by P.E. Moskowitz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 13, 2019
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 The freedom of speech of the alt-right demonstrators in Charlottesville, Moskowitz urges, clearly superseded other presumably superior rights, whipping up the violence that led to the murder of a counterprotester.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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by Bari Weiss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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