The Bright Line Between Words and Violence
A Conversation with Greg Lukianoff on Words, Violence, and Democratic Survival
When Metaphors Become Mandates
Last month, Greg Lukianoff stood in front of students at Utah Valley University and talked about free speech. The title of his talk: “Free Speech: The Antidote to Violence.”
Just weeks before, Charlie Kirk was assassinated there—part of the mounting political violence that has Americans asking fundamental questions about the civic norms and self-governance that underpin our democracy. Kirk had gone to campus to engage in argument, not violence. That someone would meet speech with murder shows how catastrophically we’ve lost the plot.
“I’m going to a school and I’m a little scared,” Greg told me during our conversation in October. “This is a place where someone was just murdered last month. And that’s insane.”
It is insane. But Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), has spent 26 years defending free speech on college campuses. So of course he went to Utah Valley University. He’s watched a rhetorical flourish–”words are violence”--become accepted truth. And now he’s watching those words justify violence.
The Collapse of the Bright Line
Greg is deeply concerned with epistemology—how we know what we know, how we create reliable knowledge. When I asked him about “words are violence,” he immediately connected it to knowledge creation itself.
“It’s more of a rhetorical flourish that people like,” he explained. “A lot of things I think we’ve seen on campus—it began as a rhetorical flourish, and then people actually just started believing it was true.”
This matters because when you erase the distinction between speech and action, you fundamentally alter the calculus around political violence. If words are violence, then violence becomes self-defense.
To be clear: no serious free speech advocate claims words are harmless. Words can wound deeply. They can contribute to harm. But as Nadine Strossen points out in her work with Greg, words “at most can potentially contribute to harm.” Violence, by contrast, “directly causes harm through its own force.” There’s an intermediary between words and harm—the person and their agency. That intermediary is where resilience and human dignity live.
Greg and Nadine Strossen make the case for a “bright line” between words and actions explicitly in their new book, The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail. Yes, you can argue that a bright line distinction between words and actions is a social construct—”a societal decision,” as Greg puts it. “But it’s one of the best societal decisions we’ve ever come up with because it’s a great tool for peace, for innovation, for artistic expression.”
When we mess with this bright line, “all sorts of horrible things develop.” Because free speech isn’t just a legal principle—it’s the alternative to violence.
Free Speech Makes Us Safer
Greg argues, “You are not safer for knowing less about what people really think.”
In our conversation, Greg connects this directly to truth-seeking itself. He cited people who claim not to believe in truth. “So do you believe in falsity? Do you believe anything is definitely false? And everyone has to say yes. Well, then you believe in truth.”
His point is that knowledge is subtractive. “Truth exists in a kind of cloud of probability...You don’t really exactly learn what is true. You learn the following hundred million things that aren’t true.”
But you can only eliminate falsehoods if you know what people actually think. Censorship doesn’t make bad ideas go away. It just makes them harder to identify and refute.
Structured Friction and Truth-Seeking
Greg connects free speech to knowledge creation through what he calls “structured friction”—systems that can create reliable provisional knowledge.
“The only way you can do it is by having what we call structured friction, where essentially it runs up against something that’s actually really going to test it.” It’s free speech as infrastructure for truth-seeking. And that infrastructure is breaking down in ways that go beyond campus speech codes.
“I don’t think that’s working very well in higher ed at the moment,” Greg said. Then he paused. “It’s not working in democracy either.”
He’s right. The deliberative function of democracy—putting ideas into venues where they can be tested through disagreement, making commitments, coming back to do it again—feels absent. I call it deliberative capacity. Greg calls it structured friction. Whatever we name it, we’re missing it.
Free Speech Protects the Powerless
About 15 years ago, Greg started noticing something troubling: people showing up “who seemed to have been taught that free speech is a cynical tool of the three Bs: the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron.”
“This is just bad history,” Greg says.
Historically, the wealthy and powerful haven’t needed special free speech protections—they already have power. “You only need a special protection for freedom of speech, like the First Amendment, for people who are either unpopular with power or unpopular with the majority.”
This is why Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela all championed freedom of speech. Greg met John Lewis, who “would often say that without freedom of speech, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.”
“They understood that free speech was not the weapon of the powerful. It is the best check on power ever invented.”
Permission Structures for Rage
Emily Chamlee-Wright used a term in our last conversation that keeps coming back to me: “permission structures.” She described what she calls the “rage industrial complex”—how each side creates justifications that say the stakes are too high to follow normal rules, to maintain civil discourse, to uphold democratic norms.
“I get the question, ‘Well, who started it?’” Emily told me. “It doesn’t matter.”
Greg’s data makes the permission structure concrete. FIRE’s research shows that about half of Americans believe that words can be violence—and “it’s actually much worse on American college campuses.” Significant percentages of students say violence is acceptable to prevent speech they find objectionable.
Research from More in Common documents what they call “perception gaps“—Americans overestimate how extreme the other side is by nearly double. This misperception itself becomes a permission structure: if you believe the other side is twice as extreme as they actually are, you’re more likely to justify abandoning normal rules of engagement. We’ve misread the room entirely, but we’re acting on those misperceptions. And when you combine misperception with permission structures for violence, you get what happened at Utah Valley University.
The Next Frontier: AI and the Same Playbook
If you think this is just about campus politics, Greg has bad news.
“I see kind of the same thing, the same playbook happening with artificial intelligence,” he told me. The mechanism is identical: anti-discrimination rationales that start with good intentions get turned into all-purpose weapons against dissenting speech.
Now Greg sees the same pattern with AI regulation. “Algorithmic discrimination laws would hold legally accountable LLM companies if their knowledge creating or knowledge producing or knowledge relaying technology arguably created knowledge or relayed knowledge that led someone to engage in discriminatory behavior.”
Read that again. Under these laws, AI companies could be liable if their systems produce knowledge that someone uses in a way that’s deemed discriminatory. (R Street and FIRE have written together warning Congress of the dangers of chilling constitutionally protected free speech via AI regulation) “That creates a situation in which you are limiting the sort of epistemic, the world of knowledge of AI to that which will not get you sued, which is a disaster for the reliability of knowledge itself.”
Greg is working with the Cosmos Institute on what he calls “epistemically humble AI”—systems that can admit limitations, promoting autonomy rather than becoming “autocomplete for life.” It’s the same principle: preserve the structured friction that lets us find truth.
The Aphorisms We’ve Lost
In The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg writes about free speech culture—the informal norms and sayings that used to oil the gears of democratic life in the United States. Things like “it’s a free country,” “to each their own,” “everyone’s entitled to their opinion.”
These aren’t casual phrases. They’re what Greg calls “quick and easy bits of wisdom” that encode important values. When we lose them, we lose the recognition that disagreement is normal, that diversity of opinion is expected, and that we can live together without thinking alike.
I realized during our conversation that I still say these things to my daughter. She’s 10, lives in Madrid, and has never lived in America. She just thinks this is how Americans still talk—and thus, how we behave.
One saying I’ve repeated often is “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” So, when the idea that “words are violence” first entered my consciousness, I struggled with it. I didn’t throw it out immediately. Of course words can hurt. But are they actually violence?
I tend toward stoicism. Words only hurt if you let them. And the question I kept returning to was: Do I want to teach my daughter to be fragile in the face of the reality that people will sometimes be cruel? A quote often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
The more I thought about it, the more I realized: “Sticks and stones” isn’t just a saying. It’s aspirational. It’s a mantra. We’re teaching children that they have agency over their internal response to external cruelty. We’re building resilience, not denial. We’re saying: Don’t let words destroy you. You’re stronger than that.
When we collapse that distinction and teach children that hurtful words are the same as physical violence, we rob them of that agency. We tell them they’re fragile, that they need protection from speech rather than the capacity to withstand it.
It’s jarring for me to realize that my daughter is growing up with an American philosophy that America itself is forgetting.
But that’s what makes the stakes so clear. If we can’t even pass these principles to the next generation—if we lose the aphorisms that encode resilience and agency—we lose more than a culture of free speech. We lose the people capable of sustaining it.
What Comes Next
The erosion of the bright line between words and violence, the permission structures for rage, the polarization that makes us misread each other—they’re all connected. And they require the same response: rebuilding the infrastructure for disagreement.
That infrastructure includes legal protections for speech, yes. But it also includes culture, norms, and institutions willing to model difficult conversations. It includes people like Greg, willing to speak at a university where someone was just murdered, because democracy depends on spaces where we can test ideas against each other without resorting to violence.
Emily Chamlee-Wright asked in our last conversation: “What can we be doing today that fireproofs liberal principles?”
Greg’s answer is clear: Defend the bright line. Build structured friction. Sit with discomfort. Report the truth even when inconvenient. Remember that free speech makes us safer, protects the powerless, and is the best alternative to violence we’ve ever invented.
Later this month, R Street will bring together historians, journalists, and policy leaders to explore both how we arrived at this moment of political violence and how we find our way back. We’ll examine the roots of political rage and what it means to overcome polarization—to disagree better when the bright line has already been crossed.
These conversations matter because someone has to defend the distinction between words and violence. Someone has to model the kind of disagreement that democracy depends on.
Greg Lukianoff keeps showing up. And in his TED Talk, he ends with a reminder of why it matters:
“Young people used to be the great drivers of free speech, and they can be again. But for that to happen, we all must remember that to understand the world, it’s crucial to know what people really think. And that is only going to happen in a situation in which people feel like they can be their authentic selves. And for that, we need free speech.”
Join us on November 19, 2025, at 3:00 PM EST for “The Fragile Republic: Lessons on Political Violence from the Founding to Today.“ Greg Lukianoff will explore the roots of political rage alongside historians, journalists, and experts on overcoming polarization. Register at rstreet.org/events.
