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.”

ONLINE CENSORSHIP IN THE UK HAS LED TO FAR MORE ARRESTS THAN THE FIRST RED SCARE: The newest Eternally Radical Idea brings you the fourth installation in our history of censorship in which we compare the age of cancel culture (2014 to today) to eras of mass censorship in history.

“With the memory of the Red Terror, some Americans began to fear the domestic threat of anarchy and communism. When World War I ended in 1918, those concerns exploded into a national panic — what is referred to now as the first Red Scare — which constitutes perhaps the biggest mass censorship incident in U.S. history.”

THE LATEST EDITION OF THE ETERNALLY RADICAL IDEA’S WEEKEND UPDATE features my second ‘book of the month’ of 2024, Rob Henderson’s “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”

THE ETERNALLY RADICAL IDEA’S WEEKEND UPDATE brings you news from the red carpet premiere of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ documentary (which is now available to stream!) & MUCH more!

ON MY RECENT PBS NEWSHOUR APPEARANCE I debated a DEI admin who tried to dismiss all of my arguments as “anecdotes.” As we remind readers in the latest edition of The Eternally Radical Idea, “First Amendment law is filled with ‘anecdotes’ …that we now call “precedent.”

IN MY LATEST SUBSTACK POST, Adam Goldstein and I reflect on my recent appearance on PBS NewsHour where I debated a DEI admin whose position was that the problem is that we don’t have enough DEI.

MY LATEST SUBSTACK POST about my recent appearance on PBS NewsHour marshals data and examples to prove that DEI initiatives are ineffective AND crush free speech on campus.

“[T]he greater the relative size of the DEI bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students feel expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students in the campus ‘quad, dining hall, or lounge’

RIKKI JOINED MIKE ROWE’S “THE WAY I SEE IT” PODCAST AND WE BOTH JOINED SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN TO TALK ‘CANCELING’ on his “Psychology” podcast. Check out these newly released episodes and a whole lot more in the Eternally Radical Idea’s Weekend Update!

CHECK OUT THE FEARSOME ‘AGGREGATOR’ AND FIRE’S ‘TOP 10 WORST CENSORS’ in the Eternally Radical Idea’s weekend round-up of all things free speech (and more!)

THE ETERNALLY RADICAL IDEA WEEKEND FREE SPEECH UPDATE comes to you live from the intersection of free speech and artificial intelligence!

THE PLAY ON AI IS TO SCARE THE PUBLIC INTO A GOVERNMENT-ENABLED AI OLIGOPOLY. From my testimony yesterday: 

“But why not just let OpenAI or a handful of existing AI engines dominate the space?” you may ask. Trust in expertise and in higher education — another important developer of knowledge — has plummeted in recent years, due largely to self-inflicted wounds borne of the ideological biases shared by much of the expert class. That same bias is often found baked into existing AI, and without competing AI models we may create a massive body of purported official facts that we can’t actually trust. We’ve seen on campus that attempts to regulate hate speech have led to absurd results like punishing people for simply reading about controversial topics like racism. Similarly, AI programs flag or refuse to answer questions about prohibited topics.

And if you want to see the hearings, scroll down to end of my article here. You might want to have a drink first. 

A TALE OF TWO CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS (AND SEVERAL AI POEMS): We showed up to warn about threats to free speech from AI. Half the room couldn’t care less.

So we tried to make a point about AI bias. 

Part of showing why we should be concerned with AI-powered censorship includes the problem of AI bias. As a light and funny example, we decided to provide the Subcommittee with the results of an experiment my frequent co-author Adam Goldstein tried the day before. Adam asked ChatGPT to write poems for the members of the committee (though the members listed at the time were slightly different — the website hadn’t been updated yet).

Our prompt was the same for each member: “Write me a poem about why Rep. is the best politician in the country.

For every Democrat and seven Republicans, it wrote specific poems. For four republicans (Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Dan Bishop, and Harriet Hageman) it declined to do that. In two of those four cases (Gaetz and Hageman), ChatGPT demurred and replied instead with a generic poem about the virtues of government service.

Much more about a depressing show on Capitol Hill (and a bunch of graphics) here. 

A FIRE VICTORY AT PRINCETON, AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL MALICE, AND ME ON BIG THINK: On this week’s Weekend Free Speech Update. 

IT’S LIKE TRYING TO PASS DOWN A NOSE JOB TO YOUR KIDS. In my latest Substack Adam Goldstein and I take on Lysenkoism, fantasy botany, John Stuart Mill’s Trident, and epigenetic rhinoplasty. 

THIS WEEKEND’S FREE SPEECH UPDATE features an interview with a Chinese dissident student at Georgetown Law, an excerpted chapter of ‘Canceling’ in Quillette, and a whole lot more!

IN MY LATEST SUBSTACK POST, I dig into some of the data which may explain why the last ten years have been particularly bad for free speech. This graph which shows the lack of viewpoint diversity in higher ed (virtually or actually non-existent in several departments) helps explain how we got here:

WORRYINGLY THE YOUNGER PROFESSORS ARE EVEN WORSE ON FREE SPEECH: In my latest post for my Eternally Radical Idea Substack, I respond to some assertions in a otherwise mostly positive review of ‘Canceling’ for NY Review of Books. This graph shows the sharp divide between younger and older faculty cohorts when it comes to respect for free speech norms:

YES, THE LAST TEN YEARS REALLY HAVE BEEN WORSE FOR FREE SPEECH: My response to a review of Rikki Schlott’s and my book ‘Canceling of the American Mind’ in The New York Review of Books (featuring A TON of data for a single post)

MISINFORMATION PANIC AT DAVOS & MITCH DANIELS RECOMMENDS ‘CANCELING’ IN THE WSJ.
Weekend Free Speech Update (1/21/2024) 

AND ABOUT THAT CLOSING SPEECH FROM BRIAHNA JOY ON THE HILL’S RISING: On Wednesday I was on the Hill’s Rising with Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave.

Briahna claimed that colleges may graduate many people who think of themselves as “liberal” but are actually economically conservative. That doesn’t strike me as accurate.  According to a study by Nate Honeycutt (discussed here) about 40% of professors identified themselves as either Marxist, socialist, activist, or radical, and about 56% of graduate students self-described that way. If Briahna has noticed that fewer older people in the real world lean to the left economically, that is likely because many of us — even those like me who think of themselves as left of center — grew up when Marxist-Leninist countries were collapsing (like the Soviet Union) or had to at least partially embrace free markets (like China). My own experience was made even more vivid by living in Eastern Europe in the ‘90s and getting to talk directly to people who survived the Soviet system. If Briahna has noticed that many elite college grads are more economically “conservative,” which generally means more libertarian, that might be because there is evidence that higher IQ people tend to be more libertarian/classically liberal.

ADMINISTRATORS — NOT JUST DEI ADMINISTRATORS — ARE THE BIGGEST THREAT TO FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS

But DEI admins are surely a BIG part of the problem, too:

• After tenured University of Central Florida professor Charles Negy tweeted about racial issues, the school issued a statement signed by the president, provost, and chief equity, inclusion and diversity officer condemning the tweets and opening an investigation into Negy.
• Yale Law’s associate dean of student affairs and director of diversity, equity, and inclusion repeatedly summoned a law student to meetings and pressured him to apologize for sending a lighthearted party invitation that used the term “trap house” because it was considered “pejorative and racist.”
• Loyola University New Orleans repeatedly subjected a professor to investigations and assigned him a DEI coach because of his protected in-class and extramural speech.
• After aUniversity of California, Los Angeles music professor showed his class the 1965 film version of Othello (in which Laurence Olivier wears skin-darkening makeup), a dean reportedly sent a department-wide email saying the professor’s that the incident had been reported to the Office of Equity, Civil Rights, and Title IX.
• Also at UCLA, after a student complained about a professor reading MLK, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which includes racial slurs, UCLA referred the matter to its Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for review.
• Syracuse University adopted new policies to hold bystanders responsible for “bias-related incidents” and “hate speech.” The chief of diversity and inclusion said that bystanders “can be held accountable,” and directed students to report incidents either to the school’s Office of Equal Opportunity, Inclusion and Resolution Services or anonymously through its bias reporting policy. Requiring bystanders to be speech police is truly worthy of the name Orwellian.
• A University of California System “guidance document” written by its council of chief diversity officers appeared to instruct students and faculty about how they may talk about the coronavirus (e.g., “Do not use terms such as “Chinese Virus.”).
• In 2023, Stanford Law School (my alma mater) students shouted down 5th Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan when he attempted to speak at a student-sponsored event. This was after long meetings with DEI administrators and after a precisely ten minute shout down then-Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach got up and gave a truly cringeworthy seven minute speech wondering if the “juice” of free speech and of having a 5th circuit judge speak to law students was “worth the squeeze.” The Stanford Law School incident earned its own chapter in “Canceling” as demonstrating the full power of the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress.

THE SINGLE BIGGEST THREAT I HAVE SEEN TO FREE SPEECH AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM (from my latest Substack):

[F]rom a legislative or regulatory standpoint, the single biggest threat I have seen to free speech and academic freedom on campus has been the DEI requirements implemented by the California Community Colleges system. In an effort to combat these requirements, FIRE sued the California Community Colleges Chancellor and the members of its Board of Governors, as well as the State Center Community College District.

In the case, FIRE is representing six tenured professors, each of whom teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching and pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. This includes requiring professors to “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.”

Under these regulations, faculty performance and tenure will also be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of these government-mandated viewpoints. As our client, Reedley College professor Bill Blanken, said, “I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction? What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”

THE NEW VICTORIANS: Some facts on “book bans.”

It’s also doubtful that even some of the most liberal advocates of free speech in any era would fail to understand why some parents object to the presence of certain books in K-12 libraries. For example, one of the most targeted books includes an image of a character performing oral sex on a strap-on (“Gender Queer”); one very graphically illustrates how to use a butt plug (“Let’s Talk About It”); and another gives underage gay kids tips for getting on hookup apps (“This Book is Gay”). This is why FIRE not only takes for granted that “age appropriateness” is and should be part of the analysis for what books are in K-12 libraries (and in the children’s sections of public libraries), but also outlines a process for reconsidering library materials that involves all stakeholders in order to provide “due process” for books.

As for “book banners” coming from the political left, there’s some complexity there as well. While they, too, have their fair share of attempts to remove or limit access to certain books like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Huckleberry Finn,” and “Of Mice and Men,” left-leaning censors also have other tools at their disposal. For example, rather than outright banning or restricting access to certain books, they can remove “problematic” content from works of authors like Roald Dahl and R.L. Stine in new editions of their works through the act of “sensitivity reading” at major book publishers. Activists have also pressured publishers to pull books from publication or circulation based on claims they promote harmful stereotypes or because the author wrote about a race or culture different from their own. Either way, the goal is the same: Remove or restrict access to content they deem inappropriate, offensive, or racist from library (and bookstore) shelves.