Trump’s War on the Press and the Future of Free Speech — with Greg Lukianoff

Scott Galloway opens by asking Greg Lukianoff what matters most for free speech after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, increased government pressure on dissent, and the spread of AI-generated material. Lukianoff identifies what he calls the ongoing campaign of “Trump versus the media,” pointing to the exclusion of Politico, CNN, and MSNBC from the White House press pool. He says that issue is important, but he expects the question of whether the United States regulates AI correctly to matter even more over the next 20 years. Lukianoff describes two opposing possibilities. In the bad version, governments use AI regulation as an excuse to control its “knowledge function”—the part that tells people what is true. He invokes Michel Foucault’s concern that power seeks to control truth, while rejecting Foucault’s broader claim that power determines truth because Lukianoff believes the scientific method and Enlightenment ultimately disrupted that model. In the positive version, AI becomes a distributed, small-l liberal system that helps people understand reality by testing claims and finding disconfirming evidence, in the spirit of Karl Popper. His central fear is not merely biased output, but giving authorities the ability to establish an official account of reality.

Scott asks whether AI bots have free-speech rights and says he worries that some of his online comments may come from bots serving an unknown objective. He argues that platforms should delete or moderate bots when they influence public dialogue, because speech generated by non-sentient systems may make the apparent conversation fundamentally misleading. He also questions why private companies tolerate bots, and suggests that traffic and engagement incentives may be part of the answer. Lukianoff’s answer is that bots themselves do not have free-speech rights, although the people who create them generally do. Since the platforms are private companies, he says the practical problem is to change the incentive structure so companies gain less from bot activity. The conversation then turns to artists and venues. Discussing Macklemore and Ed Sheeran, Lukianoff says Robert Kraft had a First Amendment right to bar an artist from his private stadium because of the artist’s message. But he says that legal right is not the end of the analysis: refusing to sell a book such as Ulysses would also be legal, yet not necessarily admirable. Excluding Macklemore may intensify the controversy, increase downloads, and feed the conspiracy theory that pro-Israel voices exercise excessive control. Scott agrees that private owners can exclude someone from their property but says a healthier free-speech culture would encourage conversation or simply refuse to buy tickets rather than seek suppression.

Scott asks whether AI companies that scrape and resell people’s work raise a free-speech issue. Lukianoff places the question at the intersection of expression and intellectual property. He says he has developed a deeper appreciation for the patent system’s role in Western progress, even though his earlier work in intellectual-property law left him troubled by parts of it. The strongest argument for AI companies, he says, is that they can use open information just as any other person can. The strongest argument against them is that they can take copyrighted material at a scale that was previously impractical. Lukianoff notes that his organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, received notice that its book “The Coddling of the American Mind” had been used to train models. Although he could have joined a class-action lawsuit, he was actually pleased that the work might inform an AI system. The discussion then turns to the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Lukianoff says he had criticized Kirk for being poor on the speech rights of scholars he opposed, but after Kirk’s death he watched more of his debates and found him more patient and civil than expected. He says Kirk appears to have been murdered while trying to argue with people he disagreed with, while both sides mishandled the aftermath: some on the left turned him into a caricature or refused to discuss the killing, while authorities and others went too far in punishing people who made insensitive comments about it.

Scott describes FIRE’s college free-speech rankings, based on surveys of nearly 63,000 students at 262 schools, school policies, and the handling of free-speech controversies. He asks what the results show across institutions as different as Bob Jones University and NYU. Lukianoff’s most encouraging finding is that leadership matters enormously. He points to Vanderbilt under Daniel Diermeier, where a serious commitment to truth and “structured friction” helped move the school from a poor ranking to roughly fifth nationally. Dartmouth likewise rose rapidly because its leadership prioritized open inquiry. The New York City schools performed poorly, with NYU finishing last among the ranked schools. Lukianoff attributes much of the problem to inconsistent handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: schools have tolerated protests at one point, cracked down later, and punished some pro-Palestinian groups or professors. He contrasts this with the University of Virginia, which said it supports speech but would not permit indefinite campus encampments. In his view, students can understand a clear, consistently applied rule, whereas a school that alternates between tolerance and enforcement loses credibility. Lukianoff’s conclusion is that honesty and consistency do more for free-speech culture than trying to satisfy every side temporarily.

Scott raises an incident at UCLA in which students allegedly distributed wristbands to everyone except Jews and restricted Jewish students from parts of campus. He says he believes an institution would have responded far more aggressively if students had excluded Black students, and he asks whether universities should distinguish between students and faculty. Lukianoff agrees that they should. Students have the strongest speech rights on a public campus and deserve room to make mistakes while testing cultural boundaries, although they can still be disciplined. Professors have strong rights to speak outside class and criticize their universities, but classroom speech must be professional and germane. Lukianoff gives an example from a case he once accepted but later came to believe he had mishandled. At Forsyth Technical Community College, a technical-writing professor spent 10 minutes of a 50-minute class discussing her views on the Iraq War. He says that, regardless of his political sympathy for her, the school could punish her for taking a substantial portion of a technical-writing class into an unrelated political subject. Scott makes a similar comparison to a workplace, saying an employer could reasonably object if an employee created a disruptive political display in the office. Lukianoff’s distinction is that academic freedom protects controversial ideas, but it does not eliminate expectations of relevance, professionalism, or a functioning educational environment.

Scott asks Lukianoff for controversial ideas about reforming higher education and says universities have changed surprisingly little in 50 years while producing large amounts of student debt. Lukianoff describes a prospective book, tentatively titled “The Academic Filibuster,” about how the standards for recognizing a problem keep shifting while institutions insist that nothing is wrong. His central proposal is to make disconfirmation—the deliberate attempt to show that one’s assumptions are false—a core institutional function. Universities justify special protections, he argues, only when they help society see the world more clearly. He says this requires “structured friction,” not a promise to be more open-minded. One model would be counter-departments that test the empirical assumptions underlying a field’s political or intellectual orthodoxies. Lukianoff calls modern scholarship a mixture of excellent research and junk that needs better mechanisms for separating the two. On tenure, he says he began his career strongly supportive but has become disappointed because tenure often fails to produce the courage to challenge local orthodoxies. Some exceptional professors owe their jobs to tenure and use it bravely, but he believes they are a minority. FIRE therefore has no general position on tenure, only the principle that professors should not be fired for political viewpoints or unpopular findings. Lukianoff suggests five-year contracts with strong academic-freedom protections could produce a more dynamic system than lifetime employment.

Scott notes that FIRE recorded 184 attempts to deplatform college speakers in 2025, with 172 counted so far in the referenced year, and says the data now show more attempts coming from the right than he expected. Lukianoff stresses that the left is still trying to block speakers, but says politicians have become the leading censorship constituency since Trump returned to office. Rather than pursuing genuine higher-education reform centered on truth-seeking, politicians are engaging in score-settling—trying to give the right what it believes the left did for years. FIRE had not seen politicians occupy that number-one position in roughly its 26-year history. Scott complains that faculty have failed to teach students that education should challenge their sensibilities. He describes a student who says he supports Trump being treated as morally defective and says universities should create “warriors, not wokesters.” Lukianoff connects this to “The Coddling of the American Mind,” arguing that students are not taught to expect discomfort and are instead encouraged to treat panic, passion, and perceived harm as evidence of moral virtue. He believes this produces students who feel constantly attacked, see the world as a binary of good and evil, and are worse off for free speech, academic freedom, and mental health. Asked what could help his own teenagers, he recommends a meaningful gap year, work, or voluntary national service before college. Working in restaurants from age 11, he says, exposed him to people outside elite educational circles, built resilience, and taught the give-and-take of disagreement.