The Case Against Free Speech by P.E. Moskowitz (Cover)
From Bold Type Books.
In the opening sentences of a new book, The Case Against Free Speech, author P.E. Moskowitz undercuts the title: “This book is not anti-free-speech. It is anti-the-concept-of-free-speech. It’s an important distinction. Everyone should have the right to say what they want. I will not argue otherwise.”
Okay, by this light, the book should have been called The Case Against the Concept of Free Speech. But even this wouldn’t really capture what Moskowitz is trying to say. More precisely, Moskowitz, a former staff writer for Al Jazeera America, sees the idea that people in this country enjoy freedom of speech as an illusion. Moskowitz's evidence for this boils down to two main tenets:
- Now, as ever, people who speak out are subject to repercussions, from the government and others.
- Rich people and corporations enjoy far more access to the levers of speech than ordinary folks.
“We use free speech as a platitude to obfuscate the truth and rhetorically level a playing field that has not been level since the founding of this country,” Moskowitz writes. “Until we acknowledge that poor people, women, people of color, and immigrants have less ability not only to speak, but to be heard, then free speech will remain elusive, a unicorn, a fantasy.” Or, as Moskowitz pronounces in the book’s final two words, the right to free speech is “totally meaningless.”
But is it?
Of course, some people have less ability than others to speak and be heard. Of course, we should acknowledge this, and push back against it. But does this mean that there is no such thing as free speech? Here is where Moskowitz's argument breaks down.
Moskowitz, who wrote a previous book called How to Kill a City, about the gentrification of urban neighborhoods, does a good job covering the battleground between speech and repression. One especially chilling section recounts the harsh crackdown lodged by the federal government against the “J20” protesters at the Inauguration of Donald Trump.
Some of the protesters were charged with offenses that carried a maximum penalty of seventy-five years. In the end, Mosowitz notes, almost all these charges ended up being dropped. But lives were disrupted, liberties curtailed, and a powerful message sent, meant to chill others from exercising their rights.
And then there was the horrific abuses heaped on protesters at Standing Rock—repression every bit as ugly as that brought to bear against civil rights protesters five decades earlier.
“From the start, police and private forces tried to disrupt the camp using pepper spray, rubber bullets, and military-style vehicles,” Moskowitz notes. “One cold night, police used water cannons to push back hundreds of protesters, injuring over one hundred of them . . . .”
No one can declare that the right to free speech in the United States is adequately protected. It isn’t.
No one can look at what happened in these and other situations and declare that the right to free speech in the United States is adequately protected. It isn’t. And since the Standing Rock protests, a number of states have even passed laws effectively criminalizing protests of fossil-fuel infrastructure.
But free speech is far from irrelevant. It still matters that U.S. citizens and media outlets—a free-speech beneficiary Moskowitz largely overlooks—have far greater protections under the First Amendment than at earlier times in U.S. history. The massive expansion of this right through court rulings is something to be celebrated.
Periodically over the last decade, I have had the opportunity to meet with visiting delegations of journalists from all over the world, in my capacity as president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, a state group that works to protect access to public meetings and records. The members of these delegations, often sponsored by the U.S. State Department, are generally astonished by the extent of press freedom in the United States.
“Another planet,” is how one Russian journalist described the difference between how things work in her country and what I was describing. “It’s like we’re on another planet.”
Freedom of speech is not a fantasy, even if it falls short of protecting everyone as thoroughly as it should.
The Case Against Free Speech belabors the obvious point that having money and power translates into a greater capacity to speak and be heard. Yes, the Koch Brothers and their ilk have a lot of cash to throw around and that buys a lot of access; but committed and devoted activists have on many occasions managed to speak their way to progressive gains, regardless.
Consider the article “Amazon Warriors” by Arun Gupta in our June/July issue. He describes how a committed group of unpaid, immigrant-led activists played a huge role in beating back the plans of a multi-billion-dollar corporation—Amazon—to locate a new headquarters in Queens. This was accomplished through the on-the-ground assertion of the right to speak and associate.
Moskowitz rightly notes that the courts’ expansion of First Amendment rights in recent years often serves the agenda of conservatives. Consider the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United, which largely blew the lid off of efforts to restrict spending by special interests on elections, on free-speech grounds, or its 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which held that making nonmembers pay union fees for representation they receive violates their right to free speech and association.
Moskowitz rightly notes that the courts' expansion of First Amendment rights in recent years often serves the agenda of conservatives. But a few bad decisions do not undo the many other good Supreme Court decisions that expanded protection for speech and the press.
But a few bad decisions do not undo the many other good Supreme Court decisions that expanded protections for speech and the press, from New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) which set an appropriately high threshold for libel, to Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), which affirmed the First Amendment right of students to wear black armbands in protest, to Texas v. Johnson (1989), which held that burning the flag is a Constitutionally protected form of protest.
Moskowitz acknowledges that, for much of the nation’s history, the protections afforded under the First Amendment have been narrowly prescribed. In 1919, for instance, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld socialist leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs’s ten-year prison sentence for criticizing America’s involvement in World War 1. Today, the right to speech has evolved to where no one disputes the right of U.S. citizens to oppose the government or diss those in power.
But Moskowitz seems determined to paint a bleak picture of a free-speech terrain in which rightwing perspectives are exalted and leftish speech sharply circumscribed. In Moskowitz's telling, political activists in America are uniformly terrified, under constant surveillance (“most activists I know now assume they are being tracked at all times”) and subject to wholesale repression.
“The Internet,” Moskowitz declares, “far from being the liberatory technology they preached it would be, has instead become just another tool for surveillance and corporate control of speech that favors the powerful over the many.” Indeed, Moskowitz shares, “[I] keep most information off Facebook and Instagram because [I’ve] had too many friends questioned by police for their social media postings that were critical of the government.”
At one point, Moskowitz declares that the right to free speech in America is limited to “those born on U.S. soil, who did not make the error of tax fraud years ago, who do not wear masks, who do not advocate for the overthrow of the U.S. government, who are willing only to speak on public property,” and so on.
As the editor of The Progressive, I wholeheartedly support the overthrow of the current U.S. government, through any and all nonviolent means. I think we should find creative ways to defy the federal government and bollix up the system until Trump is removed from office. If that crosses the line Moskowitz says Americans absolutely may not cross, let ‘em come get me.
About halfway through the book, Moskowitz reflects on the militant tactics employed by the Jewish Defense League: “I abhor the group’s politics, yet part of me wishes I could stomp on a Nazi’s face with some fellow Jews.”
We don’t need violence to attain the right to speak out. We need passion, commitment, and courage.
It is this notion Moskowitz returns to in a petulant conclusion: “Realizing a meaningful definition of free speech—one that encompasses everyone, not just those with privilege who want to uphold our current system—will likely require massively overhauling our government through illegal actions, and perhaps violence. Only then will free speech apply to all.”
That’s nuts. We don’t need violence to attain the right to speak out. We need passion, commitment, and courage. Claiming that free speech is an illusion is not just factually incorrect, it’s counterproductive, because it risks encouraging people to be afraid to use what they have. If we want to make freedom of speech be all that it can be—and yes it is still a long way from that—what we need to do is speak out.