NYU students (who don't seem to have read Coddling) try to deplatform Haidt, FIRE staff & I answer your questions, And Daddy needs a gunboat! ... for Liberty of course! & more
Bringing you the latest free speech news (5/17/26)
Stories of the week
N.Y.U. Students Object to Speaker Who Calls Their Generation Coddled (NYT) by Jeremy W. Peters & Matthew Haag
On Thursday my friend & co-author Jon Haidt gave the commencement talk at NYU. As I pointed out on X, if it weren’t so depressing it would be comically ironic that a number of students’ first instinct was to immediately prove the premise of The Coddling of the American Mind correct by demanding he be disinvited.
I had the pleasure of joining So to Speak host & FIRE EVP Nico Perrino, COO Alisha Glennon, & Legal Director Will Creeley for a member webinar.
This week in Expression
Growing calls for a federal solution, including from the White House, to fix the fragmented landscape of state regulations reflect a clear political appetite for legislative action. And a single national standard has obvious appeal for an industry seeking consistency across jurisdictions. But consistency isn’t the same as constitutionality. If federal proposals like the GUARD Act replicate the speech restrictions found in state laws, they just hardwire those problems into federal law.
Lawmakers see different threats to campus speech — but the same stakes by Michael Hurley
These points echo a long line of constitutional law, which leaves no room for the view that First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses. Indeed, the Supreme Court warned in its seminal case on academic freedom that teachers and students must remain free to inquire, study, evaluate, and gain new maturity and understanding, or else “our civilization will stagnate and die.”
This week in FIRE’s blog
International free speech stories of the week
Protesters [in Australia] prepare legal challenge over ‘absurd and stupid’ anti-hate speech laws (SBS News)
Met warns about hate speech at Unite the Kingdom and Palestine marches (The Guardian) by Chris Osuh
Lee Seung-hwan awarded damages over abrupt concert cancellation in 2024 (Korea JoongAng Daily) by Cho Mun-Gyu
Lee’s concert had originally been scheduled to take place at the Gumi Culture and Arts Center on Dec. 25, 2024. His agency applied to rent the venue on July 31 that year and received approval.
However, five days before the concert, Mayor Kim demanded that Lee and the head of his agency, Dream Factory Club, sign a written pledge stating that they would not engage in political agitation or remarks that could cause misunderstanding.
Announcement of the week
After FIRE’s staff retreat this past week at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, I’ve unilaterally decided that we’ll be pivoting from defending free speech on land & in the air(waves) to the open seas with a new initiative to purchase a warship in order to fight the pernicious threat of marine censorship!
(But in all seriousness, we got to tour the USS Olympia—the oldest steel American warship still afloat—and I think I fell in love. It’s like a floating battle mansion!)
FIRE should seriously consider the warship thing. I'm not sure how you'd fight censorship with that, but then you'd be qualified to call Harvard a pack of speech-suppressing bilge rats.
1.
should Dr Haidt's "wildly popular movement" offer (free?) resilience treatment(FeelingGoodApp.com?) to middle schoolers' moms, etc(esp his followers that are zealots?)?
2.
Googling
site:.edu "three great untruths"
20 out of 8000 accredited, post-secondary institutions, primarily in the United States... mention Greg and Dr Haidt's warning?
3.
NO WONDER Haidt "GAVE UP" ON UNDERGRADS?!
... and replaced his focus on 8000 accredited, post-secondary institutions with Middle Schoolers?! ("ANXIOUS GENERATION" over 100 weeks on the New York times bestseller list)
4.
AI Overview
There are typically between 7,000 and 8,000 active, registered .edu domain names, representing accredited, post-secondary institutions, primarily in the United States.
5.
https://youtu.be/t7SCT3w40M4?t=108
So just in the first two years-- in the first year, we got 40 US states have put limits on phones.
1:55
20 did it right, phone free for the whole day.
1:58
Australia is the first country in the world to raise the age to 16 for social media.
2:02
[CHEERING]
2:06
And in the last-- just in the last four weeks, a dozen countries have said they're going to follow. So we are at a global turning point.
https://youtu.be/-6UnYF8VdhU?t=3283
https://youtu.be/-6UnYF8VdhU?t=2702
This, I believe, is what led to what's called the Great Awokening, which
is a new form of progressivism that ultimately, I think, has been catastrophic for the left in the Democratic Party.
This is what I believe got Donald Trump elected. This is what pushed a lot of people, including a lot of nonwhite people, over towards the Republican Party.
So the Great Awokening, I think, was the disaster brought about by social media for the left. It would not have happened without social media.
And the astonishing things we've seen from the right, an attempt to overthrow an election and many other things,
again, none of this would have happened without social media. So as Jeffrey Rosen said in The Atlantic a while ago,
America is living James Madison's nightmare,
https://sites.nd.edu/truth-politics-democracy-spring-2022/america-is-living-james-madisons-nightmare/
while meanwhile-- oh, well, here--
just proof of that. This is The Economist, but there's a couple of different outfits that have done similar things.
If you rate the number and quality of the world's democracies, we reached a peak in the early
2010s-- 2011, 2012-- by a couple of different measures was the peak. Here, you see, it was sort of consistent. But in the '90s, you get a huge increase as the Iron Curtain
falls, democracy spreads. So we reach this very high level, the highest level
in history, by 2015. And then this happens. So democracies are becoming fewer and lower quality.
And in the meantime, China is living Mao's dream. Because as Tristan Harris says, the founder of the Center
for Humane Technology, these technologies are helping authoritarians be better authoritarians,
but they're making democracies be worse democracies. So that's the issue of the founders and factionalism.
6.
Up to 60% of anxious people are cured by placebo. If Burns paraphrasing Descartes is right("I think therefore I fear") and all Americans start with anxiety but then are cured by BS such as fascism... WE'RE DOOMED! AKA; If 60% of Americans treat their anxiety with an insidious placebo instead of science... then AMERICA DOESNT HAVE ANXIETY BUT STILL HAS AN ANXIETY PROBLEM!
The Democratic White House recommended this scientific inoculation:"Do one thing every day that scares you"--MsFDR