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Greg Lukianoff
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The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution Hardcover – October 17, 2023

by Greg Lukianoff (Author), Rikki Schlott (Author)

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A “galvanizing” (The Wall Street Journal) deep dive into cancel culture and its dangers to all Americans from the team that brought you Coddling of the American Mind.

Cancel culture is a new phenomenon, and The Canceling of the American Mind is the first book to codify it and survey its effects, including hard data and research on what cancel culture is and how it works, along with hundreds of new examples showing the left and right both working to silence their enemies.

The Canceling of the American Mind changes how you view cancel culture. Rather than a moral panic, we should consider it a dysfunctional part of how Americans battle for power, status, and dominance. Cancel culture is just one symptom of a much larger problem: the use of cheap rhetorical tactics to “win” arguments without actually winning arguments. After all, why bother refuting your opponents when you can just take away their platform or career?

The good news is that we can beat back this threat to democracy through better citizenship. The Canceling of the American Mind offers concrete steps toward reclaiming a free speech culture, with materials specifically tailored for parents, teachers, business leaders, and everyone who uses social media. We can all show intellectual humility and promote the essential American principles of individuality, resilience, and open-mindedness.
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  1. Print length
    464 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Simon & Schuster
  4. Publication date
    October 17, 2023
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1668019140
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1668019146
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  1. Cancel Culture is just one symptom of a much larger problem: the use of cheap rhetorical tactics to “win” arguments without… actually winning arguments.
    Highlighted by 321 Kindle readers
  2. And Free Speech Culture embraces some new idioms, too, such as “always take seriously the possibility you might be wrong,” “it’s always important to know what people really think,” and “just because you hate someone doesn’t mean they are wrong.”
    Highlighted by 266 Kindle readers
  3. Here, we will focus on a single new Great Untruth that we have dubbed The Great Untruth of Ad Hominem, which supposes that “bad people only have bad opinions.”
    Highlighted by 235 Kindle readers
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A lucid and comprehensive look at where we are and how we got here....The authors do not merely analyze; they are in the fray....their description of the scale of the problem is nothing short of galvanizing. We are in a terrible spot, and we need to get out of here." —The Wall Street Journal

Can the American mind be uncanceled? Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott make a compelling case that the answer to this question is one of the most important in American life today. Their book is a humanizing and passionate cry for intellectual independence and those who want to think and speak for themselves.
—Andrew Yang, co-founder of the Forward Party

Cancel Culture is one of the worst scourges of modern woke-ravaged society. This important and very timely book explains what it is, how it works, and how best to deal with it. It should be required reading for everyone who believes in freedom of speech.
—Piers Morgan, host of Piers Morgan Uncensored

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

Over the past decade, Greg Lukianoff has been perhaps the single most articulate explainer of the tumultuous cultural moment we’re living in. In The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg and Rikki Schlott distill an incredibly complex social phenomenon—Cancel Culture—down to its component parts. In fifty years, hindsight will offer historians a clear picture on the story we’re living through today, but Canceling already possesses that kind of clarity in the midst of the moment.
—Tim Urban,co-founder of Wait But Why

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

About the Author

Greg Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and one of the country’s most passionate defenders of free expression. He has written on free-speech issues in the nation’s top newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and was executive producer of the documentaries Can We Take a Joke? and Mighty Ira. Lukianoff earned his undergraduate degree from American University and his law degree from Stanford. He worked for the ACLU of Northern California, the Organization for Aid to Refugees, and the EnvironMentors Project before joining FIRE in 2001.

Rikki Schlott is a New York City-based journalist and political commentator. She is a research fellow at FIRE, host of the Lost Debate podcast, a columnist at the New York Post, and a regular contributor to numerous publications and television programs. Her commentary focuses on free speech, campus culture, civil liberties, and youth issues from a Generation Z perspective.

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Greg Lukianoff

Greg Lukianoff

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Greg Lukianoff is an attorney and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He is the author of "Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate" and his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, in addition to dozens of other publications. He is a regular columnist for The Huffington Post and has appeared on television shows, including the "CBS Evening News," "Fox & Friends," "The Today Show," CNN's "New Day," C-SPAN's "Washington Journal," and "Stossel." He received the 2008 Playboy Foundation Freedom of Expression Award and the 2010 Ford Hall Forum's Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award on behalf of FIRE. He is a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School.

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Richard Lucas
    5.0 out of 5 stars Strong diagnosis of a fatal illness in American academia
    Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2024
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    American academia has become strongly partisan, abandoning objectivity and truth-seeking. A consequence of its pursuit of social justice is frequent toleration or even encouragement of witch hunts and cancellations, a huge amplification of what used to be known as 'political correctness'. As a result of putting the normative over the objective, universities now impose restrictions on conduct and free speech. Some of this is intentional and a more or less direct result of the increasingly administrator-laden university governance systems that seek to provide 'safe spaces' where designated fragile groups can be insulated from words that might injure their feelings. Some of it is unintended, but still weighs very heavily, as all, students and faculty both, feel that they cannot express even truthful statements that might be viewed as challenging the official norms. Self-cancellation reflects the oppressive culture that has emerged in academia.

    The title echoes both Allan Bloom's 1987 "Closing of the American Mind" and Lukianoff and Hadit's excellent 2018 "Coddling of the American Mind." Those who have read either of those books will recognize the societal trajectory discussed here. While Bloom reflected on the many aspects of loss of classic American culture, and the problematic trajectory of U.S. society and spiritual life, and "Coddling" diagnosed the mental illness that results from preventing people from having to deal with reality, "Cancelling" is much more of a recitation of actual cancellations and their origins in institutional postures. It provides compelling evidence that innocent lives are being destroyed to no good purpose, where the motives are both corrupt and non-consonant with the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Violating the spirit or the letter of the law regarding free speech injures society.

    The authors are both involved with FIRE, and many of the book's examples come from actual cases, some involving legal action or pressure from that free speech organization. At times the book is also very personal, as when they relate the story of a cancellation violent enough that it caused the suicide of a personal friend.

    Although the book is primarily concerned with limitations on free speech and the destruction of people who speak, and it criticizes both right and left for their actions to suppress opinion, those on the left will likely dislike the book, as the majority of examples are of academia- or media-based cancellations, both of which are left-leaning. The recent testimony in Congress of Ivy League university heads, who could not guarantee safety on their campuses without contradicting their own longstanding anti-free speech policies, highlights how pervasive and embedded such structures are in the universities.

    The book's strengths are its examples and call-outs of inconsistency and illiberalism. It's weakness is in its recommendations, which are not compelling. The prescription to raise better children who are not cancellers fails to provide a rationale for that course of action. It leaves open the possibility that some may read it and decide that they *want* to become cancellers, because although the moral case is made throughout the book that cancellation is problematic, there is no stick, no warning of punishment that could come to cancellers, who usually feel free to act without remorse or the possibility of consequence for their acts of violence.

    The book lacks a section in which current and recent events are extrapolated into the future. Such a section, needed between parts two and three, would predict the course of current policies forward, and provide a warning of future dystopia. Obviously, such a section would be fiction, but as it would be informed by the authors' intimate familiarity with actual events, it would be more accurate than predictions by almost anyone else observing these social phenomena. One could argue that an academic culture focused on a telos of social justice and prescribed speech will lead to an oppressive and authoritarian, and likely highly racist culture that becomes incapable of objectivity or innovation, since the culture would be unable to tell the truth or imbue creative spirits with the freedom to venture into untried fields of endeavor. The authors are highly familiar with the legal, sociological, and psychological aspects of limitations on the human spirit. A severe warning story would have been useful in this book. American society could be headed for the GULAG; it needs to be said here.

    In short, a highly valuable addition to your library on current events sociology. If you want to understand how the 1960s turned out, the chronicle of recent campus culture rot is right here.
    15 people found this helpful
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  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Clear writing, repsonsible research, indispensible for today's America and world
    Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2025
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    Haidt and Lukionoff's research and clear writing provides a deep, responsible understanding of how the political Left and Right think, act, and contradict the definition and honest exercise of free speech in their own unique ways. Is there any better way to learn how to think like a an adult human? As opposed to reacting with emotion but not understanding, or retreating into a shell and ignoring basic citizenship, real world-national-local-and-personal economics, and interaction with people we once loved or see every day who have different views of the world?
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  • Professor B
    4.0 out of 5 stars Useful but badly unbalanced
    Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2024
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    This book has a wealth of data and sound insights about the current state of ideology-driven “cancel culture” in American universities, especially. Co-author Lukianoff is an expert on specific details this topic as a long-time FIRE staffer. But the book is strikingly unbalanced in two respects that, it seems possible, reflect another variant of the techniques of biased argumentation the authors repudiate. First, the book asserts moral equivalence of cancelling motivated by Right- and Left-wing ideologies despite using the vast majority of the pages of the book to document the techniques of the Left, and their consequences. The book devotes little space to rightist variants of “cancel” but makes crystal clear that they differ substantially in motivation and detail from hard leftist variants. Indeed, left unsaid is that many of the “free speech” suppressing moves by conservatives are designed specifically to undo political indoctrination of children, a core focus of the aggressive Left.

    Second, the book contains no discussion of the long, concerted, overtly declared effort by neo-Marxists to reach the point where they can do exactly what the book laments. Yes, the authors briefly mention Herbert Marcuse, but there is no discussion of the Frankfurt School, “critical theory” in general, or cultural Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci, whose followers and intellectual legacies created the ideological intolerance the book laments. Marx and any variety of Marxism are not in the book’s index. Marxists are well aware that the freedoms and rights of liberal societies give them tools to subvert those societies. Marxian “critical pedagogy” – doctrine on how to teach teachers to indoctrinate their students – is now firmly established orthodoxy in universities’ schools of education, and in the professoriate generally, leading to the perversion of free speech in schools that the authors lament. Lukianoff and Schlott are oblivious to the causes of this now overt social revolution, and they and FIRE are naïve to maintain that overtly stated, purposefully subversive ideas deserve protection in even elementary schools.

    A far better perspective is that of Columbia University professor John McWhorter, who argues in "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America" that the ideology he as well as Lukianoff and Schlott lament is indeed an intolerant, ideology-driven religion whose adherents are not amenable to, or susceptible to, reasoned discussion. Instead, McWhorter argues, they need to be confronted directly and defeated politically.

    Read this book for the substantial, credible evidence of cancel culture in universities, journalism, and some businesses that it provides. But be skeptical of most its recommendations – such as advice that all people really should just be more open-minded. The ideological war that generated “cancel culture” did not materialize out of thin air, as the authors seem to think, and the intellectual combat over ideas is an existential threat to the standards of inquiry and scholarship that helped build the West for half a millennium. The hard Left makes publicly clear that it wants to destroy this tradition and, indeed, Western civilization as we know it. Lukianoff and Schlott do not seem to understand this elementary fact.
    58 people found this helpful
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  • ES
    5.0 out of 5 stars Thank you for exposing cancel culture!
    Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2025
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    This is a valuable historical record of a destructive current phenomenon. It does a good job capturing that both the left and the right are guilty of contributing to the problem, and it looks at a variety of causes including the increasing wealth of the higher education industry as well as parenting styles.
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Top reviews from other countries

  • R. Schelhas
    5.0 out of 5 stars In light of Trump's election victory, a good tool for understanding why it happened.
    Reviewed in Canada on November 6, 2024
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    DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) frequently discriminates upon actual skill and ability. Human rights in Canada and the USA forbid discrimination based upon sex yet white men and men of many creeds along with low income earners are the big losers.
    Add to that, shutting down freedom of speech with intellectual buzzwords and/or gaslighting are making us stupid.
    Both sides are wrong. Sharing, morality and ethics are a luxury unavailable to many people. Just sayin.
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  • Kindle Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book
    Reviewed in Australia on November 11, 2023
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    Amazing book. Cancel culture is a real issue. It should be addressed.

    Everyone should read this book. Important as heck.
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  • Pages
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 30, 2024
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    Excellent
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  • annie RN
    5.0 out of 5 stars Important read
    Reviewed in Canada on March 7, 2024
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    Everyone who is interested and compelled to try to understand the complexity of the world we live in should add this excellent book to their collection.
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  • Amazon Kunde
    5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 31, 2024
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    Was a bit hesitant before ordering it because I didn’t want to read some right wing book. But it turned ihr to be an amazing book that well describes how many feel when it comes to political opinions. Thanks to both the right and the left most people that disagree with both extremes are afraid of voicing their thoughts (obviously a danger to democracy). A must read for actual liberals.
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