The Canceling of the American Mind Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution

it's also about the way we argue as a society at the moment and saying that we figured out this Byzantine system to actually never address what someone's saying on the merits to immediately make it personal about the person.

So you have a new book coming out on October 17th, this is recorded in 2023, October 17th, Canceling of the American Mind, authors Greg Luke-In-Off and Ricky Shlott. So congratulations on that. Thank you so much. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about the book and why you guys are partnering together also to write it? Yeah.

I think it's probably a little unusual for a 48-year-old and a 23-year-old to be writing together, but I couldn't feel luckier than to get to work with Ricky Shlott. She's absolutely brilliant.

And we pull no punches. You know, when we think the right or left has been wrong just like we do as fire, we call them out.

And we pull no punches. You know, when we think the right or left has been wrong just like we do as fire, we call them out. But when it comes to the, well, when it comes to the phenomenon of cancel culture, the place where it's the most dominant of course is in higher ed.

I do think that it's just an honest truth, that just speaks to the female proclivity a little bit more.

The Canceling of the American Mind is more or less just explaining all the different ways we try to win arguments without actually convincing anybody and partially by scaring the hell out of them that they'll lose their job or that they'll otherwise have their lives ruined if they say something that kind of mildly pisses off some people in our, forgive the expression, ruling class and the groups that are willing to stand up to that and not actually be told what they can say are being treated as if we're all pariahs.

It's backfiring in a real way right about now and it's happening at some pace that it didn't happen in the past. They've sped up the whole process of their backfiring process, meaning stuff used to take a while to work or not work.

They always go way too far. They did it with COVID. They did it with all things COVID. COVID will be the thing that undid them. They took all their shit. They dumped it all into COVID.

And there's a whole chapter on this and canceling the American mind, because one of the things we talk about is how cancel culture destroys trust and expert.

It's even worse for the credibility of experts because now that Scientific American is trying to make the argument that, oh, biological sex exists on the spectrum, nobody believes them because when they realize that anybody who has a contrary opinion is going to get canceled, they're not going to trust you to be objective.