Hate Speech Defined?

Some on the left have been trying to suppress discourse in various places on the basis of a desire to prevent  what they call hate speech.   Several writers have pointed out that hate speech does not exist as a legal category of expression and is not among  the types of declarations such as shouting “fire” in a theater or inciting a mob to go down the street and murder someone which are not legally protected by the First Amendment.  These observations are true, and attempts to ban or censor statements as hate speech are clearly unconstitutional. Still it is interesting to consider what the term might mean if specifically defined  and thus perhaps to figure out  precisely what  it is these leftists want to ban.

  It could mean  any expression of actual hatred of someone or something, but most people agree there are people  and things such as, say, Soviet Russia, Adolph Hitler, Bin Laden, and slave traders (at least the non-Arab ones) which are deserving of hatred. Besides most of the people carrying on  about hate speech seem quite uninhibited about letting the world  know about all the people and  things they hate. So that can’t  be  what is meant.

It could mean being vulgarly offensive or demeaning to an individual or a group of people as with racial, ethic, religious, or sexual slurs or insults.  But many  anti-hate speech leftists do this all the time to Christians, white men, and traditionally minded married heterosexuals and  especially to blacks, Hispanics, women, Lesbians, and homosexual  men who hold political opinions they dislike. So that can’t be what they want to ban  either.

  It could mean insulting hyperbole as when one might say the secret service people protecting Mrs. Clinton had to worry about a house falling on her from the sky or that Barack Obama could not string two coherent sentences together without his teleprompter. However leftists often see nothing wrong with things such as claiming that George W. Bush was retarded or that Trump is Darth Vader without the deep voice. So that can’t be it. 

It could mean expressing wishes for someone’s suffering or demise as when a person might say the republic would be well served if Chuck Schumer fell in the Potomac and Pelosi drowned while unsuccessfully trying to save him. But again some leftists say this sort of thing all the time about  people such as Trump, Limbaugh, and Bush.  So that too is not the answer.

It could mean simple excessively bad manners and rudeness, but no one who has attentively observed recent activities around the country  since November could see much reason to think  leftists had compunction about that.

One could go on with other imagined possibilities, but the point is clear enough. What the term “hate speech” means, to the extent it means anything, is speech which strongly disagrees with the beliefs or offends the sensibilities of some  leftists. It is a textbook’s example of what the objectivists call an anti-concept and of the sort of language Orwell warned against.  It should be unmasked as such, and efforts by leftists to suppress free discourse and expression should be opposed by all liberally minded people.

There certainly is hateful speech – assertions and opinions which are  irrational, insulting and even disgusting and inhumane. The right way to deal with them is with rational disputation, refutation, and  appropriate ridicule. This  is the same medicine we should dispense to the hate speech crowd.   Then remind them it’s a free country and tell them to go to hell.