"We've taught young people that any of their missteps or any of their heterodox opinions are grounds to tear them down. That's no way to grow up." 

That was journalist Rikki Schlott speaking before a sold-out crowd on Monday night at a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City. Schlott, 23, teamed up with Greg Lukianoff to co-write The Canceling of the American Mind.

Lukianoff, 49, is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author with Jonathan Haidt of the bestselling  The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Schlott is a fellow at FIRE, a New York Post columnist, and a co-host of the Lost Debate podcast. 

Cancel culture, they argue, constitutes a serious threat to free speech and open inquiry in academia and the workplace, and is best understood as a battle for power, status, and dominance.

Watch the video of the full event, and find a condensed transcript below. 

Reason: What's the elevator pitch for this book? Why is it relevant now?

Rikki Schlott: Well, I think it's twofold. On the first front, people are still saying that cancel culture does not exist, which is absolutely crazy and defies all statistics fundamentally. But also, cancel culture is not just about the people that are torn down, it's about the epistemic crisis that it creates and the devastation of the body of common knowledge that we all share, and also the undermining of trust between people. 

And for me as a young person, the undermining of being able to grow up and have the freedom to fumble and make mistakes as well. So I think it's important on a ton of different levels.

Reason: What is the working definition of cancel culture?

Greg Lukianoff: Basically, we're trying to give the historical era that we're in a name. I'm a First Amendment lawyer. I'm big on the history of freedom of speech. And a lot of what we call mass censorship events have names. So Alien Sedition 1798, the Red Scare One in the 1920s, Red Scare Two, also known as McCarthyism, the Comic Book Scare, etc.  

So basically we're proposing more or less that this be a historical definition of a unique and weird period where there's been a lot of people losing their jobs because of their opinion. That's really one of the things we're trying to show, is that this is on par with any of these previous moments of mass censorship, and actually exceeds them in terms of the numbers of professors fired.

Reason: Can you elaborate more on the number of firings you are referring to? 

Lukianoff: So real quick through the stats. Our definition is: the uptick of campaigns beginning around 2014 to get people fired, de-platformed, expelled, and the culture of fear that resulted from that. And I think it's always important to root numbers in comparisons. 

When I started at FIRE, I actually landed in Philadelphia at 9:10 in the morning on 9/11. All of my first cases were involving people who said jerky or insensitive things about the attacks or people who said, "Let's go get those terrorists." So it was a bad period for academic freedom. There was a moral panic, and it actually followed the normal M.O. of mass censorship events in history. There was a national security crisis. That's usually the way it goes—it's either a national security crisis or a large-scale war that you have these mass censorship events. And 17 professors were targeted for being canceled, as we would say, which basically means punished for their speech. There were more students as well, but we were pretty small at the time, so we know that we probably only know a fraction of the students who got in trouble. Three professors were fired. That's really, really bad historically. All three of those professors, by the way, were justified under things that weren't related to speech. 

For the cancel culture era, we're talking over 1,000 attempts to get professors fired or punished in some way. About two-thirds of them resulted in someone being punished. About one-fifth of them, so about 200, resulted in them losing their jobs. During McCarthyism, the number of people who lost their jobs due to being a communist is about 63. They count other people who lost their opinions in this massive study that they did right towards the end of McCarthyism, and there were about 90 fired for their opinion overall, which is usually rounded up to 100. 

We now think that they're probably somewhere between 100 and 150 fired from 2014 to mid-last year, July. We know this is a crazy undercount as well. According to our survey, one in six professors say that they've either been threatened with investigation or investigated for their academic freedom. That means the numbers are absolutely colossal. Students, about 9 percent of them, say that they've actually faced sanctions for their speech. That's an insanely huge number. And about one-third of professors say that they've been told to avoid controversial research. So we know that we're only seeing a portion of it.

Reason: The first case study in your book is at Hamline University. Can you remind us what happened there and why it exemplifies cancel culture?

Schlott: There was a professor named Erica López Prater who decided to show an image of the prophet Muhammad in one of her courses, which is considered sacrilegious by some people who follow Islam. And so she said in her syllabus that that was going to be in a class. She told people that you could get an excuse from class if it's untenable for you to see that. She warned them multiple times ahead of time. She gave ample warning in every way, shape, and form, and also just told everyone that, "The only reason I'm showing you this is because there are some sects of Islam that do not find this offensive. This is a piece of art that was commissioned by a Muslim king."

She ended up being squeezed out of her job for doing that because one student did show up to that class and decided afterward that she was offended. And the president of the university came out and said, "This is beyond freedom of speech, this is just offensive." And it was a perfect example of cancel culture just defying common sense, defying just pluralism and democracy on a very fundamental level. And so that's why we decided to call this one out as our opener because pretty much everyone condemned it in the end. It was unbelievable. And Hamline did have to reverse course.

Reason: The happy ending there is that the university president kind of got pushed out. What was the reaction of other academics? 

Lukianoff: This was a positive case in the sense that people really came to her defense. The idea that she wasn't rehired in the face of it is really stunning. Penn America was involved, of course, FIRE was involved, the American Association of University Professors came out and condemned it. So it was a moment of some amount of unanimity, but it somehow wasn't enough at the same time.

Reason: What role do psychotherapists play in cancel culture?

Lukianoff: This is near and dear to my heart because my experience with Coddling of the American Mind started with me being hospitalized for depression back in the Belmont Center in Philadelphia back in 2007. The idea that you would actually have psychotherapists who think they should intervene if you have wrongthink in your mind when you're talking one-on-one with them is about as horrifying as I can imagine. It's no exaggeration to say I'm not sure I'd still be here if I actually had a psychotherapist who corrected me.

As far as a chapter that we could easily expand into its own book, and maybe we should, the psychotherapy stuff scares the living hell out of us. I know we talked to a number of practitioners. In terms of what I've heard from the existing clinical psychology programs is that they will pain over the nightmare scenario of, "What if