The Canceling of the American Mind, by FIRE's Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott

I just read and much enjoyed this new book, and highly recommend it: It's readable, factually detailed, and thoughtful in its analysis and recommendations. For a taste of the argument, see this Substack post. And here are a few of the jacket blurbs from others:

This riveting book presents compelling stories about Cancel Culture and its devastating impact on a wide range of Americans. It draws upon detailed databases to refute persistent attempts to minimize the problem and shows that discourse-destroying cancellations are perpetrated by people all across the ideological spectrum. Most importantly it lays out steps that all of us can take to supplant Cancel Culture with Free Speech Culture. It should be a game-changer in the Culture Wars.
—Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU

To many, the proper takes on Cancel Culture are either that it's a blip sensationalized by certain contrarians or just bad people being duly dismissed. Um, no. Read this book and find out what a scourge Cancel Culture has been, and what we can do to get past it.
—John McWhorter, Columbia University linguistics professor and New York Times columnist

The growing regime of censorship, slander, and punishment against anyone who questions establishment orthodoxy is locking us into error and corroding the credibility of our institutions. No one has documented the facts and causes of this alarming trend more thoroughly than Greg Lukianoff, joined here by a collaborator, Rikki Schlott, who belies the accusation that the younger generation has been hijacked by authoritarians.
—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University and bestselling author of Enlightenment Now and Rationality.

Cancel Culture has long resisted serious analysis in part because the phenomenon's adherents protect it from inquiry by coding it as fictional or a right-wing fantasy. But Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott get under its surface and at the deeper problem: the extraordinarily rapid erosion of America's once-thriving free speech culture. The authors argue that censoring is humankind's natural inclination. After a brief flirtation with Enlightenment values, is the world regressing to a mean? There's no more important or scary political subject today, and we owe Lukianoff and Schlott a huge debt for tackling the subject head on.
—Matt Taibbi, award-winning author and investigative reporter

Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott do Americans an invaluable service by putting to bed the idiotic myth that "Cancel Culture doesn't exist." Cancel Culture is very real and very dangerous—and this book is the most comprehensive look at the rot threatening our institutions and freedoms.
—Ben Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire

John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, warned that social coercion can be an even bigger threat to free thought than government censorship. He didn't use the phrase "Cancel Culture," but that's what he was talking about. In The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott have updated Mill's classic for our time. With startling stories and a wealth of data, they show how intolerant activists impose a gag order on the rest of us—and how the rest of us can lift it.
—Jonathan Rauch, Brookings Institute senior fellow and author of The Constitution of Knowledge

Not since the McCarthy era have so many people been so afraid to express their opinions on crucial issues. Today, the situation is arguably worse, as it's no longer the government that is the primary enforcer of ideological conformity, but private citizens and institutions. In The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott ably diagnose the threat this atmosphere of dogmatism poses to a free society and offer solutions as to how we can replace a harsh and unforgiving Cancel Culture with a generous and constructive free speech culture.
—James Kirchick, bestselling author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington

Note that I've consulted for FIRE (which Lukianoff runs) before, but I wasn't involved in the creation of the book.

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