Does Anyone Really Believe in Free Speech? With Rikki Schlott

_THE INTERVIEW_

This interview was edited for clarity.

Ari: You wrote an entire book on cancel culture, and I want to start there because it seems a lot has changed since it was published.

For context, when I first started Upward News, I did it anonymously because I was afraid to put my name on stories about controversial topics like the Kyle Rittenhouse situation or the George Floyd story.

I remember one moment that stuck out was when a police officer was fired for donating $25 to the Kyle Rittenhouse defense fund. It felt like America was in a terrible place.

But thinking about where we are now, it's hard for me to imagine something like that happening again. Where do you think we are with cancel culture in America today compared to then?

Rikki: You mean a left-wing cancellation of someone, presumably?

Ari: Yes, exactly. I’m thinking about someone donating to a defense fund like that, or someone being pro-police. It's hard to imagine the same kind of backlash we saw everywhere just a few years ago.

Rikki Schlott: One interesting thing I learned about cancel culture while writing the book was that it frequently goes through ebbs and flows. Everyone wants to say that it's behind us, and things seem fine now. One might have said that around 2017 or 2018, when the 2016 election was in the rearview mirror.

People thought that was just a crazy, contentious election and an anomaly where people were canceling each other because Donald Trump was historically unprecedented. Then 2020 happened, which was another culturally seismic event, and you had cancel culture erupt in a totally unexpected and perhaps even more disruptive way.

I would argue that post-October 7, it might be a different type of cancel culture, but people have certainly been canceled for various viewpoints, whether or not I share them. It's often in moments when the culture is contentious that it's easy to say we've moved past this. But as soon as we have another massively culturally disruptive event, people go straight for the jugular with illiberalism.

We haven't, in my opinion, come to the cultural conclusion that we are now elevated, classically liberal people who know how to argue and debate.

We're not in the middle of a crazy election or a global pandemic right now. If we had another one tomorrow, I'm fairly certain we'd find a way to ruin people's careers. I feel like it's always bubbling under the surface, ready to come out.

Ari: You mentioned October 7, and I can certainly see how things got really contentious after that.

People were putting up signs for the hostages, and others were taking them down. That was all over the internet, and I guess that can be seen as a form of cancel culture. I think some of those people probably lost their jobs.

How do you think cancel culture has changed since October 7?

Rikki: I do think that in different circles and contexts, there have been attacks against people on both sides of the conflict.

Whether you're in a very progressive circle where being a Zionist is a career-ending thing in certain areas of academia, or you're a student who is pro-Israel, that is socially super disruptive at Columbia, where I'm a student.

I see firsthand what that's like for a lot of kids in my class who ended up deciding to take the end of their classes remotely during the encampment semester. That's a form of cancel culture, when you can't even feel comfortable on your campus because it's been so disrupted by really vitriolic antisemitism.

I think that, depending on the context, there was cancel culture from both sides. Some of what the Trump administration has done, from what we can see, involves attacking and going after certain students for their viewpoints and singling them out for their immigration status because of their politics.

Even if I think their politics are hideous, I still think that is a weaponization of the state in a specific way against people for their politics. I think that's a concerning form of cancel culture.

I don't like that precedent, and I don't like the idea that a Democrat in office in four years might do their own version of that, going after kids' visas for politics they don't like. That sets a really alarming precedent.

It was an interesting cultural moment because it was not so cleanly left-right, Republican-Democrat, or American-coded like most of our conflicts are.

There were a lot of strange bedfellows in that conflict, and a lot of people were driven apart that you wouldn't necessarily expect. It was interesting to watch culturally because the dividing lines in America were not quite as uniform or expected.

Ari: After Trump's election, I started hearing the argument that cancel culture is normal. People said it’s just how society ensures certain behaviors it agrees are not allowed do not happen. For example, they’d argue public shaming is a good form of cancel culture because it discourages extreme behavior.

What do you think about people who oppose cancel culture — until they’re the ones trying to cancel someone else?

Rikki: Sure, you can say that cancel culture is a normal, and probably the most primal, response to disagreeing with people within the bounds of our legal system today.

It's much more instinctual to want to go after someone and attack their job and career than to live in a cerebral world of conversation and classically liberal debate.

We uniquely live in a period of time that has accepted that a classically liberal society is a far more productive and healthier one. For most of human history, we were burning people at the stake and attacking heretics. The people who say that mob mentality is the norm are right. I just disagree with them that returning to that is a positive.

Adding the internet into the mix creates a permanence and intensity that you can unleash on people.

I think we ought to reconsider whether what might have been gentle social shaming or stigmatizing a viewpoint in the past is now something that can follow them forever and change their life irreparably. It is a far different and more delicate situation today than it would've been pre-internet.

Ari: One thing I think about is that while I disagree with many of the political views of older generations, I've always been impressed that they seem much more averse to cancel culture and clear attacks on free speech.

Young people our age seem much more excited to participate in cancel culture and to silence others. How do universities and the education system play a role in that?

Rikki: I think we've totally lost these idioms of cultural tolerance in the past couple of decades. When I was writing this book with Greg, we were talking about the different generational sayings he grew up with that I didn't, like "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt you."

Maybe my parents are unique in that they raised me that way, but those were not the messages I was getting in school. It was, if someone's bullying you, go to the teacher. Don't deal with it interpersonally; get an intermediary. You can be harmed.

There were trigger warning posters on the back of the bathroom stalls at NYU. The message was very much that you can't handle things on your own, and you need an adult and an appeal to authority.

That was a very different set of values than what even Gen X grew up with. It's not a massive gap between us, but the bureaucratic and administrative culture in schools definitely inculcates a lot of those ideas.

You need to be protected from ideas and insulated from things that make you uncomfortable. That's a massive generational divide.

The further I move from academia, the more I'm amazed by how the academic world is still so catty. People are concerned with what everyone else is thinking and doing, and it is a very censorious universe.

For kids who go through that system, a lot of them end up bringing that into their corporate jobs. It's interesting to see how young people with hostility to free expression have managed to introduce those ideas into the broader world.

Ari: I completely agree. When I was in college, people were always trying to get the administration to solve all their problems. Growing up, I was just taught to deal with my problems on my own.

Right now, the Trump administration is trying to solve many of these problems on campuses, like antisemitism and radical progressivism. I've seen that free speech organizations have been deeply concerned about these efforts. How do you see what's happening there?

Rikki: I've been pretty concerned by the activism of the administration. There has been a genuine, organic, grassroots revival of young people on the right who are concerned about academia and interested in free speech values. They are picking up on very true and valid concerns that I share.

There is a massive progressive bias on campuses, free speech was not an available value to people on the right for years, and there are problems with antisemitism.

I agree with many of these presuppositions, but I'm not sure that I agree that the federal government is the right entity to serve as the intermediary.

I do think they run the risk of overstepping and enforcing things top-down that were already happening organically on their own. You have new coalitions of professors banding together, like at Harvard, and student organizations popping up everywhere. Schools were changing their rules to facilitate more debate organically.

Even the Common App now has an essay choice about overcoming a political difference or conflict. There is genuine grassroots progress being made. If you create the optics of a centralized authority enforcing quotas of conservative professors, you're going to get a backlash. I am personally opposed to it.

Ari: It seems these universities have been very progressive for a long time, and I would argue that progressive ideology advocates for restricting speech in certain situations.

The Trump administration and conservative voices might prefer to just switch who's running things and make it more conservative. They might see that as increasing viewpoint diversity and creating a fairer environment.

Don't you think that would be a good fix, given that the current progressivism running universities is more hostile to free speech?

Rikki Schlott: It's true that the Left generally is, but recently my opinions have shifted on how much conservatives are actually allies of free speech. I think it's always just whoever's the underdog says they're in favor of free speech. As soon as the power flips and you're in the majority, a lot of people turn their backs on it.

I think the idea of the federal government, particularly in private universities, having anything to do with removing or reshuffling professor appointments is simply not within their role. There are already numerous pressures in place.

A school like Columbia, for instance, was so thoroughly humiliated publicly before Trump was even getting involved directly.

You have fewer young people even interested in academia across the board. Applications to Columbia went down considerably. Their reputation is irreparably damaged for the foreseeable future.

Those sorts of pressures should make a school start to say, Who can we put in this role, or What new coalition can we establish to oversee academic freedom? That was happening.

As soon as you have the President of the United States getting involved on that level, to me, it's just a complete power overreach.

Ari: What about specifically with the protestors, the pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas groups that led to encampments and sometimes riots?

The Trump administration has been pressuring universities by threatening to withhold funding. Is that also a form of cancel culture or an infringement on free speech?

Rikki: I do think the federal tax dollars have been weaponized in a way that's just getting too specific in these demand letters. Some of the things have absolutely nothing to do with specific civil rights violations. Again, I don't really think it's the federal government's issue personally.

I think Columbia grossly mismanaged the encampments, but that's a local issue between the NYPD and Columbia. Columbia should have handled that very differently and far more decisively. Some schools said as soon as you put a stake in the ground to pitch a tent, there will be cops here. The cops showed up, and that never became a problem at those schools.

That should have been the case at a place like Columbia. But I feel like Trump is putting schools like Columbia in a somewhat advantageous position because they can now assume this sort of martyr role, claiming they're being attacked by the federal government and singled out unfairly, which in some ways is true.

If liberal academia is so rotten to its core, then let it fester. I disagree with the federal government's overreach into the inner workings of a university.

Ari: An interesting thing you said is that maybe the free speech issue isn't so much Right versus Left.

Whoever is in power will say concerns about them violating free speech are unwarranted, and the people out of power will say their free speech is being violated.

Is this a new phenomenon, or has it been this way for a while in America?

Rikki: I think this is how free speech principles have always worked. I remember when I first started to get interested in the issue in college. I had never really sat with the concept of free speech or why it was important. It was just a meta term that was never drilled into me during my education.

I remember thinking, Wait, back in the Berkeley sixties era, it was the Left that was pro-free speech? But the people on the Left hate free speech. My mind was so boggled by that.

Then, of course, in retrospect, I'm like, Oh, that's because it was a moment in time where the culturally ascendant power was very conservative. The hippie culture on the left was the minority, and they were agitating for their own rights to express themselves. By the time I ended up in college, things had flipped.

I think it's very consistent that the vast majority of people are not careful enough or principled enough to filter every single issue through the lens of, "I might not like this, but would I like it if the other side was weaponizing the same thing?"

Ari: That boggles my mind. If it's so obviously used as a political weapon, then who actually believes in free speech as a value? Who are the groups in America really fighting for it, and how small is that group?

Rikki: I really wonder. I think in the older generations, there were a lot more people who actually understood how classical liberal debate and the scientific method function, and how clashing viewpoints get us closer to the truth.

That seemed to be more intuitive and baked into the culture. I fear that older generations probably have a higher percentage of people who actually believe in the concept of free speech.

Certainly, FIRE, the organization my co-author runs, is very consistent. Conservatives say they're liberal, and liberals say they're conservative, because they're going to defend somebody whose position you absolutely hate, no matter who you are. That's a sign that you are consistent.

I think they've risen in profile recently because the ACLU has kind of abdicated its role of being consistent. In several cases, they've entered into overt political activism and have taken more interest in the content of speech than the speech itself.

I would say it's a very small minority of people who are actually informed enough or really care enough about the principle because it's not an especially expedient thing.

In terms of the culture war, it's not a super sexy issue. It's easier to just spit off on crazy gender war stuff on Twitter than to have a nuanced debate about someone's right to speak at Columbia.

Ari: Another big thing has been Elon Musk acquiring Twitter, saying he's turning it into a free speech platform. Months later, everyone's timelines are filled with random neo-Nazis popping up like crazy. It seems he found out quickly that the approach wasn't even tenable.

What does real free speech look like, and should there be any limits on it, at least on social media platforms?

Rikki: Certainly, there's a difference between upholding First Amendment standards outside the realm of private companies and what private companies do. A private company acts in its own right and exercises its own freedom to shape its own rules.

There does become an issue, especially like what happened during COVID, where some platforms basically have a monopoly over communication. Then, whether or not they're censoring certain things actually does become very important.

Generally, I would say there needs to be some boundaries. Even with First Amendment case law, we agree that defamation is beyond the pale and direct incitement to violence is not protected. We do have some contours to free speech.

One thing I'm curious to get your take on, with X, I feel like I see a lot more nasty, vitriolic, overtly racist stuff. But I also wonder, I just see a huge quantity of material, and I wonder how much of that is just not even real, just inorganic and generated.

Ari: A hundred percent. Right after the attacks on Iran from Israel, a bunch of pro-Iran and anti-Israel accounts just stopped posting for days. They went offline. I assume these foreign governments have a major interest in influencing the online discourse.

Even Israel got in trouble for this, not the government itself, but some people within it were doing coordinated bot attacks on congresspeople's social media accounts, trying to change how people thought. So there's definitely a sense of artificial engagement.

I would like to be able to see what neo-Nazis are saying on X, but the way social media has worked since switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed has gotten so much worse.

The algorithms actually promote that type of speech that would normally be relegated to the crazy section of the internet. I feel like that accelerated the free speech discussion.

Rikki Schlott: The unfortunate thing that happened when Elon bought Twitter, and it's not even necessarily his fault, is the imbalance.

I would really like to return to the era before they started kicking off the far-right people around 2016 and 2017. Back then, you had the far-left and the far-right, and just kind of everyone on Twitter, and people were checking each other.

The problem that arose after Elon lifted those boundaries is that the far right returned to Twitter, but the left left. So now it just seems like Gab or something like that. There's no balance; it just shifted, and the left side totally fell off.

I actually think it would've been a service to society if we had welcomed back the fringe two percent of people who had been kicked off Twitter.

We could understand that this is the rainbow of American opinion. But now it's just completely imbalanced, and I don't think those ideas are clashing with the rest of the scope of opinion.

Ari: Definitely. There was even a point when Elon addressed the issue and said, We believe in free speech, but not in freedom of promotion, referring to the algorithm.

He was saying they'll just make sure the algorithm doesn't pick these people up. That's probably the future of censorship or cancel culture.

Mark Zuckerberg now talks about how big a mistake it was to censor people during the pandemic. Instagram was my primary platform, and there were times during the pandemic or the George Floyd riots when we would post about those topics and just get no views.

Then we'd post something random and not controversial and get thousands of views. It was a crazy time.

Rikki: And now with Twitter, it's like you post anything with a link, and it just does not even get a view. It's very strange. I don't know. Elon let me down with his acquisition here. I'm not impressed.

Ari: Last question for you. How do you feel about the future of free speech in America and cancel culture within the next ten years?

Is it getting worse, or will we improve, especially now that Gen Z is maturing and will play a significantly larger role?

Rikki Schlott: I am not fully sure, but I'm holding out a little bit of optimism. I feel like we're in a moment of right-wing cultural overcorrection right now. It's almost like we have a culture-warrior White House, owning the libs in a way that I find to be completely over the top.

The left has been over the top and culturally ascendant for quite a while. I'm hoping that this is a brief overcorrection.

The Left has had their crazy moment, and now the right is having their little tantrum. Hopefully, everyone can agree that we got this out of our system, and we need to have some sort of healthy, centrist vision going forward.

I feel like there is now a really large group of Americans who are just completely turned off by both major parties and the way they've acted lately. I hope that somehow there's a growing coalition that is open to common sense, centrism, and working across the aisle instead of just owning each other.

I think it's so bad right now, this cultural backlash pendulum swing, that it's just completely unsustainable. That actually gives me hope in a weird way. So I try to be optimistic.