The War on Words

In a sense, this book could not be more timely. It was published in July 2025, just months before Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking. Nadine Strossen notes in the book (p. 19) that if it is legitimate to silence a speaker by shouting the speaker down, then this would logically lead to legitimizing assassination as an even more effective way of silencing a disliked speaker. Assassinating a speaker is an extreme version of the “heckler’s veto.”

The authors are superbly well qualified. Greg Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Strossen is the past president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

But in another sense, the book is already out of date. Because this book was written before Kirk’s assassination, it doesn’t address an important new aspect of the situation in which we find ourselves: increased conservative support for cancel culture in the private sector and civil society and for suppression of free speech by conservative-led government. 

This book is addressed to open-minded progressives and center-left liberals. Even though it is outstanding in many ways, it will not appeal to conservatives or classical liberals, particularly those who put an emphasis on property rights. 

Conservatives and classical liberals will be uncomfortable with or disapprove of the book’s advocacy of proactively supporting “equality . . . diversity, and inclusion” (p. 13). Strossen describes DEI as an aspect of tolerance, whereas conservatives and classical liberals see DEI as institutionalized intolerance.

It is noteworthy that the book contains a chapter on the bad argument “Free speech is right-wing,” but no parallel chapter on the bad argument to which conservatives (especially after Kirk’s assassination) might be susceptible: Namely, that free speech aids left-wing causes. Lukianoff and Strossen do not write such a chapter because conservatives are not in their intended audience.

In Strossen’s discussion of whether free speech “protects power,” she says that “our society” must push for “full and equal access to the means for effective communication.” These words are immediately followed by “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” (p. 59). To a conservative or classical liberal, Strossen’s wording looks like opposition to the connection between speech/press rights and property rights. Indeed Strossen follows these comments by reminding readers of the ACLU’s support for “net neutrality” regulation (p. 59). In contrast, classical liberals and many conservatives have favored internet deregulation. 

As one classical liberal (Brent Skorup, “Internet Regulation Is Back: FCC Refuses to Retire ‘Net Neutrality’ Rules,’” Cato at Liberty, April 25, 2024) has written, the ACLU-backed policy would transform internet access “from one of the least-regulated services” in the country into a government-regulated “national common carrier service.” Access providers would be “subject to second-guessing” by regulatory attorneys, “interminable” waiver proceedings, and the Federal Communications Commission’s “vague” general conduct standard.

Like Strossen, Lukianoff contends, in the book’s earlier online version, that both the marketplace of ideas and marketplace of goods per se are “full” of “distortions and structural power imbalances.” All speech is not yet “equal.” He says that it is “not at all obvious” that speech and the press should enjoy “a laissez-faire approach.”  

Lukianoff’s and Strossen’s discussions of equality of access, net neutrality, and power imbalances signal to the conservative or classical liberal reader that the authors are not defenders of property rights or users of property-rights analysis. The reader will not find any property-rights analysis in the book, even when obviously pertinent.

Yet property rights often figure in normal discussions of freedom of speech and of the press. For example, the US Supreme Court in Miami Herald Pub. Co. v. Tornillo (1974) said that a mandatory privilege of reply violates the free press’s rights. Florida had a law that bestowed a privilege of reply on political candidates who had been attacked in newspapers. The court held, 9–0, that the mandatory reply privilege is a command by the state. It is forced speech, not free speech. It violates the publisher’s First Amendment right in part because publishers are forced to print the reply when they might have preferred to print something else in their papers. It intrudes on private editorial control. 

Free-speech absolutist Justice Hugo Black went further in recognizing the connection between speech and press rights and property rights. He did not think that a speech forum or picketing should be imposed on private property owners of a shopping mall (dissent, Amalgamated Food Employees Union v. Logan Valley Plaza (1974); see also dissent, Brown v. Louisiana (1966)).

Likewise, Justice Black said that people do not have a free speech right to barge into a private home and make a speech there without the owner’s permission (Hugo L. Black, One Man’s Stand for Freedom: Mr. Justice Black and the Bill of Rights, A Collection of his Supreme Court Opinions, ed. Irving Dillard (1963), pp. 477–78).

As for shouting down speakers, Lukianoff and Strossen (pp. 19–27) do not deploy property-rights analysis here either.

Justice Black says that if we went to the theater as ticketed customers, but you wanted to make a speech that was not part of the play, you would be arrested and for good reason. “Buying the theater tickets did not buy the opportunity to make a speech there” (p. 477). He goes on to say: “We have a system of property, which means that a man does not have a right to do anything he wants anywhere he wants to do it” (p. 477). 

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s statement in Schenck v. United States (1919) that free speech is not a license to “falsely” shout “Fire” in a theater (Lukianoff and Strossen, p. 48) should be viewed, according to Justice Black (p. 478), along the lines of his argument about patron’s making speeches in theaters.

In a time when all too many conservatives are shaky on free speech, Lukianoff and Strossen miss a chance to appeal to a potential readership of conservatives and classical liberals (as well as a chance to fully elucidate free speech rights) through their neglect of property-rights analysis. They likewise miss an opportunity with this readership when it comes to descriptions or metaphors that suggest how free speech and a free press work in practice. 

Our authors discourage this potential readership by wanting to downplay the metaphor of a “marketplace of ideas,” a longstanding analogy in discussion of speech issues. As far back as the 1640s, pioneering classical-liberal Henry Robinson (in Liberty of Conscience, 1643) called for the “free trading of truth.” 

Lukianoff and Strossen discuss (pp. 48–49) Justice Holmes’s use of the marketplace metaphor in his dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919). There Holmes writes that the ability of an idea to be accepted through “free trade in ideas” in the “competition of the market” is a “better way” than censorship in getting at and testing what is true. 

Another free-speech absolutist, Justice William O. Douglas, writes in a concurring opinion in United States v. Rumely (345 U.S. 41, 56 [1953]) that publishers bid “for the minds of men in the market place of ideas.” Regarding this case, it should be noted that Edward A. Rumely was the secretary of the classical liberal Committee for Constitutional Government. The organization sold political books and refused to disclose to a congressional committee the names of its bulk-ordering customers. 

In the earlier online version of the content of The War on Words, our authors suggest that the marketplace is a “broken metaphor.” In contrast, classical liberals argue that, on the contrary, applying the marketplace metaphor to speech and ideas is appropriate. Market transactions are win-win; they are ex ante positive sum. Market transactions are voluntary—as are speaking and listening under conditions of freedom. 

The “marketplace of ideas” is not just an analogy or metaphor for the pragmatic discovery of truth. This marketplace is an actual real-world phenomenon (publishing, broadcasting, hiring out speaking venues, and the like) that is simultaneously part of the world of intellectual life and the world of commerce. Economist Aaron Director in the 1950s and Nobel laureate economist Ronald H. Coase in the 1970s argued that the First Amendment and free speech should provide guidance in counseling against state intervention in the economy. If center-left liberals grasp the value of a laissez-faire approach in the marketplace of ideas, why do they not see its value in the market for goods and services? 

Director (in “The Parity of the Economic Market Place,” Journal of Law and Economics 7 [Oct. 1964]: 1–10) said that economists have shown “better insight” into the “basis of all freedom” than those who only allow freedom to ideas. Ideas-only liberals have to depend on “exhortation” and on the “fragile” protection of parchment barriers. The commerce-too liberals, Director said, have discerned the importance of institutions which “foster centers of resistance against the encroaching power” of the coercive state. Director’s paper was first delivered in 1953.

Coase (in “The Economics of the First Amendment: The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas,” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 64, no. 2 [May 1974], 384–391) maintained that there was ‘‘no fundamental difference” between the market for goods and market for ideas. He slyly added that if ‘‘the government is as incompetent as is generally assumed” in the market for ideas, societal leaders should endeavor to ‘‘decrease government intervention” in the market for goods. Conversely, if government is as efficient as proponents of economic intervention tacitly assumed it to be in the market for goods, perhaps we ought to ‘‘increase government regulation” in the market for ideas.

In contrast, Lukianoff says that applying the market metaphor to politics “makes a lot of sense” (p. 52). But he is mistaken. Politics and markets are quite different. Politics is zero-sum, while the market is not. In politics, there are winners and losers. Market transactions are win-win; they are ex ante positive sum. Market transactions are voluntary; politics brings in coercive state power and Carl Schmitt’s friends vs. enemies. 

Lukianoff calls the concept of a marketplace of ideas “Darwinian” (p. 56). It is odd for the word “Darwinian” to be a seemingly deprecatory adjective here, especially given the ACLU’s role in defending the teaching of evolution in the 1925 Scopes trial. But, in contrast to Lukianoff’s hostile view, zoologist Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976) used Darwinian theory as an analytic lens to describe the circulation of units of cultural transmission or ideas. He argued that ideas evolve and are transmitted in a way similar to natural selection. (His discussion is where we get the term “meme” in social media.)

Taking off our marketplace-of-ideas glasses is Lukianoff’s prescription for our vision (p. 55). At times Lukianoff sounds as if he wants to discard the marketplace metaphor, at times he just wants to demote it. Lukianoff proposes as a better analogy or an alternative to the marketplace metaphor what he calls “pure information theory” (pp. 52, 55). 

In the online version, Lukianoff describes scholarship in higher education as a process of taking “checkable” ideas then testing, retesting, and winnowing out “false assertions.” This process (p. 67) eliminates false ideas and hypotheses and moves us toward a “better approximation of the truth.” Lukianoff’s account is quite similar to Karl R. Popper’s idea of falsifiability, found in his Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934/1959). Jonathan Rauch, whom Lukianoff quotes (p. 67) on the need for “checkable” ideas, credits Popper explicitly in Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (1993) and The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (2021).

Online fact-checking is a challenge related to having checkable ideas. When Lukianoff brings up online fact-checking (p. 37), he lauds Meta’s adoption of crowd-sourced “community notes.” And in an earlier online version (co-authored with Adam Goldstein) of this part of The War on Words, they include the adoption of community notes by X, which was the first social-media giant to use them.

Lukianoff points out that when fact-checking is a centralized, top-down approach, it is not trusted by the public, and that too often top-down fact-checkers are mistaken or biased. Lukianoff’s account of dispersed fact-checking would have been richer and fuller if he had discussed the insights of Nobel laureate economist F. A. Hayek. 

Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia, got his idea for the crowd-sourced reference site from reading Hayek’s essay “The Use Knowledge in Society” (American Economic Review 35, no. 4 [Sept. 1945]: 519–30) as an undergraduate. 

Hayek points out that the knowledge needed for the functioning of an economy does not exist in a single mind in “concentrated or integrated form.” Such knowledge exists and can only exist in “dispersed” pieces of “incomplete and frequently contradictory” information that reside in the minds of “separate individuals.” 

Hayek explains that the market gathers and summarizes dispersed knowledge through the price system faster and more accurately than a central-planning system can. Wales applied this idea to an online encyclopedia. “Community notes” applies the crowd-sourcing approach to fact-checking. By not discussing Hayek, Lukianoff missed adding depth that belongs in the analysis and neglected to cite an author deeply respected by conservatives and classical liberals.

Book reviews often criticize, and this review is no exception. But this book deserves to be recognized as an excellent one, on its own terms. Its authors, Lukianoff and Strossen, are genuine liberals. They endeavor to uphold liberty in the political sphere. But they are what theorist John N. Gray in his book Liberalism (1986) called “revisionist” or “revisionary” liberals (pp. 26, 32) who favor government intervention in the economic sphere. These economic views are the source of most of my criticisms. Classical liberals should welcome revisionary liberals as major allies in the struggle against illiberal onslaughts on liberties of speech and press. 

Some of the high points in this book are its rebuttal (pp. 1–4) to the assertion that “words are violence”; its refutation (pp. 63–68) of the claim that the existence of disinformation warrants government regulation of media; and its history of how vigorously enforced speech codes in Weimar Germany (pp. 71, 77, 80) did not stop the rise of the National Socialists. This is a book you can confidently give to a young person going off to college or to a left-liberal friend who is in danger of slipping toward the Dark Side.