***I was granted an ARC of this via Netgalley from the publisher.***

The Case Against Free Speech by PE Moskoswitz provides a view of free speech that will challenge people of all political stances. He discusses the debates surrounding free speech from Charlottesville, to college campuses, to the protests at Standing Rock. He puts his arguments about what free speech is into perspective by showing the reader what is happening today in the United States and making a clear connection to events in the past that have led to what we see today. This a great examination of what we mean when we say free speech and whether or not we truly have free speech in the United States.

You can find my full review here:
https://openlettersreview.com/posts/the-case-against-free-speech-by-pe-moskowitz

Rating: 4 stars. Would recommend to a friend.

THE CASE AGAINST FREE SPEECH by P. E. Moskowitz is subtitled "The First Amendment, Fascism, and the Future of Dissent." Moskowitz, who uses pronouns they/them, is a journalist and author. They argue that "the First Amendment is nearly irrelevant, except in its power as a propaganda tool." Moskowitz acknowledges that this concept holds a great deal of weight in America, but feels that "it has never really existed .... [since] the US has systematically acted against those values, suppressing the opportunities, speech, movements, and actions of the masses, especially people of color and anticapitalists, in order to favor the free flow of capital to the ruling class." They write about Charlottesville, the history of free speech, college campus fights, and alternative conceptualizations in Part One of the text. Later, they focus on the repression of protest, corporate internet control, and influence of "outside forces" in campus free speech battles. I know these topics are of interest to our students. However, Moskowitz takes a pretty strident approach, describing a desire to "unravel the rhetoric we had been taught" and noting a belief in "'positive liberty,' the idea that people are free only when their material conditions are equal (as opposed to 'negative liberty,' in which freedom is defined as a lack of formal obstacles to achieving one's goals." I sincerely wonder if high school students have enough experience to objectively interact with these views.

An eye-opening dissection of what "free speech" really means in contemporary America. The book argues that the first amendment has been reduced to a conservative talking point, allowing those already in power to continue promoting their agenda and propaganda while hypocritically silencing the left. The author doesn't so much argue against free speech as they do point out that it doesn't truly exist in the first place. True free speech can't exist when power, influence, and money determine who actually gets their speech heard.

The section on Charlottesville made me very emotional. The violence that happened there was avoidable, but was permitted to happen thanks to the ACLU of Virginia defending neo-Nazis and the KKK. White men shouting for the extermination of others is not speech worth protecting or defending, ever. It's not a "differing viewpoint," it's just promoting violence, genocide and fascism.

Also discussed is the Black Lives Matter movement, Standing Rock pipeline protests, and immigrant rights protests. Seeing how the government responded to those movements, it's clear that the types of free speech they really want to protect isn't the kind that challenges power or the status quo.

I can't recommend this book more. It's a scathing look at how speech and dissent is truly treated in America.

Of all the issues facing us today, one that continues to excite an enormous amount of outrage from the right (and sometimes from the left) is that of “free speech.” Whether it is Milo Yiannopoulos being met with fierce protests at UC–Berkeley or racist psuedo-scientist Charles Murray being met with a similar outrage at Middlebury College, the First Amendment is on everyone’s lips. P.E. Moskowitz’s The Case Against Free Speech is thus a very timely contribution to the fraught (and sometimes violent) discussion surrounding this pressing issue.

I was honestly quite excited about this book. For some time now I’ve been grappling with the complicated issue of free speech and how it can be that Nazis and others who advocate genocide have their rights championed by people across the political spectrum. Though I don’t always agree with Moskowitz’s conclusions, I appreciated the way they lay out in exhaustive and excoriating detail how it is that free speech has increasingly become an empty signifier. While we pride ourselves on our championing of this essential right, the reality is that we have always imposed certain restrictions on certain types of speech, usually so that those who possess power can continue to do so without undue interference from below. Given that many (though not all) of those who have attempted to impose such restrictions have come from the right, it is galling to see them now up in arms.

For me, the most compelling (and convincing) example of the American right’s hypocrisy is their continued bankrolling of radical conservative thought in the American academy. At the same time as they are doing so, of course, they help to lead the charge against those who would push back against such corporate control of our intellectual life. For people like the Kochs, free speech only matters in so far as it allows them to continue building their influence and, it goes without saying, their wealth.

Throughout The Case Against Free Speech, Moskowitz gives attention to those whose stories are frequently left out of (or deliberately effaced) in discussions around free speech. In these pages we meet those young people who led the protests against Milo and Murray, the labor protestors of the early 20th Century, and numerous others who openly confronted the injustices they saw in the world. Dismissed by many as special snowflakes and rabble rousers, here they emerge as people of passion and deep intellect, profoundly invested in changing the world for the better and confronting the deep and structural inequalities that have blighted (and continue to blight), the promise of the American dream. As they point out, it is almost always the marginalized who are sacrificed on the altar of free speech. Those who have been discouraged (often violently) from speaking truth to power are all too frequently the ones who are the first to suffer in these battles.

There were times when Moskowitz’s history lessons threaten to detract from the primary thrust of their argument, and it would have helped if they had tied together those deep (and very problematic) histories with the issues of the present. Part of this, I think, comes from the book’s organization, which doesn’t seem as coherent as it should be. It sometimes shuttles between past and present in a not-entirely-coherent manner, and this makes it easy at times to lose track of the thrust of the argument.

It’s worth pointing out that this book is straightforward about its political investments. Moskowitz is very clearly a radical, and in my view this allows them to sometimes fire their criticism at both those who are acting in cynically self-serving ways and those who, for better worse, truly do believe in the essential virtue of the American experiment. Be that as it may, The Case Against Free Speech is nevertheless required reading for all of those who want (or need) to take a good, hard look in the mirror at the myths that we construct around ourselves and that prevent us from seeing the realities of our troubled present.

At the end of the day, however, The Case Against Free Speech leaves us with a conundrum, one that has no easy answers. Do we really want to abandon the idea of free speech, as empty as it may sometimes seem? What would this actually look like in political practice? These are questions we will all have to grapple with, both today and in the days to come.

Free speech. Americans swear by it. What is free speech and why is it a cop-out, or worse, a tool of oppressors? This book explores why free speech is conceptually and literally dangerous and why it leads to great harm. I found it hard to follow at times, but the message was incredibly valuable.

A superb, humanizing book for anyone who wants to understand college campuses in the Trump era. It's easy to be cynical about the situation on college campuses, and to question the intent of students, but this book instead fills readers in on where students are coming from and the challenges that they face. I was not as impressed by the political content, but there were some surprises there too.

The author is an antifa sympathizer, but more importantly, he's a well-trained journalist. He goes after the facts with a righteous anger, exposing how reporting about campuses becomes propaganda. Has anyone else noticed that most of the college campus visitors who cry “deplatforming” actually have all the platform they need, while more marginal individuals really are denied a mainstream platform when they need it? Moskowitz has noticed, and he has figured out how the game is played.

The most politically curious moment comes midway through the book, when the author discusses the role of the ACLU in defending the right of Nazis to parade through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors, and the role of the ultra-right Jewish Defense League in preventing that parade. Moskowitz, who is himself a Jewish anti-Zionist, despises the JDL, but openly admits he understands and even admires what they did. This admission is very interesting and points to how counterprotests help people protect their interests.

The book offers two discussion chapters, the first of which, regarding the Internet, was familiar to me. “If you want to learn about the US military’s role in the creation of the Internet and you search [Google for] DARPA,” Moskowitz writes, “you’ll get many results that portray DARPA positively, and a few that only superficially cover the agency’s controversies, before you get to something truly critical, like Yasha Levine.” Having summarized most of Yasha’s book over the previous few pages., Moskowitz appends an argument that the Internet has completely invalidated the social possibilities contained in free speech — but he has to ramble quite a bit to get there, including an unnecessary and cliched invocation of Foucault.

A final, shorter conclusion summarizes the entire message of the book: free speech was once a means to transformative political action, and now it stands in the way of the same. I was only somewhat persuaded by this, but I am grateful for the way the case is made, especially in the first half of the book.