like the the British way of handling conflict, which is to say that we won't discuss it at the dinner table. And it's like, no, that actually doesn't solve anything.
It is interesting, you know, to start off the conversation this way, because it does sound like you have in some way been thinking about this stuff for a very long time. It's been central to your life for a very long time. It's my second earliest memory, actually. Which is? What is the second earliest?
It was Christmas when I was four, and my auntie Rona had got me a gift, and I opened it up, and it's this absolutely terrible, cheap, plastic drum. Uh-oh. And it's the kind of thing that when you hit it, it's like, tonk, tonk, like it didn't even make a drum sound. Okay.
I later found out it was a joke gift because Rona was picking on my mom, like a good friend should, but for the idea that like, ha ha, I got your son a drum, you know, to ruin your life. But I wasn't in on the joke. And so... You were just a kid getting a kind of... Terrible, lousy gift. Yeah. And...
It was the first time in my life at least that I could remember that I got a gift I didn't genuinely like and feel appreciative about. And I remember like looking at my mom and being like, I have to be polite and like looking at my dad and being like, I have to be honest because Russian is much more brutal honesty, you know, like to be like, I do not like it.
You have an angel and a devil on your shoulder when it comes to free speech. I see. Yeah. But here's the thing though, like what's the, which is which sometimes, you know, like it can be hard to tell. So I look back forth, back and forth, back and forth. And then I'm like, and I break into tears, you know, because I don't know what to do. So it took me a while.
I always told the story of crying about that without realizing it had a free speech intersection as well. The idea that you can't be both polite and honest sometimes. And between the two, honesty is more important. Before we go any further, I want to just ask if you can give me your definition of what free speech is and what it isn't. Sure.
So freedom of speech, you know, I have a pretty simple definition of it. Freedom of speech is to be able to think what you will and say what you think. Like, just that radical, you know, just that expansive.
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Chapter 3: How does Greg Lukianoff define freedom of speech?
But the scale is even worse than we were expecting. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Ivan Penn. I'm an energy reporter for The New York Times. I think a lot of people take electricity for granted, but it's an essential piece of some of the biggest stories right now.
The rise of artificial intelligence, the threat of climate change and the real challenges that everyday people are facing with increasing electric bills. I spend my days talking to experts, sometimes traveling to really remote places, and investigating the role that energy plays in these huge issues.
I'm just one of hundreds and hundreds of journalists at The Times, experts in what they cover, who carry the same level of commitment to their reporting. And that's the beauty of The New York Times. We're all working together to help you better understand and make sense of the world today.
So if that sounds like something that connects with you and you're not a subscriber yet, you can go to nytimes.com slash subscribe. Walk me through the abuses, in your words, that you have seen so far from the Trump administration. What has stuck out in your mind the most in terms of what Trump has done on free speech thus far?
Honestly, like the most troubling one to me and the least appreciated are the attacks on the law firms that opposed him. They went after law firms that hired people who were involved in investigating the Russia claims, law firms that had lawyers who were involved in the January 6th hearings, like all things that...
All of these lawyers have every right to engage in as part of their profession, as part of their societal role. And it was incredibly vindictive going after these law firms and saying two things that they couldn't do. They might lose all their security clearance and two, that they couldn't go into federal buildings, which of course implies that they can't go to court. Is this a speech issue? No.
I think it is because I run a group that has a litigation arm. And if I can't oppose the government on things, I think it's very much a speech issue. It's an advocacy issue for sure. It's, you know, right to petition the government for address of grievances. It's a huge part of the First Amendment. We're in court with Trump himself right now.
We're suing someone who has suggested that he can take away nonprofit status and has gone after every other opponent possible. It's the best I can tell he's ever had in his life. So I'm a little bit waiting for, you know, when is it going to be our turn? Okay. Talk to me about what you've seen and how you interpret Trump's actions with regard to universities. Yeah. There's a lot.
There's a lot, yeah. There to unpack. What is kind of stuck in your mind as the most important? I would say the behavior towards Harvard was a lot of the most galling stuff. Yeah. Greg has a running list of the tactics the Trump administration has used to pressure universities. They're going to remove federal funding using the Title VI. You can no longer have foreign students there.
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Chapter 4: What personal experiences shaped Greg Lukianoff's views on free speech?
So I have a question that is about people on the right who look at what the Trump administration is doing in universities and they say, look, these academic institutions have amassed so much power. Yeah. And, you know, to them – These institutions are imbued with left-wing ideology to the point where they are just incapable of change. I'm embodying this argument right now.
And so if they're incapable of change and we think they should be changed, all we're doing is forcing the issue. What do you say to that?
I say I believe that there are lots of ways you could actually completely within the law improve and reform higher ed in ways that make it more rigorous, less expensive, you know, increases competition that actually allows lots of things that could even make it more egalitarian.
But you can't just rule from on high and say the federal government now demands that you have more conservative professors like that is not an option. The ends don't justify the means, is what you're saying. Exactly. There seems to be a core of an idea that you want to defund to the extent possible institutions where the left has a lot of power. So media, so higher ed, and big-name law firms.
Let's take the Jimmy Kimmel case, which we were horrified about but not really surprised about. That was a case where... If they wanted to get rid of Jimmy Kimmel and they decided to be more canny about it and exercise sort of like pressure behind the scenes, they probably could have pulled it off.
But instead, you have Trump actually on record like the previous summer saying, Kimmel's next, you know. And then you have Brendan Carr going out there who used to actually talk a good game on free speech. The chairman of the UFC. Of the chairman of the FCC used to talk a good game on free speech as well, you know, saying we can do this the hard way or the easy way.
It must be frustrating for some of the White House lawyers to have the people in charge basically say, you know, in the name of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, I'm now going to do the following, you know, 15 things. And it's like, oh, great. Now we're going to lose in court.
So, okay, can I ask about that episode of those comments by the FCC chair and then ABC moving to temporarily suspend Kimmel? You've seen a lot over the course of your career. Where does this rank for you? The funny thing about Kimmel was a lot of people thought that this really seared in their brains, but it wasn't even the worst thing we'd seen from the Trump administration that week.
Because that was the week after Charlie Kirk was killed. The extent to which the Trump administration exploited that once again just to go after their perceived enemies was stunning. And, you know, suddenly Pam Bondi is arguing if people say insensitive things about the death of Charlie Kirk, well, that's hate speech and we can go after you.
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