“[S]o long as you have free speech, protect it,” Ayn Rand said. “This is the life-and-death issue in this country . . .” Yet today that precious freedom is under siege.

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.

What can be done? Speak up in defense of freedom of speech. But start by educating yourself on the issues by reading ARI’s new book, Defending Free Speech, edited by Steve Simpson, an urgently needed collection of hard-hitting essays presenting an uncompromising defense of the right to free speech.

That’s not just us saying that. “Ever since the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Ayn Rand Institute has been a morally and intellectually consistent defender of free speech. There is no ‘free speech, but’ exception in ARI’s approach to this important right. Its position is based on a simple truth: the individual is the most important minority in any society. Thus, for a society to be decent and civilized it has, through the force of reason, to be serious about the protection and cultivation of individual liberty,” says Flemming Rose, former editor of Jyllands-Posten and author of The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech.

Order it today on Amazon.com!