A compelling case that any just assessment of free speech means thinking outside the frame of the First Amendment.
An indictment of the First Amendment for protecting toxic speech while stifling speech that “challenges hierarchies of gender, race, religion, and class.”
A law professor at George Washington University and the author of The Cult of the Constitution, Franks claims that the First Amendment contributes to injustice by enabling powerful and privileged individuals and organizations to use speech to harm the most vulnerable. Cushioned by the law, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in 2017, and Twitter (now X) hosts and circulates bigoted and threatening posts. Such reckless speech strengthens racism and misogyny, she argues, while discussions of diversity, equality, inclusion, race, and gender are restricted in many public schools. Worsening matters is the false portrayal of the private, commodified world of social media as the new public sphere. Franks dreams of a world in which fearless speech that speaks truth to power is encouraged and defended. She thus shifts the debate from free versus censored speech to reckless versus fearless speech. Her heroes are people like Sophie Scholl, an outspoken student activist executed by the Nazis, and Christine Blasey Ford, who, at Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court nomination hearings, testified about his alleged teenage sexual assault on her. Although Franks discusses legal issues, she is more concerned that speech be evaluated in the context of “objective, historical, material conditions of subordination.” The issue is whether speech enhances or degrades justice and democracy, and her argument leads away from judicial reform to broad educational initiatives. Franks’ zealous tone and uncompromising approach, which may put off some readers, are nonetheless appropriate, given her view that the First Amendment has long been used to validate speech that causes harm and glorifies violence beyond what a just and decent society should tolerate. Franks leaves it for others to make the counterargument.
A compelling case that any just assessment of free speech means thinking outside the frame of the First Amendment.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781645030539
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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