Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of the Free Lunch

Summary

Renowned author and playwright David Mamet decries how activists on the left are repressing free thinking, freedom of speech, and the bohemian American spirit, in this hard-hitting, definitive account of how cultural commissars are trying to turn America into a homogenous state.

The conservative right was once the party of moralistic stick-in the-muds, but now, they’re the defenders of rebels and iconoclasts. How did this happen? In a broad-ranging journey through history, the Bible, and literature, David Mamet examines how politics and cultural attitudes about rebellion have shifted in the United States.

Mamet reveals how culture is being homogenized—how stories, including movies and books, are being shaped with the aid of focus groups, committee meetings, and sensitivity readers, and how it is being “cancelled” by diversity boards and social media mobs poised to call out any transgression. Exposing how oppressive cultural codes—encapsulated in buzzwords such as inclusion, diversity, social justice, appropriation—are constricting the vibrant intellectual life of the world’s freest country, Mamet calls for it to stop. By trying to shut down freedom of thought and expression, we are threatening invention and democracy—the foundations of growth and change.