A single week of news could do more to sell my books than a decade of marketing to family, friends, and anyone who will listen.

Click here to buy the Kindle version of When Loves Speaks. Click here to buy the printed version.

This week, a pair of Bostonian architects have come to the defense of brutalism while conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been censored by Facebook, YouTube, and Apple on the grounds that he incites violence and hate. My first novel’s themes have come to life.

Alessandra Burley and the politics of architecture

When Love Speaks is a romance between an architect and an opinion columnist. The female protagonist, named Alessandra Burley, works to restore and rebuild century-old homes along Colorado’s Front Range. She loves architecture that glorifies the best of humanity and dislikes the abstract, inhuman appearance of modernism. She would agree with Donald Trump on one thing: Brutalist architecture is ugly.

Brutalism evolved in post-World War II Europe from forms created by the Swiss modernist Le Corbusier. Steel wasn’t widely available following Europe’s costliest war, so architects and engineers built structures from concrete. The movement, explains Mark Pasnik, is about an ethic rather than an aesthetic: Be honest about your materials, show them for what they are.

Thank you, Ellsworth Toohey.

The movement caught on in the 1960s and 1970s and represents what Alessandra Burley sees as the architectural antithesis of human decency and liberty: Function over form, matter over mind; the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Brutalism’s proponents hardly disagree. Pasnik and Chris Grimely state the movement “became synonymous with the modern international bureaucratic order” (it’s all over Washington, DC). They write:

“Concrete buildings recall a time when our country invested in the civic realm [that is, when government elites invested in themselves], when government could be a positive caretaker of its most vulnerable people [when communism was most popular], when the nation could sincerely express collective aspirations and openness through monumental structures [when people were easier to control by giving them bread and circuses].”

For men like Pasnik and Grimely—men who worship the state as though it were God and praise the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building as though it were Rome’s colosseum or Chartres’s cathedral—these are good things. To them, the individual matters not in an age where her body, mind, and soul can be crushed by a single concrete block.

As another of my characters, Argentine architect Miguel Estrada Ramírez, tells Alessandra Burley, “All architecture is a reflection of politics. All buildings demonstrate ideological goals.”

Brutalism exists to convince you your soul is dead and remind you your opinion no longer matters. Its message is clear: Get in line for your bread and embrace your government-controlled future. (But first please fill out forms GSB-1071 and GSB-1074E.)

John Cartwright and the politics of free speech

John Cartwright, the columnist in my novel, is willing to die to defend the freedoms he holds dear. He finds himself in trouble after the government passes the Brandenburg Act, a law named for the US Supreme Court case which limits speech that incites imminent violence.

But unlike Alex Jones, John Cartwright is a moral man. He would never harass Sandy Hook families. He would never spread rumors about Hillary Clinton and a pizzeria-based child sex ring. He would never interview much less vote for Donald Trump. He harbors hate only toward those who would keep men and women from living and thinking as they choose—whether they call themselves Christian democrats, communitarian republicans, libertarian paternalists, progressive liberals, constitutional monarchists, neoconservatives, or communist revolutionaries. To Cartwright, these roses by any other name still reek of power and control.

In response to Jones, free-speechers on both the right and left have canceled their gold-card memberships. Neil Macdonald of CBC News calls “the doctrine of free speech flawed” and brands Jones as a bigoted liar who “deals in viscous stupidity.” His penultimate line reads: “Alex Jones’s horrifying incitement goes too far.” Anoa Changa at the Huffington Post absurdly and inaccurately claims free speech laws and media corporations protect only white, conservative speakers. She writes: “Jones is not the hill any free speech advocate should want to die on.”

If we do not defend the rights of society’s most deplorable to speak, then soon, none of us will be able to speak.

Alex Jones is a rotten piece of anti-intellectual neofascist filth. He no more loves liberty than Cartwright does control. But if we do not defend the rights of society’s most deplorable to speak out, then soon, none of us will be able to speak out.

Toward the end of my novel, one of Alessandra Burley’s friends asks her, “But you don’t think he [John Cartwright] goes too far?”

Jones’ ban from major social media platforms again raises that question. Do you believe in freedom for the thoughts you hate? Would you place society’s vilest men on the gallows for mere words?