Pants on FIRE

Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), recently made an appearance on The Daily, The New York Times’ flagship podcast, where he received a soft little interview from host Natalie Kitroeff. 

I wrote early this year about the ideological crisis faced by FIRE, a free speech organization that has for 15 years focused primarily on threats posed to free speech by the campus left – liberal students and administrators who stifle speech in the name of social justice. FIRE made its name in large part by publishing rankings of the so-called “worst colleges for free speech,” and also prominently tracks attempts to deplatform campus speakers. 

In retrospect, it’s clear that FIRE has been obsessing over minutiae. The Trump administration’s aggressive, state-backed assaults on speech have done more damage to free expression in this country than any college administrator ever could. 

But it’s not just that FIRE misidentified the biggest threats to free speech; they were arguably complicit in the right-wing project. Their PR campaigns helped foster the narrative that college campuses were untethered hotbeds of liberal ideology, and that narrative in turn drove Trump’s extensive attacks on universities.

I’ve been waiting to see what Lukianoff says about this critique. For all of FIRE’s faults, I think that Lukianoff views himself as a good faith, nonpartisan actor. The organization has been openly critical of Trump all year, and their litigation wing has taken up liberal causes consistently: they’re representing folks who got into trouble for criticizing Charlie Kirk after his death, and they helped get Trump’s case against pollster Ann Selzer tossed out of court. They also acknowledge that what Trump is doing now is worse than what came before him.

But Lukianoff, it seems, is still in denial about what he’s wrought. At one point during his Daily interview, after much fawning, the question finally gets posed:

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