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How President Trump's Rhetoric Is Changing The Way Americans Talk

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Chris Crandall is a researcher at the University of Kansas who studies prejudice. In 2016, Crandall did a study examining how then-candidate Trump's rhetoric affected people's standards of what speech is permissible.

"It's not so much what's in your head and heart, as it is you looking around and seeing what's acceptable, seeing what's okay, seeing what people will tolerate. And the election changed people's notion of what was tolerable," Crandall says.

Another topic Crandall explores is when and why people turn to free speech arguments to defend racist speech.

"People pull out free speech when they're defending racist speech, but not when they're defending simply aggressive, or negative speech," he says.

The United States goes further than many other countries in its legal protections for speech — even hate-filled speech. Some people have used free speech claims, for example, to defend the white nationalists and neo-Nazis who took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia several weeks ago.

In this episode, we look more closely at how people use free speech defenses, and why their true motivations might not be apparent — even to them.

The Hidden Brain podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Lucy Perkins, Rhaina Cohen, Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt, Parth Shah and Renee Klahr. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tara Boyle is the supervising producer of NPR's Hidden Brain. In this role, Boyle oversees the production of both the Hidden Brain radio show and podcast, providing editorial guidance and support to host Shankar Vedantam and the shows' producers. Boyle also coordinates Shankar's Hidden Brain segments on Morning Edition and other NPR shows, and oversees collaborations with partners both internal and external to NPR. Previously, Boyle spent a decade at WAMU, the NPR station in Washington, D.C. She has reported for The Boston Globe, and began her career in public radio at WBUR in Boston.
Shankar Vedantam is the host and creator of Hidden Brain. The Hidden Brain podcast receives more than three million downloads per week. The Hidden Brain radio show is distributed by NPR and featured on nearly 400 public radio stations around the United States.

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