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THE CASE AGAINST FREE SPEECH

THE FIRST AMENDMENT, FASCISM, AND THE FUTURE OF DISSENT

A provocation for First Amendment absolutists, who may be surprised at all the hidden constraints that bind free expression.

Forget about shouting “fire” in a crowded theater—free speech, by this account, is anything but free.

As former Al Jazeera America staffer Moskowitz (How To Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood, 2017) writes, the doctrine of freedom of speech is constantly in opposition to other rights that often supersede it. For instance, if you wished to rename yourself Google as an expression of some political view or another, you would likely face down some very powerful corporate attorneys. On another score, argues the author, people like Charles Murray or Steve Bannon may widely be accounted undesirable and are therefore banned or disinvited from speaking on campuses, leading to conservative outcries about supposed censorship, but the national news such banning brings is disproportionate to the silencing of activists on the other side: “Their rights eclipse the rights of so many others in mainstream discourse: Dakota Access Pipeline protestors, or J20 defendants, or Black Lives Matter activists.” The freedom of speech of the alt-right demonstrators in Charlottesville, Moskowitz urges, clearly superseded other presumably superior rights, whipping up the violence that led to the murder of a counterprotester. Indeed, the argument continues, a scenario in which many of the alt-right participants were armed was sanctioned by police while, one imagines, a similar demonstration of armed Black Lives Matter marchers would not be. As A.J. Liebling noted, just as freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns the press, true freedom of speech belongs to those who wield political power. Although the argument is sometimes diffuse, Moskowitz does valuable work in connecting dots—noting, for example, that a professor censured at Evergreen College under supposed PC censorship who became a cause célèbre was the brother of the managing director of a firm owned by Peter Thiel, “a right-wing billionaire who has helped fund lawsuits to shut down the left-leaning media site Gawker."

A provocation for First Amendment absolutists, who may be surprised at all the hidden constraints that bind free expression.

Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-56858-864-3

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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