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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. I want to play a few clips from Jimmy Kimmel's monologue last night as he returned to ABC after his suspension over something he said after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We'll talk in this segment for a few minutes with a guest who works full-time to advance free-speech rights on both the left and the right. Can there be a single standard that Americans can largely agree upon on campuses in the Trump administration and anywhere else?

First, here's Kimmel's explanation of the line that got him in so much trouble on the night after the murder, when Kimmel said, "We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid, who murdered Charlie Kirk, as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it." Of course, it seems from the evidence that the shooter was not MAGA. If Kimmel seems to suggest there that he was convinced the shooter was MAGA, here's how he addressed that last night, beginning with what he had posted before that monologue after Charlie Kirk was killed.

Jimmy Kimmel: I posted a message on Instagram on the day he was killed, sending love to his family and asking for compassion, and I meant it. I still do. Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what was obviously a deeply disturbed individual. That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make, but I understand that to some, that felt either ill-timed or unclear, or maybe both. For those who think I did point a finger, I get why you're upset. If the situation was reversed, there's a good chance I'd have felt the same way.

Brian Lehrer: Jimmy Kimmel, with his voice breaking there, as you heard, said that last night. He has critics and supporters on that part, as maybe you've been seeing with critics arguing, for example, that he didn't really apologize and should have used that word, "apologize." Most of the monologue had to do with free speech. Here's a line that's being cited a lot this morning.

Jimmy Kimmel: This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.

Brian Lehrer: Kimmel thanked a lot of people who had reached out during his suspension or who had spoken up to oppose it, making a point of singling certain people out.

Jimmy Kimmel: Maybe weirdly--

[applause]

Jimmy Kimmel: Maybe most of all, I want to thank the people who don't support my show and what I believe but support my right to share those beliefs anyway.

[applause]

Jimmy Kimmel: People who I never would have imagined, like Ben Shapiro, Clay Travis, Candace Owens, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, even my old pal Ted Cruz-

[laughter]

Jimmy Kimmel: -who, believe it or not, said something very beautiful on my behalf.

Brian Lehrer: There are a few excerpts from Kimmel last night. Joining me now is Greg Lukianoff, president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He's also co-author of the books The Canceling of the American Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind, among others. He's been a longtime critic of what he sees as limited free speech on college campuses, but also says, today, the political right is making the same mistakes. Greg Lukianoff has an op-ed in The New York Times that maybe you saw called Everyone's a Free-Speech Hypocrite. Greg, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Greg Lukianoff: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Would you start for people who don't know your work with a short introduction to your organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and maybe a through-line idea or two from your books?

Greg Lukianoff: Sure. I started at FIRE back in 2001. We're about a 26-year-old organization. We initially defended freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus. We always defended people all across the spectrum. I started right after 9/11, and I was defending people for cracking jokes about 9/11. I understood that angered a lot of people, but it was a good training for the kind of blowback you receive when you defend unpopular speech. We expanded in 2022 to be the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, when we used to be in education, to try to defend free speech beyond campus and for the whole country. Unfortunately, business has really been booming.

Brian Lehrer: Your op-ed in The Times was pegged to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel. You wrote, "If, like me, you defend free speech as a principle rather than invoke it opportunistically, you get distressingly accustomed to seeing the same people take opposite positions on an issue, sometimes within the space of just a few months." Then you referenced an executive order President Trump issued on day one of his term back in January. What was that executive order, and why did you bring it up in your op-ed?

Greg Lukianoff: There was a number of executive orders and statements that Trump made that were very clearly pro-freedom of speech, not weaponizing the FCC, pro-freedom of speech on social media, not the government should engage in jawboning against social media companies to censor speech they don't like. All that, we certainly welcomed.

You get used to being disappointed as a First Amendment lawyer, although, honestly, they certainly saw this coming, that it wasn't very long before they were doing all of the things that they criticized the other side for doing. Certainly, the last eight months, when it comes to any claims that they really value free speech, he's gone after law firms for advocacy. He's gone after higher-ed for speech. He's certainly been going after media and is perceived as actual enemies in the media pretty relentlessly.

Brian Lehrer: Ironically, perhaps, on the day before Charlie Kirk was killed, your group released its sixth annual College Free Speech Rankings, as you call it. You concluded that, "Conservative students are increasingly joining their liberal peers in supporting censorship." As we've established, I said in the intro, you've long been a critic of what you see as censorship on campus by people on the left. I hear you that that's not all you do. Your new report said, "For the first time ever, a majority of students would prevent speakers from both the left and right who express controversial views." Can you say more about the trend you're seeing, and in what ways you see censorship rising among conservative college students?

Greg Lukianoff: Yes. Well, one of the questions we ask that I find the most disturbing is, are there circumstances under which you would find violence in response to free speech acceptable? We also ask, is it okay to shut down speakers to prevent them from speaking or to block students from attending speeches that you don't personally like? It used to be that the answers that was, in some cases, okay were mostly dominated by the left, that the left was higher on that than the right.

Unfortunately, the right has caught up to the left. The answer to whether or not violence is acceptable to a speaker on campus, 0% of students should say that it's okay. The fact that we're at 34% or 32% nationally for students saying it's, in some cases, okay is awful. There are schools like UC Davis, I believe, that, last year, got a 52% of them saying it was okay in some circumstances.

Brian Lehrer: Could you tell us, though? I was a little skeptical of those numbers when I read them in your report, like, "Really? A third of college students would say violence is acceptable to quash political speech?" How exactly did you word that question?

Greg Lukianoff: We asked them, "Is violence acceptable in response to speakers?" We gave them three options, which are never, which is the right answer, sometimes, always, or rarely. If you said anything other than never, that's saying that, in some rare cases, you think it's acceptable.

Brian Lehrer: Right, right, so a lot of them said "rarely," but even rarely is shocking. Go ahead.

Greg Lukianoff: There's additional data here. When you add that to the fact that now more than half of students think that speakers should not be invited in the first place if they're controversial at all, you're talking about what they mean by "rarely," is they mean people who are controversial in any way. Those are the rare cases they're thinking about. Things look bleak for the attitudes of young people on a lot of these issues.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your questions and comments welcome for Greg Lukianoff, president and chief executive of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and his New York Times op-ed, Everyone's a Free-Speech Hypocrite. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, call or text. Listeners, can there be a single standard? Do you think our guest is articulating that well? Has your own thinking about the limits of free speech changed over the years? Some of you may think there's a false equivalency here. I'm going to ask you a question about that in a minute-

Greg Lukianoff: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: -or whatever your take on this question or your question on this take. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. In The New York Times op-ed, part of your critique is a critique of the term "hate speech," which I think you've critiqued as a concept for a long time and, usually, as a term used on the left. Now, you cite Attorney General Pam Bondi's recent statement that, "We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech," after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Take us to your objection to the term "hate speech" regardless of who's using it. Do you not think hate speech is real or a real problem?

Greg Lukianoff: Hate speech is not an exception to freedom of speech in the United States, nor should it be. We have something called the "bedrock principle" that actually comes out of a case called Texas v. Johnson from 1989 that says you cannot ban speech simply because it's offensive. America is one of the few countries in the world that doesn't have any exception for hate speech.

When people usually describe, "Well, don't you think this pattern of behavior that's discriminatory should be unprotected?" I say no. If you're talking about actually targeting someone and it's persistent, pervasive, for example, and it's severe, and it's on the basis of a protected category, you're describing racial harassment. If you're saying racial harassment isn't protected, you're right. It's not actually generally considered to be an exception to free speech. It's considered to be a pattern of harassing behavior.

Brian Lehrer: This is where I think some people will raise the false equivalency charge, right? Critics might say hate speech on campus or elsewhere has consequences. If speakers are creating an environment that's racist or anti-Muslim or anti-Jewish or anti-LGBTQ, whatever, the students whose groups are being targeted have been known to have more trouble doing their work and succeeding academically, that speech is violence in that respect, some have said, because it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It creates a hostile environment for learning. In some cases, it can be discrimination in that way. Historically, marginalized groups are the ones most vulnerable to that. It's not a moral equivalent, they'd say, of arguing that President Trump is a fascist, for example. Do you agree with that at all?

Greg Lukianoff: I'm not even sure I understand it, to be honest.

Brian Lehrer: Well, you've heard this idea, I think, largely campus-focused in the last decade or so, that speech has consequences, that people who are the subject of what they feel is racist or anti-whatever speech, especially if they come from marginalized communities historically, actually suffer academically. Hate speech is not something that exists in an abstract speech bubble. It can affect people's success.

Greg Lukianoff: I guess I don't understand that, and here's what I mean by I don't understand it. That sounds like a theoretical discussion from the 1970s. What's actually happened over the last 10 years has been a genuine free-speech crisis, particularly targeting professors. They have been targeted, by the way, from the left and the right. I can think of very few examples that involve anything that might be called hate speech, except over the last two years, since the October 7th attacks, in which case, I can understand how people would characterize it that way.

Prior to that, the free-speech crisis that I was seeing was primarily a combination of students and administrators getting together to punish their political enemies or speech that they didn't like. This is one of the reasons why conservatives are so angry at the moment, is they feel like this crisis that had been going on on campus for a long time was pooh-poohed. The media didn't pay a lot of attention to it. Now, when it's actually the backlash happening to it, this is something that's getting a lot of coverage in mainstream media. I get the frustration on the right. I do not agree with the tactics.

Brian Lehrer: Santiago in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Santiago.

Santiago: Hi. How's it going? I'm curious. Talk a lot about students' views of shutting down speakers' opposing views. I'm wondering about research into the government doing so. I know Texas and Florida have laws that they passed banning professors and universities from teaching. I believe the words they use are divisive concepts, by making someone feel uncomfortable about teaching like gender ideology. I'm sure the speaker has a bit-- I'm curious what research you can share about that, about the spread of those laws. Also, I know FIRE has some rankings about free speech, so I'm curious if those laws factor into your rankings about campus speech.

Greg Lukianoff: Sure. The most prominent one and the most clearly unconstitutional version of the divisive concept laws was championed by Ron DeSantis in Florida, and it's called the Stop WOKE Act. I've described it many times as laughably unconstitutional. Under the Stop WOKE Act, professors would be prohibited essentially for taking positions on certain arguments. For example, it required a lawyer to actually go into court and try to make this argument with a straight face.

This is a constitutional law, but it does mean that a professor could argue against affirmative action in class, but not make an argument for it, which is basically saying, "FIRE is entirely right. This is unconstitutional." The good news there is that the ACLU and FIRE have both defeated it in court. We're waiting to see what happens on appeal. I'm pretty confident it's still going to be defeated even on appeal. If not, ultimately, I think at the Supreme Court level that, essentially, the Stop WOKE Act is going to be laughed out of court.

Brian Lehrer: Jay in North Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jay.

Greg Lukianoff: Hi, Jay.

Jay: Hi. I wanted to draw attention to, I think, what is a false equivalency being drawn between censoriousness on the left and right, given the power differential between, like you're talking about, Ron DeSantis, who is in charge of a state government right now and has a majority in his state house to pass the agenda that he wants versus college students who, to be honest, don't really have a huge voice on campus, as we've seen in the past year with Gaza protests being brutally cracked down on by college administrators. I just wanted to ask about how this power differential factors in when, really, the instances of right-leaning professors being fired are vanishingly few, but we've seen time and time again students being expelled for speaking out for Palestine.

Greg Lukianoff: I'm having a hard time nicely putting that that's just not actually what we've seen on campus. Okay, so the idea that this power differential thing that people on campus hide behind, the idea that, essentially, these massive mega corporations with tremendous amounts of power in which administrators are actually using the excuse of students to punish speech that administrators themselves don't like is not power itself, I think, is diluted. American higher education is one of the most powerful institutions.

It is a massive, massive industry, and it gets a pass from this very weak argument that students aren't powerful. Nonsense, "Students aren't powerful." They have gotten a record number of professors fired. Now, if you're making the argument that students in the Gaza situation aren't sufficiently powerful, the reason why they're not as powerful as they were is because now, actually, administrators and students are at odds. Working together, they were completely unstoppable over the last 10 years.

Again, people are frustrated because a lot of people in the media were not paying sufficient attention to this. I spent the last 25 years trying to draw greater attention to this, also, by the way, fighting people on the right when they were doing this as well. The idea that these students who can get people's jobs and careers ruined are not powerful. They are powerful as soon as they're actually working together with the administrators for the same purposes.

Brian Lehrer: Jay, thank you for raising the question. In your Times op-ed, you call out Vice President Vance for urging people to inform employers of anyone celebrating Charlie Kirk's assassination. If they do that in a private sector context, is there something wrong with that in your view?

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, I do. I don't want to live in a country-- Now, of course, you have the First Amendment right to say, "This person should be fired," and "I'm getting together all my friends to create a Twitter mob to demand this person be fired for their speech," but I always want to caution people to say, "You don't really want to live in a country where you can have opinion or a job, but not both." I don't like it when the left does it, and I don't like it when the right does it. My book, Canceling of the American Mind, calls both sides out for that.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Rick in Astoria, Queens, you're on WNYC. Hello, Rick.

Greg Lukianoff: I love Astoria.

Rick: Hi, guys. Good morning. I find this conversation very interesting, and it's a bit of a conundrum. I have kids in their mid-to-late 20s. My oldest is 33. They've grown up in a political climate of hyperpolarization. What can we expect from these kids who are becoming awakening politically in this time that we live in over the last 15 to 20 years? They're going to go to the extremes. They see us. They watch us. It's a bit of a conundrum. I find myself trying to have conversations with my kids without setting them off, which is difficult. I just find this to be a very interesting conversation for the times that we're living in.

Brian Lehrer: Rick, thank you very much. Further to the point about polarization, we see with the return of Jimmy Kimmel on ABC as a network, some of the major TV station owners, Sinclair and Nexstar, deciding not to put Kimmel back on the air. Those are conservative-leaning companies in the private sector who each own a lot of television stations. Defenders again would say private companies have a right to function within their chosen value systems, but maybe it means we're going further down the rabbit hole into echo chambers. I wonder if you have a thought about that.

Greg Lukianoff: Sure, yes. I think about polarization a lot. I think it's just a fact that we are deeply polarized. I think there's things that we could do against that, though, that we're not doing. I honestly think a lot of what the worst instincts of K through PhD education has done is actually make this, in some ways, worse. I was really pleased when Harvard, for example, moved one of their essay questions from really trying to emphasize, "Are you essentially an activist," someone who strongly believes in any causes as being the most important thing you can say in your essay, to one asking about your curiosity, or about when the last time you actually had a disagreement that mattered to you.

A lot of what we have to do, we have to focus on people having a radical open-mindedness that we're not currently teaching, which doesn't mean that you think other people are right, but you should be curious about why they think what they actually do. At core, the most important value of freedom of speech, as far as I'm concerned, is knowing what people truly think. Not even if, but especially if it might be disturbing, is absolutely crucial to understand the world in which you live in. The cure to a lot of this stuff, a lot of this polarization is deep and profound curiosity.

Brian Lehrer: Are you encouraged by the number of conservatives who've come out in support of Jimmy Kimmel retaining his show, as he mentioned in the clip, Ted Cruz, all the others? Do you think this could be a watershed moment for the values that you support, upholding free speech in all kinds of contexts from left and right?

Greg Lukianoff: Yes, I was both encouraged that the conservatives did that, and I was encouraged that Jimmy gave them credit for it. I thought that was really classy all around. I do think that there was a honeymoon period with Trump where a lot of people on the right were afraid to contradict him on anything. I hope that's starting to break because if it is, then a lot of the stuff he's been able to get away with on the right, the targeting of law firms, the targeting of higher-ed, the targeting of media, particularly now that he's actually really doubling down on the idea that these late-night show hosts, including Jimmy Kimmel, have to be stopped, that that's going to get greater and greater resistance. Again, like I said in my New York Times piece, I'm also used to being disappointed.

Brian Lehrer: We'll end the segment with one more Jimmy Kimmel clip from last night in which he referenced the speech at the Charlie Kirk memorial by his widow, Erika, forgiving the man who murdered her husband.

Jimmy Kimmel: That is an example we should follow.

[applause]

Jimmy Kimmel: If you believe in the teachings of Jesus, as I do, there it was. That's it. A selfless act of grace, forgiveness from a grieving widow. It touched me deeply, and I hope it-

[applause]

Jimmy Kimmel: -it touches many. If there's anything we should take from this tragedy to carry forward, I hope it can be that. Not this. Thank you for listening, and I'll have more to say when we come back.

Brian Lehrer: The end of Jimmy Kimmel's monologue last night. We thank Greg Lukianoff, president and chief executive officer of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. His op-ed in The New York Times called Everyone's a Free-Speech Hypocrite. Thank you for joining us.

Greg Lukianoff: Thank you so much.

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