Why censorship is making us all dumber

The more we censor ourselves as a culture, the farther our ideas drift from reality and the more trouble we cause.

A note from Greg: Below is a post from

Julian Adorney

, founder of

Heal the West

(a Substack focused on combating illiberalism and extremism via spiritual formation and rebuilding the American community), and our first-ever guest poster on ERI! I decided to publish Julian’s great piece here because, besides being well-written, it also echoes an important point I made in my first book “Unlearning Liberty.” Enjoy!

At first, the censorship came from the left. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, intelligent and knowledgeable critics of lockdown policy such as Stanford professor

Jay Bhattacharya

were silenced. At the behest of the Biden administration, these critics were blacklisted by social media platforms, and videos featuring them were removed by YouTube.

During this same period, marked by the rise of what author and political philosopher

Tim Urban

called Social Justice Fundamentalism, it was social and career suicide to contradict certain culture war shibboleths. Mobs intimidated anyone who wouldn't voice support for the Black Lives Matter cause. People were canceled for refusing to post a black square on Instagram. Yelp flagged hundreds of businesses for "the use of racist language, symbols or sentiment that clearly discredits the Black Lives Matter movement."

Scientific papers were rejected or even retracted because they contradicted SJF orthodoxy. A paper studying rapid-onset gender dysphoria was retracted by the prestigious academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior following a backlash from transgender activists. A paper making the case for colonialism was retracted from Third World Quarterly following death threats against the journal's editor.

Cancel Culture ran rampant. People lost their livelihoods. Children's author Gillian Philip was fired by her publisher for changing her Twitter handle to include the hashtag #IStandWithJKRowling. Nick Buckley was fired from Mancunian Way, the charity that he founded, for writing a blog post criticizing Black Lives Matter.

Corporations and governments adopted mandatory DEI trainings in which participants were forced to adopt and promote scientifically dubious concepts in order to keep their jobs. Disney employees were instructed to "take ownership of educating yourself about structural anti-Black racism" and "challenge colorblind ideologies and rhetoric.” At the Department of Homeland Security, employees were forced to sit through trainings that discussed "the myth of meritocracy" and the dangers of "color blindness." Ibram X. Kendi, a major figure in the anti-racist movement, told 25,000 CVS employees that "to be born in [the United States] is to literally have racist ideas rain on our head consistently and constantly."

Unsurprisingly, all of this had a distinct chilling effect on our culture. In 2020, a whopping 62% of Americans agreed that "the political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive."

Thankfully, however, this kind of censorship is waning — partly because social justice fundamentalism is on the decline. Fewer and fewer Americans believe in concepts such as "white privilege," or that "racial differences in outcomes are mainly due to discrimination." Another reason is that businesses are realizing that going woke isn't as good for the bottom line as they had expected. After Budweiser partnered with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney and sales cratered as a result, many businesses reconsidered DEI trainings and taking public stances on controversial issues.

The problem is far from gone, however. DEI trainings may be less common given the backlash, but they are still prevalent in many circles. Earlier this year, Newsweek reported that brands ranging from Delta Air Lines to Costco to Apple are doubling down on their company-wide commitment to DEI. A study of S&P 500 companies found that, in 2024, "80% of DEI goals remain unchanged from 2023."

Academics are still screened for their ideology, with the result that many universities wouldn't dream of hiring a professor to the right of Bernie Sanders. An analysis of 1,907 postings for full-time professorships in August 2024 found that 24.5% required DEI statements as part of the hiring process.

In 2024, a poster presentation was canceled at the annual conference of the prestigious Society for Personality and Social Psychology because its conclusions were considered "Islamophobic."

The rise of censorial behavior from the right

Unfortunately, many seem to have seen the chaos of the last five years and decided, "Right playbook, wrong targets." Indeed, the problem of censorship from the left is now compounded by an equal and opposing censorship from the right.

This censorial impulse has been brewing for a long time. In 2022, Florida passed a law revoking Disney's special tax status in retaliation for the company opposing Republican-backed Florida House Bill 1557 (the “Don’t Say Gay” bill). When Major League Baseball opposed a new voting-ID law in Georgia, Republican representatives promised to use the power of government to punish the organization. And then of course there was the "Stop WOKE Act," which sought to control what topics students and faculty in public universities in Florida could discuss.

But this impulse has been given new legs by the right's recently-acquired cultural power. While Twitter was once a bastion of leftism, 22 of the 25 most popular political and news accounts on the platform, now known as X, lean right.

The problem has also been kicked into overdrive by a notoriously thin-skinned president who prioritizes punishing his political enemies over protecting the First Amendment.

For example, President Trump recently sued CBS because "60 Minutes" aired an interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris that he alleges was edited to make her look better. This act sent a strong signal that news organizations with the wrong ideological opinions should watch their backs. In a similar vein, the administration has blocked the Associated Press from attending Oval Office events because the AP still calls it the "Gulf of Mexico" instead of the "Gulf of America."

And then there's Trump's baseless lawsuit against The Des Moines Register and veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer for publishing a poll wrongly predicting that Harris was likely to win Iowa in the presidential election.

Now, the Trump administration is deporting former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. The administration claims that Khalil is compromising a compelling foreign policy interest, and that he "led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization." However, apart from a recent allegation that Khalil lied on his visa application, the administration has supplied no evidence that Khalil was doing anything more than engaging in speech. In fact, one Trump official said that "The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law."

If Khalil has done nothing more than speak out and protest, then his prosecution looks less like a case of defending our national security and more like a case of persecuting speech that the administration doesn't like. In fact, when commenting on the case Department of Homeland Security deputy director Troy Edgar appeared to conflate merely protesting with being a terrorist.

Why this censorial behavior — from the left and right — is making us dumber

All of this censorial behavior is bad for a few reasons.

First, it's making us all more scared of each other than we should be. In the runup to the 2024 presidential election, over 80 percent of partisans on both sides feared for democracy if the other team won. Surely some of that is because both parties have a track record of punishing ideas (and people) with whom they disagree. This is tearing at the roots of our historically-free culture. When our opponents censor us, we're tempted to censor them in turn, leading to a retaliatory cycle of tit-for-tat that erodes our culture of free speech, breeds fear and distrust, and breaks down the foundations of civil society.

But this censorship is also causing another problem — one which isn't talked about nearly enough: it's making us dumber as a society. By declaring certain ideas and political positions to be off-limits, it's hamstringing our ability to find the truth in these areas.

This works in two ways.

First, engagement with opinions and ideas you dislike and disagree with is critical to developing your own. Without that, our own ideas shrivel up and die. This is a concept grounded in what FIRE president Greg Lukianoff calls “Mill’s Trident,” named after John Stuart Mill’s three-part argument for why free speech is always important:

In any argument there are only three possibilities: You are either wholly wrong, partially wrong, or wholly correct — and in each case free speech is critical to improving or protecting those positions…

• If you are wrong, freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you.

• If you are partially wrong, free speech and contrary viewpoints will help you get even closer to the truth.

• If you are 100% correct (which is unlikely) you still need free speech for dissent, disagreement, and attempts to disprove you, both to check your arguments and to strengthen them.

For every issue on which we opine, most of us tend to think we are either wholly correct, or at least that we've got it more right than wrong. But even if this is true (which is unlikely), we still need robust pushback on our ideas from people who disagree with them.

In his book, “What's Our Problem: A Self-Help Book for Societies,” Tim Urban says that ideas are like boxers. When an idea has a chance to fight against other ideas, it becomes stronger. Its weakest components get stripped away, its most compelling evidence gets sharpened, and it gets a little closer to the truth. But when we don't subject our ideas to pushback, they can end up weak and rather silly. It can cause us to believe things that our in-group believes — or, at the very least, won't challenge us on — but that wouldn't survive a bout with reality. That’s dangerous, because believing things that are false has a tendency to cause serious problems.

Of course, every one of us can see this when it comes to our political opponents. Folks on the right can see how living in an ideological bubble makes people on the left believe — or claim to believe — nonsense, such as the idea that there are more than two biological sexes. Folks on the left can see how living in a different ideological bubble makes people on the right believe — or claim to believe — nonsense such as the idea that "tens of millions" of Americans are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments.

We struggle to see this same tendency in ourselves, but we should really try harder. After all, humans are humans regardless of their politics, and as such are susceptible to the same kinds of biases and blind spots. We all respond to our environments, and we respond in fairly similar ways, whether we call ourselves Democrats or Republicans.

In a landmark study published by Cambridge University Press, researchers found that liberals and conservatives both struggled when presented with simple math problems whose solutions went against their ideological biases. When we really want to believe that something is true, we engage in what psychologists call "motivated reasoning" in order to reach that conclusion. When we surround ourselves with people who also want to believe the same things we do, our conclusions can drift further and further from reality without us ever knowing it.

If existing in an echo chamber is making our political opponents dumber — which many of us can agree is the case — then it's good odds that existing in a similarly-structured echo chamber of our own is making us dumber, too.

The second reason that the censorial behavior we’ve seen from both the left and the right in the last few years makes our society dumber has to do with the censors themselves. Contrary to the myth that our censors will be wise experts who know everything about a certain topic and will only ever censor misinformation and disinformation, the reality is that censors often aren't very good at determining what's true.

The COVID-19 pandemic gives us clear examples of this. Those who pushed for lockdowns as the only way to deal with the pandemic — and who censored or tried to bully anyone who disagreed — were simply wrong. As Jay Bhattacharya writes, "Sweden, which in large part eschewed lockdown and, after early problems, embraced focused protection of older populations, had among the lowest age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths than nearly every other country in Europe and suffered none of the learning loss for its elementary school children." Florida, which similarly lifted lockdowns rather quickly, suffered fewer age-adjusted deaths than states like California.

Censors accused lockdown opponents of spreading misinformation, but the truth is that lockdowns simply weren't all that effective.

One reason censors tend to be bad at determining what's true has to do with the psychological concept of "cognitive rigidity,” or a general inability to mentally adapt to new demands or information.

In his book “Liberal Bullies: What Psychology Teaches Us about the Left's Authoritarian Problem—and How to Fix It,” Grove City College professor of psychology

Luke Conway

describes cognitive rigidity as follows:

People high in rigidity really hate thinking hard about things. They dislike thoughtful reflection. They exhibit intellectual apathy. They shun serious intellectual questions. Research shows that high-rigidity persons ignore evidence and rational argument; instead, they focus on lazy, quick-and-easy heuristics that are functionally irrelevant to the argument itself. Unsurprisingly given their unwillingness to engage in deep thinking, high-rigidity persons produce especially unhelpful and boring ideas.

Conway goes on to cite scientific research, which “has shown for years that people high in authoritarianism score much higher on measurements of cognitive rigidity."

This cognitive rigidity hamstrings censors' ability to find the truth. Conway cites a study (listed as “unpublished data” in his book) that his lab ran showing that authoritarians are more likely to be taken in by fake news stories. They also perform poorly on what's called the Cognitive Reflection Test, which includes items such as math problems with a simple but counterintuitive answer. As Conway writes, the evidence suggests that authoritarians "simply don’t like to think very hard."

Of course, would-be censors can be highly-credentialed and very knowledgeable about a given topic, but the desire to censor is still an intellectual red flag because it correlates so highly with cognitive rigidity.

That’s why, when faced with a choice between trusting scientist John who espouses support for XYZ idea, and trusting his identical twin Jim who wants to censor anyone who doesn't support XYZ idea, we should probably trust John. It's a good bet that John has the better intellectual grasp of the arguments for and against XYZ, and lacks the cognitive rigidity that his twin Jim seems to have.

We must reject censorial behavior, left or right

The past ten years have been an insane and chaotic time. We had a global pandemic, BLM protests and riots, Cancel Culture, and what seemed at the time like a never-ending series of cultural crises. Amidst that time, we were also seeing what happens when we cede control of the marketplace of ideas to those who want to censor and silence dissent instead of engaging in good faith.

We've seen it coming from both the left and the right, and while many can and will quibble over who is more at fault or whose behavior was worse, we've seen that the result is the same: The more we censor ourselves as a culture, the farther our ideas drift from reality and the more trouble we cause. Again, and again, the censors we trusted to distinguish truth from fiction have gotten it wrong — and we've all suffered as a result.

At every stage, it's clear that our culture, our discourse, and our capacity to know not just what our positions are but why we believe them, have suffered as a result of this endless Spy versus Spy-esque censorial cycle.

If we want to get out of this, we must reject censorial behavior no matter what side it comes from. We must remain principled in our defense of free speech, open inquiry, and good faith debate. We should be deathly allergic to ideological bubbles and knee-jerk rejections of opposing beliefs. We should exercise intellectual humility, admit when we’re wrong, and embody the ideals, behaviors, and principles we demand others hold dear.

For the sake of our nation and our own intellectual growth, we should fight censorial and authoritarian behavior from all sides, not just one.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Make sure to look out for my “Canceling of the American Mind” co-author

Rikki Schlott

on Bill Maher this weekend! Rikki is a brilliant human being, and I’m lucky to have worked with her on this book — which, by the way, is out in paperback April 29. I encourage you all to pick it up!

In the meantime, here’s a clip of Rikki’s last appearance on Real Time, where she informs Bill about Bias Response Team hotlines, which allow students to report professors and students for wrongthink. And if that sounds scary, you should know that these kinds of systems have made their way off campus and into cities and municipalities across the country.