The Canceling 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. From the team that brought you the bestselling Coddling of the American Mind comes hard data and research on what cancel culture is and how it works, along with hundreds of new examples showing the left and the right both working to silence their enemies.
The Canceling of the American Mind will change 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 Mindoffers 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.
Praise
The Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2023
New York Post 30 Best Books of the Year
The Inc. Non-Obvious Book Awards: The Best Books of 2023
The Wall Street Journal Top Five Books on Education
The Free Press's Favorite Titles from 2023
Piers Morgan
Important and very timely... it should be required reading for everyone who believes in freedom of speech.
Andrew Yang
A humanizing and passionate cry for intellectual independence and those who want to think and speak for themselves
Ben Shapiro
Cancel Culture is very real and very dangerous - and this book is the most comprehensive look at the rot threatening our institutions and freedoms.
Jordan Peterson
Lukianoff and Schlott make an inconvertible case: If we had set out as a society to generate a doctrine designed specifically to demoralize young people-to deprive them of hope and fill them with anxiety-we could not have done better than Cancel Culture.
Steven Pinker
No one has documented the facts and causes of this alarming trend more thoroughly than Greg Lukianoff, joined here by Rikki Schlott, who belies the accusation that the younger generation has been hijacked by authoritarians.
Matt Taibbi
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.