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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
  8. See all details
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Popular Highlights in this book
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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 274 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 212 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 205 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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (October 17, 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1668019140
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1668019146
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:

About the author

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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.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
237 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the book well-written, well-researched, and timely. They also say it provides a helpful introduction to rhetorical moves that interfere with robust discourse.

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12 customers mention "Research quality"9 positive3 negative

Customers find the book well researched, intelligent, and useful. They also say it provides comprehensive coverage of an important subject and is a great inroad to conversations.

"...It is a comprehensive coverage of an important subject and if cancel culture is not halted, we face a dystopian future." Read more

"...A riveting explanation of what we now call 'Cancel Culture,' where it's come from, and where it is headed, as well as the atrocious impact it's..." Read more

"...It's weakness is in its recommendations, which are not compelling...." Read more

"This book has a wealth of data and sound insights about the current state of ideology-driven “cancel culture” in American universities, especially...." Read more

6 customers mention "Writing and content"6 positive0 negative

Customers find the book well-written, well-cited, and easy to grasp. They also say the content is explained thoroughly to the reader.

"...This is a well thought out book, well researched and written. I do feel obliged to give a caution...." Read more

"...The book is well-written, well-cited, and almost hilariously timely, given what's going on around the various university systems in the United States..." Read more

"...He was all that and more: intelligent, well-read, caring, charismatic, meticulous, loyal, articulate, spiritual, and passionate...." Read more

"Meticulously researched. Well written. Extremely important." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

Dave Murray
5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful must read book, but with caution.
Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2023
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I was aware of cancel culture before reading this book but had no idea of its scope. What it is and the damage it can do is truly horrifying. This is a well thought out book, well researched and written. I do feel obliged to give a caution.

Commit to reading the book in its entirety. As I read the book it was difficult to not think of the cancelers as loathsome enemies of humanity. That is a problem because seeing people with differences as enemies is at the heart of cancel culture where, “If I can’t actually kill them then destroying their lives and livelihood will have to do” is all too common. That is something that the authors clearly are criticizing and is a big part of the ideas at the end (read the whole book) on combatting the problem without resorting to that kind of combat. Do not become the “enemy” to oppose it.

Another caution, don’t make it partisan political. This book is from FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) which is dedicated to defending Americans’ rights to free speech and free expression. It would be all too easy to think that the political left is “the” cancel culture because of its methods of trying to destroy individuals to stop not just their ideas but to inspire self-censorship. That ad hominin method is at the heart of this book. The book also justly points out that the political right attempts to quell the spread of ideas with laws that are vague so as to promote self-censorship in addition to removing books with ideas it finds offensive from availability. Cancelling people or books are both an assault on freedom of expression.

With those cautions in mind, do read this book. It is a comprehensive coverage of an important subject and if cancel culture is not halted, we face a dystopian future.
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Austin D.
5.0 out of 5 stars A Timely Publication
Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2024
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The Canceling of the American Mind is a worthy 'sequel' (ish) to 'The Coddling of the American Mind,' itself a spiritual successor to the likes of Allan Bloom's 'The Closing of the American Mind.'

The book is well-written, well-cited, and almost hilariously timely, given what's going on around the various university systems in the United States, as well as in our political world, where one-sided censoriousness seems to be the name of the game du jour.

If you'd like to understand how Harvard ended up the butt of many the (deserved) joke in the last few months, or why businesses seem to be bounding away from ESG and DEI initiatives, or if you'd like to understand how students could cheerlead the genocide of the Jewish people from comfortable college campuses, this is essential reading.

A riveting explanation of what we now call 'Cancel Culture,' where it's come from, and where it is headed, as well as the atrocious impact it's having on the sciences, academia, and American society at large.
13 people found this helpful
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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.
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Top reviews from other countries

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
Verified Purchase
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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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book
Reviewed in Australia on November 11, 2023
Verified Purchase
Amazing book. Cancel culture is a real issue. It should be addressed.

Everyone should read this book. Important as heck.
One person found this helpful
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Joseph Myren
5.0 out of 5 stars AWESOME
Reviewed in Canada on October 27, 2023
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AWESOME
One person found this helpful
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SP
5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous Book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2023
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What a fascinating read! Some food for thought.
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