FIRE’s 2020-2021 Free Speech Essay Contest: More winning essays
This year’s prompt asked students to draw on current events, historical examples, personal experiences, or other FIRE resources to pen “a persuasive letter or essay [to] convince your peers that free speech is a better idea than censorship.”
Below, we’re printing the essays from our second and third place winners.
And if you’re a high school student or teacher, find age-level resources on free expression, civil liberties lesson plans, and more at thefire.org/high-school.
Second Place Entry
Glendale, Ariz.
Free Speech: The Foundation of a Vibrant Democracy
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. R. Jamil Jonna is associate editor for communications and production at
Monthly Review. Brett Clark is associate editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah.
The authors thank John Mage, Craig Medlen, and Fred Magdoff for their assistance.
The U.S. economy and society at the start of 2021 is more polarized than it has been at any point since the Civil War. The wealthy are awash in a flood of riches, marked by a booming stock market, while the underlying population exists in a state of relative, and in some cases even absolute, misery and decline. The result is two national economies as perceived, respectively, by the top and the bottom of society: one of prosperity, the other of precariousness. At the level of production, economic stagnation is diminishing the life expectations of the vast majority. At the same time, financializatio