A must read to understand the current zeitgeist

This is outstanding work the best work of non-fiction I have read in at least a decade and an absolute must for anyone who truly wants to understand how we got here. This is no right-wing book it’s a non-partisan, flawlessly argued and meticulously researched work that traces the increasingly confounding attitudes towards free speech at American (and Canadian) Universities. This is not about the right to offend it’s about how these institutions fulfil a crucial social function and their influence radiates to other American institutions… If we cannot have good faith conversations to grapple with the biggest questions of our time in Universities where can we have them? When we can no longer have these discussions every other civil institution suffers… Democracy itself suffers. I would heartily recommend this enlightening and engaging book to anyone who is serious about wanting to understand the times we are living in and how we might make this world a better place.

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The Tyranny of the Minority

This book reinvigorates a free speech culture and does a good job at reminding people that the cancellers are those of the Minority. We must be brave and stand up for free speech, and for each other.

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Buy this book!

Great book. Disappointing delivery. Rikki Schlott is an important voice in the promotion of free speech, but she is not a skilled narrator. I always prefer when the author voices their own work, but in this case the result is only marginally better than listening to speechify read the text. This book deserves a narrator that enriches rather than takes away from the text.

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Lots of truth but few solutions

Cancel culture is a massive problem right now, one that's only getting worse and is crippling both our institutions and our trust in them. Nowhere is this more obvious that academia, particularly Ivy League American academia, where entitled rich kids have made it a hobby to get outraged on behalf of others, most of whom never asked for their help in the first place. This is having a dangerous chilling effect on independent thought and creative and academic freedom. As a fan of The Coddling of the American Mind, I was looking forward to hearing what Greg Lukianoff thought about this latest plague.

The book is actually principally written by Rikki Schlott, a protege of Lukianoff's who works alongside him at FIRE, but has a very different political persuasion. It contains a number of stories of cancel culture on campus, many of which FIRE worked on. These are indeed disturbing and paint a depressing picture of modern higher learning, but the problem is, this makes up the overwhelming majority of the book's content. It's very light on proposing actual solutions and most of them boil down to "stop coddling kids". Yes, I do agree with that, but when your title has "but there is a solution" in its title, I expect a bit more than obvious, surface level ideas.

On top of that, Schlott is just not a great reader. Her voice is at the same time flat, robotic and valley girlish. Her narration is certainly not a reason to avoid the book, but a better reader would have certainly helped.

If you somehow don't believe cancel culture is real, this book should give you a shock to the system and could be worth it for that alone. But if you're coming here looking for concrete answers on how to solve it, you'll fine it comes up short.

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