Greg Lukianoff, a self-described First Amendment advocate, believes that people cannot understand their community unless they genuinely know what people around them think. 

That only happens, he said, through protections of freedom of speech and a culture that supports it.

That was the message Lukianoff told a crowd at the Lobero Theatre on Thursday night during the latest lecture hosted by Spotlight Santa Barbara. 

Lukianoff is an author, attorney and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan group that defends free speech and free thought.

He took to the stage for a two-hour discussion on the culture of free speech across the nation with Spotlight Santa Barbara co-founder and attorney Brian Goebel. 

For about two hours, Goebel and Lukianoff broke down the state of free speech in the United States, cancel culture and Lukianoff’s books that he co-authored: “The Coddling of the American Mind,” “The Canceling of the American Mind” and “The War on Words.” 

Lukianoff discussed free speech — or sometimes the lack thereof — at schools, the workplace and in the federal government.

He said he saw one of the worst attacks against free speech throughout his career in a 2025 incident in Tennessee. A Tennessee police officer was jailed for 37 days for posting a meme quoting President Donald Trump after Charlie Kirk’s murder. 

“I have never seen a case as bad as that in the United States,” he said. 

He added that President Trump’s administration also recently violated the First Amendment by banning certain media outlets from the White House press pool.

“You cannot kick people out of the White House press pool because you don’t like their opinions,” Lukianoff said. “Then Trump tweeted he was doing that.”

“The Coddling of the American Mind” and Free Speech on College Campuses

Goebel and Lukianoff discussed the latter’s career as an author and how it all came to be. 

The best-selling book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” which he wrote with his friend Jonathan Haidt, stemmed from a personal mental health crisis, Lukianoff said. 

In 2007, Lukianoff was hospitalized because he was a danger to himself, he disclosed. He said the first two years of his FIRE presidency “nearly did him in.”

“My life fundamentally changed at that moment, though, for the better because I started studying cognitive behavioral therapy,” he said.

The therapy practice, Lukianoff explained, is rooted in ancient traditions to deal with anxiety and depression. Through the therapy, he began to learn how to talk back to the exaggerated voices in his head. 

Around that time, he said, across school campuses, students were being told to catastrophize, overgeneralize and engage in binary thinking, in what he called “anti-CBT.” 

He added that he started seeing students on campuses demand trigger warnings and speech codes. 

That, he predicted, would be a disaster for freedom of speech and would be detrimental to students’ mental health.

He described the current free speech culture on college campuses as “horrifying.”

“When I started in (FIRE) in 2001, it was already worse on campus than I think a lot of people understand for speech,” he said. 

Some of the threat to speech is coming from those who identify with right-wing policies, with efforts to punish professors, he added. 

FIRE grades universities across the nation through student surveys and a database of documented professor and student “cancellations.”

UC Santa Barbara won a whopping “F” grade. Sixty-nine percent of students believe that shouting down a speaker on campus is acceptable, at least in rare cases, according to the FIRE ranking.

By comparison, the national average is that a third of students believe violence is acceptable to stop a speaker, according to Lukianoff. 

“That is a threat to our way of life,” he said. “It is treated as, ‘Oh, they will grow out of it.’ It’s not cute.”

Lukianoff believes the K-12 education system should instill in young students that violence as a response to speech is unacceptable. 

He and Goebel explored some of the concepts the book presents, including the three “great untruths,” the first being the “untruth of fragility.”

Lukianoff argues that parents and K-12 education leaders are overprotecting children to “be really scared and panicked about danger.”

The book explores the concept of safetyism among younger millennials and Generation Z, which the authors describe as “the cult of safety.”

Lukianoff believes social media played a role in accelerating it.

He is working on a new book explaining this issue.

Cancel Culture and First Amendment Violations

The follow-up to Lukianoff’s first book was “The Canceling of the American Mind,” published in 2023 with Rikki Schlott, and was also a topic of Thursday’s discussion. 

The book explains cancel culture and its effects on both sides of the political spectrum, who utilize it to silence “their enemies.”

Lukianoff said there was an uptick starting around 2014 to get people fired, excluded, expelled or deplatformed for saying something that falls under protected speech under the First Amendment. 

He said he’s seen those “cancel culture” efforts from those who fall on both the left and the right politically. In the past two years, he said he’s seen more cancel culture from those who are right wing, he said.

However, he said there seems to be more “eye-rolling” lately when people try to “cancel” another person. 

Lukianoff called self-censoring detrimental to society.

“When you don’t have genuine candor in a society, you’re harmed, and the extent to which you function as a democratic republic, you’re really kind of not,” he said.

Goebel also asked Lukianoff to weigh in on national First Amendment-related issues that have made recent headlines. 

One included U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents retaliating against people who criticize the federal agency by showing up to their front doors. 

“This was not something I expected to see within my career,” Lukianoff said. 

He added that his organization has seen about a half-dozen similar cases and estimates there are “probably hundreds” more websites being shut down under Trump’s orders.

“This has been something we’ve fought successfully in court,” he said.

During the second half of the discussion, attendees posed their own questions to Lukianoff.

Many asked him to weigh in on different First Amendment-related situations. 

Some asked about whether freedom of speech as a principle is relegated to American citizens.

Others asked what advice Lukianoff would give to New York University professor and podcaster Scott Galloway, who was recently appointed to the University of California Board of Regents.

Lukianoff said he hopes Galloway keeps in mind the idea that when it comes to college, it is important to consider not just the amount someone spends to attend a certain institution, but rather how much the institution spends on educating a student.

The next Spotlight Santa Barbara event will feature Mara Liasson, an NPR national political correspondent and Fox News contributor, on Nov. 17.