Welcome to the Michelle Tofoya podcast.

Well, I like your hopefulness there.

The canceling of the American mind is your fourth or your fifth book?

Depending on what do you call a book, this is my fourth.

I read a very short book called Freedom from Speech, which I always wonder if it's long enough to even be considered a book. I think you should be, and I think we're going to call it a book. The forward in here by Jonathan Haight is really revealing and the names of the chapters are really revealing. What we know is this is what I always come back to. To me, it started with coddling, and I know

the book, the coddling of the American mind. A student gets sensitive and everyone goes and rushes

to protect that student, provide him or her a safe space, segregate libraries, whatever it is,

so that people, you know, the book white fragility comes out. And that word

fragility just gives me the hebi-jeebies. It likens me to, for me, I think of this. I have two

children. I raised, I raised them to be tough to, you know, oh, you got sick. That's okay. All right, fine. We're, you know, maybe antibiotics, maybe not. But I'm not going to, you know oh you got sick that's okay all right fine we're you know maybe antibiotics maybe

not but i'm not going to you know stop you from going to do a daycare because viruses run around

daycares yeah you're going to run into these and the only way to get some you know thick skin

is to run into these and get through them same with you got to fight with your friends go figure. I'm not here to protect you. I'm going to try to tell you what I think and what your stance should be, but or could be. But let's go figure it out. You got it. You don't go through the world on skates. And if you do, it's pretty uninteresting. And by the way, the scar tissue is really, really helpful all through your life.

Yeah. So, but we're not as a society and particularly in these higher institutions of learning.

It doesn't seem like we want to allow kids to go through that. We're so protective. And that makes for

weak, unchallenged, really uninteresting people.

It also makes for anxious and depressed people.

I mean, that was the revelation that led to coddling the American mind.

And ultimately, it came from me getting, to be frank, suicidally depressed back in 2007,

partially because by being in the culture

world all the time, I just got mentally exhausted. Because if you're consistent in your values

on freedom of speech, all but a relatively, a relative handful of deeply principled people

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