Defending Free Speech

Freedom of speech is indispensable to a free and civilized society, yet this precious right is increasingly under attack today. • Islamic totalitarians repeatedly threaten and kill those deemed blasphemers, while our political leaders stand idly by, and many intellectuals blame the victims. • College students seek “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” from controversial ideas and fly into fits of rage at the slightest offense. • The government harasses tea party groups, preventing them from speaking out during an election, and it investigates oil companies and advocacy groups for the “crime” of dissenting from climate change orthodoxy. Why is this happening? What can be done? This hard-hitting collection provides answers. Applying Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism to the most pressing free speech issues of the day, the essays in this book reveal the attacks on free speech to be the product of destructive ideas—ideas that are eroding Western culture at its foundation. They expose those ideas and the individuals who hold them, and, importantly, they identify the only ideas on which Western civilization can be sustained: reason, egoism, and individual rights.

Steve Simpson, a former constitutional litigator, is the director of legal studies at the Ayn Rand Institute.