The Eternally Radical Idea

Honestly with Bari Weiss

The Free Press

News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 7.8K Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2022

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There is no organization that’s done more to fight for freedom of speech on American campuses over the past 20 years than FIRE, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. If you care deeply about the First Amendment and a robust culture of free speech, FIRE is the kind of organization you hope will go out of business. Unfortunately, as our friend Andrew Sullivan has perfectly put it, we all live on campus now. As the culture of campus has become the culture of the country—one in which ideological conformity is enforced by mobs that wield the weapons of shame and stigma—it should not come as a surprise that 62% of Americans say they hold views they are afraid to share in public. All of which is why FIRE is radically expanding its scope and its ambition. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is now The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And the organization has announced a goal of $75 million in order to pick up the flag the ACLU has put down by becoming the premier civil liberties organization in America. Today: a conversation with the president and CEO of FIRE, Greg Lukianoff. Lukianoff is also the author of “Unlearning Liberty” and the co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	History.
0:01.0	What does this make you think of?
0:04.0	Swords, armor, castles, cannons, trenches, tanks, tanks?
0:10.0	Or perhaps it makes you think of bravery, courage, resistance.
0:15.6	We shall fight on the beaches and in the streets.
0:19.6	Uncover a thousand years of incredible defensive stories.
0:23.4	A brand new series, Defending Europe, Mondays at 9 on National Geographic.
0:28.4	This is honestly.
0:32.0	I don't think it's a radical statement to suggest that free speech is the single most important tool that we have as citizens of a democracy.
0:43.7	And until quite recently, that virtue,
0:46.1	the virtue of free speech,
0:47.7	it was a particular source of pride among liberals.
0:52.6	The purpose of college is not just, as I said before, to transmit skills.
1:01.0	It's also to widen your horizons, to make you a better citizen, to help you to evaluate information, to help you be more creative. The way to do that is to create a space where a lot of
1:20.9	ideas are presented and collide and people are having arguments and people are testing
1:28.7	each other's theories and over time people learn from each other because they're getting out of their own narrow point of view and having a broader point of view.
1:40.0	So when I went to college, suddenly there were some folks who didn't think at all like me.
1:46.0	And if I had an opinion about something, they'd look at me and say, well, that's stupid.
1:51.0	And then they'd describe how they saw the world.
1:54.5	And they might have had different sense of politics,
1:58.3	or they might have a different view about poverty,
2:01.6	or they might have a different perspective on race and sometimes their views would be infuriating to me.
	...

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