I recently had the pleasure of reading War On Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech — And Why They Fail, a new book about the dangers of censorship by two eminent defenders of free speech: Greg Lukianoff (CEO of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and Nadine Strossen (former president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a senior fellow at FIRE).
The book is marketed towards Americans across the political spectrum, but most of its arguments seem designed to appeal particularly to leftists. Lukianoff, and especially Strossen, document at length how threats of government censorship have been wielded against modern left-wing causes like Black Lives Matter. Both authors point out how civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s relied on freedom of speech to make their case — former Congressman John Lewis said, “Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent, the Civil Rights movement would have been a bird without wings.” Both authors point out that free speech has long been the bulwark of the disempowered, by protecting them from censorship and silencing attempts by the powerful whom they were challenging.
In today’s political climate, this is a strategically wise decision. Most of the philosophic arguments against free speech come from the left, from Critical Theorists like Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (authors of Must We Defend Nazis?: Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect Hate Speech and White Supremacy) and professor Mary Anne Franks (author of Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from The First Amendment). In 2017, a survey by Cato and YouGov found that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to believe that a business executive should be fired for a host of so-called politically incorrect beliefs, including the belief that “psychological differences explain why there are more male engineers” (which a third of Democrats considered to be a fire-worthy offense).
FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings report, which surveyed 58,807 students from 257 colleges and universities, found that political ideology correlates strongly with intolerance for supposedly “offensive” speech. That is, the more left-leaning a student is, the more likely they are to support illiberal and even violent measures to shut down speakers with whom they disagree. Eighty-four percent of very liberal students said that “shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus” is at least “rarely” acceptable, and 38 percent of very liberal students said that “using violence to stop a campus speech” was at least “rarely” acceptable. While the Trump administration is shaping up to be no friend of free speech, most of the grassroots support for censorship is coming from the left, and so these are the hearts and minds that Lukianoff and Strossen are wisely focused on trying to persuade.
The book makes dozens of arguments against censorship, but perhaps the most common thread of these arguments is a criticism of what Lukianoff calls “naive statism.” As Lukianoff describes it, naive statism “involves a kind of magical thinking by which the passage of a speech restriction eliminates a problem, without realizing that any law has to be passed and enforced by actual people.” Time after time, Lukianoff and Strossen stress this key point: categories of speech that people might wish to censor (for example, “hate speech”) are vague and nebulous, and lead to lots of edge cases that have to be decided by imperfect human beings.
Such human beings are neither omniscient nor omnibenevolent; they can and do make mistakes. As Christopher Hitchens once put it:
Did you hear any speaker in opposition to this motion, eloquent as one of them was, to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read? Do you know anyone? Hands up. Do you know anyone to whom you would give this job? Does anyone have a nominee? You mean there’s no one in Canada good enough to decide what I can read or hear? I had no idea.
And then there’s the potential for abuse of power. It turns out that when we give people the power to censor, they rarely use it in the way that we would like. Throughout history, censors have abused their power to punish dissent. In the Antebellum South, slave-owning politicians censored abolitionist literature under the guise that it could be “incendiary.” In the Middle Ages, the Papacy was obsessed with using its power to crack down on so-called “heretical” texts and pamphlets that described God in a way different from that approved by the Church. Stalin’s Soviet Union lobbied for international hate speech laws that helped legitimize its brutal repression of dissent and protest.
Censorship is a tool that the powerful use to keep the little guy down. And in a republic in which power regularly changes hands, any new censoring tools that we give to our political allies will invariably be wielded by our political opponents. As Lukianoff writes: “A good intellectual exercise before passing a new law is to consider how your worst enemy would use that law — and thinking about that is even more important when imagining restrictions on free speech.”
My favorite argument in the book is one that I’ve rarely heard before. Censorship laws often backfire, creating more of the views that they aim to punish. There are a few reasons for this, one being that censorship-related court cases actually generate a lot of visibility for the opinions of the censored. In 1985, for instance, Canada brought a case against a Holocaust denier, and journalists who wrote about the case had to explain the denier’s views and arguments in order to inform their readers. The attempt to tamp down on Holocaust denial by persecuting it actually led to its proliferation. This phenomenon is known as the Streisand Effect, and it recurs throughout history; whenever a point of view is censored by the powers that be, the censorship seems to generate more interest in (and visibility for) the censored point of view.
But Lukianoff and Strossen point to a deeper truth: this backfiring effect is most powerful when it comes to people with the kinds of truly odious views that many of us least want in the public discourse. As counterterrorism expert Elizabeth Neumann documents in Kingdom of Rage, violent political extremism has its roots in: “shame, humiliation, a lack of belonging and significance, loss of control, uncertainty, and a sense of unaddressed injustice.” When we use the power of the law to demonize and shame people who hold a specific view, and to try to rob them of that most intimate control over what they say, we don’t make them reconsider their view. Instead, we simply feed the psychosocial roots of their extremism.
As Lukianoff and Strossen point out, this is how censorship has always worked. The Weimar Republic, for instance, heavily censored prominent Nazis. It shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers and even banned Hitler himself from speaking in Germany. Far from diminishing the Nazis’ appeal, this censorship gave National Socialists new recruiting tools.
As one Nazi poster read:
Why is Adolf Hitler not allowed to speak? Because he is ruthless in uncovering the rulers of the German economy, the international bank Jews and their lackeys, the Democrats, Marxists, Jesuits, and Free Masons! Because he wants to free the workers from the domination of big money!
It turns out that if we want to combat conspiratorial views, employing powerful forces to silence the adherents of those views is actually quite counterproductive.
Free speech is in crisis throughout the world. As a 2025 report by the Future of Free Speech documents, “In the past decade, the number of countries experiencing increased repression of free speech has far outnumbered those demonstrating substantial improvements, and the share of countries with strong free speech protections has declined significantly.” Free speech is on the ropes, and experts warn that we are entering a “free speech recession.”
Free speech is in danger in the United States as well. The United States has long been a champion of free speech, but that may be changing. On several measures, the Future of Free Speech reports that we’ve become more censorious than we were a few years ago. In 2024, just 60 percent of Americans agreed that “People should be able to express statements that are offensive to minority groups” and about the same number agreed that “People should be able to express statements that insult the national flag.”
All of which is to say: Lukianoff and Strossen’s book couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. If we want to climb out of our “free speech recession” and rebuild a culture willing to defend free speech as a principle, we need to understand the arguments in favor of censorship and why they’re misguided.
