AMERICAN HIGHER ED’S FREE SPEECH PROBLEMS DIDN’T START ON OCT 7, 2023. My newest Substack piece looks at the absolute bedlam rocking college campuses across the country (Columbia chief among them), the ‘hypocrisy projection’ of people who didn’t care about free speech until it was their ideological comrades being censored, and more.

SILLY WALKS & FREE SPEECH TALKS: The full video of my interview with the legendary John Cleese is now available. Enjoy!

“WHILE HIS PROPOSALS APPEAR ON THE SURFACE TO BE AIMED ONLY AT MINORS, IN REALITY, THEY WOULD IMPLICATE THE RIGHTS OF ADULTS, TOO.” Check out my review of my good friend & previous co-author Jon Haidt’s latest book in which I address some First Amendment concerns with some of his proposed solutions.

‘THE ANXIOUS GENERATION’ IS AN EXCELLENT AND IMPORTANT BOOK … [h]owever, as a free speech advocate and First Amendment lawyer, I believe some of Jon’s proposals that reach beyond norms and into government legislation go too far and would restrict free speech rights.”

MY FIRST AMENDMENT CONCERNS WITH WITH MY COAUTHOR JON HAIDT’S NEW BOOK ‘THE ANXIOUS GENERATION.’

GURRI’S NEGATION: My term to convey Martin Gurri’s observation in his book, “The Revolt of the Public,” that the explosion of social media and information technology that coalesced to accelerate “The Fifth Wave,” has tremendous power to tear down institutions, ideas, and people, but, as of yet, very little ability to create or sustain.

GURRI’S NIHILISM: My term to describe the kind of nihilism Gurri describes in his book, in which negation is the primary approach and the lack of constructive or realistic suggestions or proposals amounts to a kind of de facto, and sometimes explicit, nihilism.

Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Public” wins my highly-coveted “Prestigious Ashurbanipal Award” for the month of April!

MARTIN GURRI’S “THE REVOLT OF THE PUBLIC” WINS MY ‘PRESTIGIOUS ASHURBANIPAL AWARD’ FOR APRIL 2024. This book helps make sense of the chaos that social media has wrought on global communication and politics. It’s also beautifully designed and illustrated!

“OUR MEDIA REVOLUTION HAS ONLY BEEN ABLE TO TEAR THINGS DOWN. WE NEED TO LEARN HOW TO BUILD.” Check out my review for Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Public”, the winner of April’s Prestigious Ashurbanipal Award!

COME SEE ME IN VA! AMY WAX DEBATES! GUERNICA GUERNICAS ITSELF! AND MORE! Bringing you the latest free speech news.

AND THE PRESTIGIOUS ASHURBANIPAL AWARD GOES TO… Abigail Shrier’s “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.” Check out my latest ERI post to see why Shrier’s follow-up to Irreversible Damage is the most important book of the year.

JOHN CLEESE PUT ‘UNFUNNY’ COMEDY CENSORS IN THEIR PLACE, and lots more in the Eternally Radical Idea’s newest free speech weekend update.

LONDON CALLING: ERI’s newest free speech weekend update features come concerning free speech news from abroad and, for the first time ever, commentary on new First Amendment jurisprudence from FIRE’s very own general counsel, Ronnie London.

UMM, YES, THINGS HAVE GOTTEN MUCH WORSE FOR FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS (PART 2!): The data just keeps piling up.

The change we saw happen in 2014 was not simply that students were suddenly not as good on free speech. It was also that students who weren’t good on free speech were entering campuses that already had administrators hostile to free speech. It is that collaboration that has created the disaster we have seen on campus — perfectly illustrated by events like the shouting down of U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan at Stanford University, which was the result of students and administrators working together to silence disfavored speech and deplatform speakers they didn’t like.

Tons of new data and a video with the great Mike Rowe, here. 

THE SKEPTICS WERE WRONG, PART 1. Over the past decade, the average number of deplatforming attempts involving students per year has quadrupled.

SO META! MY “CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND” CO-AUTHOR RIKKI SCHLOTT WAS JUST CANCELED FROM SXSW.

It appears that I’ve been canceled … for speaking up about cancel culture.

Organizers of the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival declined to approve my participation in a panel of speakers.

The reason? Concern that I’d dared to speak out against cancel culture.

An email from SXSW staff, shared with me by the panel’s organizer, reveals the festival was “hesitant to approve” my participation because my commentary has been “focused on the idea of cancel culture.”

Oh, the irony!

You know Rikki, I heard there is this book about Cancel Culture that you might find interesting…

CANCELED FOR WRITING ABOUT CANCEL CULTURE? AND WHY WE ARE WILLING TO “DRIVE THIS BUS INTO A WALL.” Bringing you the latest free speech news.

ACCORDING TO THE NUMBERS ON DEPLATFORMING ATTEMPTS, THE PICTURE FOR FREE SPEECH ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES IS GRIM: In a new post for The Eternally Radical Idea, FIRE’s Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens and I unpack the data and zero in on where these attempts are coming from and who they tend to impact.

“The last couple of weeks alone have been absolutely terrible, and it’s no surprise why. Campuses exploded in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, with attempts to deplatform speakers coming in about equal numbers from both sides. However, as of this moment we are not aware of a pro-Palestine event being disrupted by pro-Israel students. The most recent examples we have are all pro-Palestinian protestors shutting down pro-Israel speech.”

In the latest Eternally Radical Idea post, Sean Stevens and I dig into the campus deplatforming numbers. 2023 was the worst year on record for shout downs, hecklers’ vetoes & disinvitations, but unfortunately if the current pace is kept, 2024 will top it.

THIS WEEKEND’S ETERNALLY RADICAL IDEA WEEKEND UPDATE features a piece co-written by me and Angel Eduardo in The Free Press on the recent UC Berkeley riot, a great new piece from FIRE’s Sarah McLaughlin which asks “Why is an Indian court order determining what you can read on the internet?”, and a whole lot more!

CANCEL CULTURE IS HAPPENING ON A HISTORIC SCALE, PART 4: From the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids to censorship in the contemporary UK, this week’s Eternally Radical Idea has some scary news about how bad it’s gotten across the pond.

“British police track “non-crime hate incidents.” In essence, this means anyone who takes offense to someone’s speech about a protected characteristic can report the speaker to the police. Horrifyingly, guidance for police states that “the victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers and staff should not directly challenge this perception.”

“From 2014 to 2019, almost 120,000 such incidents were cataloged across the U.K.”