The War On Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech — And Why They Fail

Heresy Press’s first non-fiction offering addresses free speech and creative freedom—central to the Press’s mission—through a systematic debunking of the most common pro-censorship arguments. Co-authored by Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen, The War On Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail constitutes a bulwark against the persistent censorial efforts from both the political left and right. At a time when conformist pressures threaten viewpoint diversity, and when political attacks on free expression are mounting, this book is a valuable resource for all who seek to understand and defend the right that is central to both individual liberty and our democratic self-government.   

This concise volume is organized around 10 claims that proponents of speech restrictions regularly assert, such as: “words are violence,” “free speech is right-wing,” and “hate speech isn’t free speech.” In lively, clear, and persuasive prose, the authors examine the flaws in these pro-censorship assertions. The book also includes an insightful introduction by Jacob Mchangama, shedding additional light on the topic from historical and international perspectives.  

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Further Resources

• Books
• Films
• Miscellaneous
• Podcasts
• Websites

BOOKS

• Floyd Abrams, The Soul of the First Amendment (Yale University Press; First Edition, 2017). 

The author, who is widely considered to be the preeminent First Amendment lawyer in recent times, explores the First Amendment’s uniquely speech- and press-protective nature both historically and currently. Drawing upon Abrams’ extensive international experience, the book also focuses on key areas where the First Amendment’s approach differs from that in other democratic nations. Abrams’ contagious reverence for First Amendment freedoms shines through his eloquent prose.

• American Association of University Professors, 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure (AAUP, 1915), and 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure (AAUP, 1940). 

There may be no place where free speech is more important than at colleges and universities; since many of them are private, that freedom is protected more by norms of academic freedom than by the First Amendment (which only binds public institutions). Nowhere are these norms stated with greater clarity than in these two foundational AAUP documents, which have been widely adopted by campuses and often cited by courts.

• Teresa M. Bejan, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard University Press, 2019 edition). 

Bejan forcefully argues that the U.S.’s expansive notion of freedom of speech has its roots in antiquity. Mere Civility introduces readers to the still influential ancient Greek concepts of isegoria and parrhesia. It also proposes an unlikely champion for American free speech: the founder of Rhode Island, the uncompromising and cantankerous Puritan, Roger Williams.

•  Eric Berkowitz, Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News (Beacon Press, 2022 edition). 

Berkowitz’s book is a comprehensive, entertaining historical account of censorship in the West, from Ancient Greece to the present. It does an especially good job of highlighting the class dynamics of censorship, including “the Streisand effect” (whereby the efforts of powerful people to suppress certain information actually fuels greater interest in it) and censorship imposed by elites for the “benefit” of the poor.

• Philipp Blom, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment (Basic Books, 2012 edition). 

For twenty years in the late 18th century, a salon in Paris transformed western philosophy through vibrant free speech and debate, which flourished despite censorial laws. Wicked Company traces the interactions of such colorful key figures as Diderot, Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, and more. The book provides an inspiring example of a strong free speech culture that can thrive even in the face of hostile laws threatening imprisonment. It should embolden readers to courageously exercise their free speech rights in the face of hostile peers threatening cancellation.

• Michael Kent Curtis, Free Speech, The People's Darling Privilege: Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History (Duke University Press, 2000 edition). 

Curtis expertly explains how free speech in the United States survived despite the First Amendment having very little legal force up until about 1925 (when the Supreme Court’s decision in Gitlow v. New York made the First Amendment enforceable against state and local officials). We learn how a commonly held belief in freedom of speech protected and sustained free speech (at least in the non-slaveholding states) up until the Civil War.

• Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin Press; Illustrated edition, 2018 edition). 

This book insightfully analyzes the factors that have contributed to a culture on campus, and in broader society, in which controversial ideas are treated as “harmful,” hence allegedly warranting censorship. Its distinguished coauthors – a prominent social psychologist and First Amendment lawyer – explain that shielding young people from expression and ideas that they find emotionally distressing is actually likely to undermine their psychological well-being, as well as violating core free speech principles. (See also Films below.)  

• Thomas Healy, The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind — and Changed the History of Free Speech in America (Metropolitan Books, 2013 edition)

Healy provides a fascinating account of how a growing cultural and intellectual belief in freedom of speech — championed by influential thinkers like Judge Learned Hand and the socialist intellectual politician Harold Laski —  persuaded Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to finally reinterpret the First Amendment as providing actual protection against real world violations; for the prior 134 years it had served as the mere “parchment barrier” that its chief author, James Madison, rightly feared it could be.

• Nat Hentoff, Free Speech for Me — But Not for Thee (HarperCollins, 1992 edition)

Authored by a titan of free speech advocacy, who was also a prolific jazz critic, this book stressed that censorship is a universal reflex shared by the left and right, and that it takes work to overcome that reflex.

• Anthony Lewis, Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1992 edition)

A vivid account of the characters, stories, and legal principles that led to one of the Supreme Court’s landmark free speech cases, which simultaneously reined in government power to punish dissenters and protected the First Amendment rights of peaceful protestors that were essential for the Civil Rights Movement. It compellingly demonstrates what many people consider counterintuitive:  that the dangers of punishing false speech outweigh the dangers of permitting such speech to go unpunished. Given the increasing pressures to suppress “disinformation” and “misinformation,” and to weaken Sullivan’s speech-protective standards, this classic work is especially timely now. 

• Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There Is a Solution (Simon & Schuster, 2025 edition)

Cancel culture endangers free speech norms. Canceling cites data to illustrate exactly how far we’ve gone in the wrong direction, identifies the illegitimate rhetorical tactics that people deploy to avoid hearing each other, and charts the path back to sanity. The paperback edition contains new data, FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings, and a new epilogue.

•  Jacob Mchangama, Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022 edition)

A truly international and history-spanning work, Mchangama's book powerfully demonstrates that free speech has been a constant concern for human beings and societies all across the globe, under all forms of government and in dramatically disparate cultures, since the dawn of civilization. This comprehensive work belies common misconceptions that the American commitment to free speech is “exceptional.” To the contrary, it shows that there has been an eternal, universal human yearning for free speech, and corresponding efforts to restrict it. It also shows that assertedly “new” arguments about the dangers of free speech and benefits of censorship in fact have repeatedly resurfaced in multiple earlier contexts. (See also Podcasts below).

• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) (chapters 2 & 3)

Both coauthors consider this to be the most influential, persuasive argument for free speech in history. The book is especially pertinent to contemporary debates about “cancel culture,” because Mill focused on the comparable censorial pressures resulting from the conformist state of Victorian English culture; he viewed the English law at the time to be fairly speech-protective. However, just as our current speech-protective First Amendment law provides no protection against the cancel culture that is fostered by influential private sector forces (because the First Amendment restricts only government action), the same problem animated Mill’s powerful argument. For a beautiful and more easily digestible version, check out Heterodox Academy's illustrated pamphlet: Jonathan Haidt, Dave Cicirelli, and Richard Reeves, All Minus One: John Stuart Mill's Ideas on Free Speech Illustrated (Heterodox Academy, 2021).

• Aryeh Neier, Defending My Enemy (The New Press, 2025 edition)

Aryeh Neier was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who served as the ACLU’s Executive Director during the seminal “Skokie case” in 1977-78, in which ACLU/Neier defended the First Amendment rights of American Nazis to demonstrate in a Chicago suburb with a large Jewish population, including many Holocaust survivors. This classic work answers the question that civil liberties advocates will continue to be asked in perpetuity: “Do we really need to defend the rights of Nazis?” The new edition contains a new chapter by Neier reflecting on the many free speech challenges in the past half-century, as well as a new Introduction by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who as a young ACLU lawyer defended freedom for Alabama Governor George Wallace and other white supremacists, and an Afterword by this book’s coauthor Nadine Strossen, explaining the book’s ongoing importance for current free speech controversies. 

• David M. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

The modern legal history of free speech begins in 1925, when the Supreme Court held that the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment “incorporated” the First Amendment, making it enforceable against state and local governments. This book focuses on the period between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and the Supreme Court’s decision to use it to give the First Amendment teeth.

• Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution Press, 2021)

Rauch focuses on the modern crises facing our knowledge-producing institutions, particularly higher education and journalism. Constitution makes a winning case that, despite appearances, our intuition, and our misplaced confidence, the world around us is, and forever will be, deceptively difficult to understand. Readers may be introduced for the first time to the work of great American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce and left with an expanded understanding of the epistemological genius of James Madison.

• Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (University of Chicago Press, expanded 2014 edition). 

While Mill’s On Liberty might well be the best thing ever written on free speech, Kindly Inquisitors might well be  the best thing written after that. While the book contains immense wisdom on any number of topics, for cancel culture, pay special attention to its treatment of the fatwa (religious edict) against Salman Rushdie.

• Flemming Rose, The Tyranny of Silence (Cato Institute, 2016). 

This compact, readable book was written by the Danish newspaper editor who published the controversial Mohammad cartoons in 2005. It chronicles Rose’s principled, egalitarian determination to treat Danish Muslims the same as Danish adherents to other religions — as citizens of a modern, liberal, democratic society who could exercise free speech rights and whose religion could be the subject of their own and others’ free speech rights. This book sets the record straight on the many prevalent misconceptions about the origins of the cartoons’ publication and the ensuing consequences. It also addresses other important misconceptions about free speech, including that Hitler’s rise to power resulted from too much free speech in Germany’s Weimar Republic.

• Nadine Strossen, Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know® (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Part of a trade-named What Everyone Needs to Know® series, this question-and-answer guide to free speech lays out modern free speech law by explaining not only the current doctrines, but also the important cases that gave rise to it.  A major theme throughout the book — because it is a major theme throughout First Amendment law — is the mutually reinforcing relationship between robust free speech protection and increasing protection of the equal rights of groups that have historically been subject to discrimination throughout U.S. history. Free Speech is both a guidebook for the uninitiated and an organized handbook for the expert. 

• Nadine Strossen, HATE:  Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2020 Edition, with new Epilogue)

This book comprehensively but concisely explains why suppressing hateful speech, for the sake of promoting the important goals of reducing hatred, discrimination, and violence, is a strategy that is likely counterproductive. Citing much evidence and analysis from multiple countries, as well as from U.S. history, the book shows why so many human rights advocates world-wide oppose increased restrictions on hateful speech; such restrictions are predictably wielded disproportionately against minority views and voices. The book also cites extensive evidence of the greater effectiveness of multifarious counterspeech strategies for reducing discriminatory attitudes and ideas.

• Jonathan Turley, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage (Simon & Schuster, 2024 edition)

Turley explores the personalities and periods that have shaped our views of free speech. Arguing that free speech is a human right based on natural law, he marshals an impressive array of scientific, artistic, historical, and legal sources that demonstrate why we need free speech in order to be fully human.

FILMS

• Bodies Upon the Gears: The Birth of the Free Speech Movement: https://www.thefire.org/bodies-upon-the-gears

This short film (just under 9 minutes), by Oscar-winning documentarians Paul and Ellen Wagner, sponsored by FIRE (and narrated by coauthor Nadine Strossen), contains riveting videos, audio recordings, and photographs of the historic events surrounding the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (“FSM”). It was produced in 2024 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the FSM’s landmark contributions to free speech and students’ rights, as well as to many other causes (the film touches on the integral connections between the FSM and the civil rights, women’s rights, and anti-Vietnam War movements). 

• Free to Speak

This three-part documentary film series contains many concise episodes, dramatizing a broad, diverse array of free speech issues:  from different historic periods; from many, varying countries; involving speech about multiple topics; and focusing on speech by people with wide-ranging identities, backgrounds, and views. Originally aired on public TV in 2023, these films may be freely streamed from the Free To Choose Network website, which also provides resources to enhance understanding and discussion of each segment. Coauthor Nadine Strossen is the films’ narrator, as well as project consultant.

• The Coddling of the American Mind

Based on the book of the same title by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, this film is available on many streaming services and captivatingly embodies the book’s themes through the stories of several diverse students, whose mental health demonstrably deteriorates when they come to believe that certain ideas are “harmful,” and improves when they open their minds to differing perspectives. 

MISCELLANEOUS

• Learned Hand, "The Spirit of Liberty" (1944). 

Judge Hand’s poetic and persuasive language in this historic, often-quoted speech is a quick read, but it’s a stirring call to action. Among its many memorable, inspiring passages: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

• Randall Kennedy, The Forgotten Origins of the Constitution on Campus. https://prospect.org/health/forgotten-origins-constitution-campus/ 

This article explores the essential role that high school and college student Civil Rights Movement activists in the Deep South played in advancing constitutional protection for not only racial justice, but also freedom of speech. It demonstrates that these earlier cases, resulting in important lower court decisions, constituted building blocks for the Supreme Court’s landmark Tinker v. Des Moines School District decision, which first expressly recognized that “neither teachers nor students shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate.” It powerfully underscores the mutually reinforcing relationship between free speech and equality rights.

• West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). 

Many Supreme Court opinions contain historically significant rulings that define and defend free speech rights. A smaller subset of these also eloquently explain the value of free speech. Both coauthors concur that one supremely eloquent example is the Barnette majority opinion. In 1940, the Supreme Court had ruled 8 to 1 that public schoolchildren — including those with religious objections to the practice — could be required to salute the American flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Three years later, the Court reversed itself in Barnette, 6 to 3. In doing so, the Court sweepingly celebrated freedom of conscience and belief, far beyond the specific factual circumstances the case presented. The often-quoted opinion contains many memorable passages, including this one: “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” 

PODCASTS

The Free Press’s podcast, “The Witch Trials of JK Rowling” https://www.thefp.com/p/honestly-presents-the-witch-trials-d94 (March 10, 2023).

Jacob Mchangama’s Clear and Present Danger, A Free Speech History Podcasthttps://www.freespeechhistory.com/ (2018-2020).

So To Speak,: The Free Speech Podcast, Hosted by FIRE's Nico Perrino. https://www.thefire.org/news/podcasts/so-speak-free-speech-podcast

WEBSITES

(Highly recommended examples of reliably excellent sources on free speech issues.)

FIRE

First Amendment Watch

Future of Free Speech

Heterodox Academy

National Coalition Against Censorship

PEN America

The Free Speech Project