This post went up a little while ago, but preoccupations in real life caused me to miss it. I go into some of the problems I see with the whole ‘hate speech’ concept (there’s a lot more to be said, regarding speech laws and freedom of speech and all that, but I decided to focus on this one aspect for now. I might do a follow-up essay later):

Another key problem may be illustrated merely by noting that there is a particular demographic that receives an enormous amount of hatred and vitriolic language directed against it, that historically has been a frequent victim of violence both large scale and individual, and yet which no one, to my knowledge, has ever suggested protecting under hate speech laws. Of course I’m speaking of the Rich.

The issue isn’t that we much protect the Rich. The issue is that the hate speech concept explicitly only applies to those certain forms of hatred, which its advocates, for reasons best known to themselves, have fixated on. Thus, it is not vitriol or inciting speech as such that they object to, but only speech that targets their particular values.

I bring up the case of the Rich to demonstrate that this uneven application is inherent in the very definition that its adherents give to hate speech. Any fair and even application of such a concept would have to include economic status, social position, and political beliefs among protected categories.

This would, of course, exacerbate the inherently contradictory nature of the idea to the level of insanity, while effectively rendering all discourse illegal. Hatred can be felt and expressed along any line of human experience, meaning that, assuming an even application of this principle, every topic imaginable would be a potential source of hate speech, and since the qualification of ‘attack’ is not given, any speech that one person happens to find offensive or difficult or painful could be regarded as such an attack.

Under such a situation, it would of necessity be left to the judge or the lawyers to decide in each individual case, meaning that a hate speech law, by its nature, calls for the censoring of speech at the discretion of a particular official. Again, this not only permits, but demands the imposition of a particular worldview, not by any official act, but by the arbitrary rule of particular judges.  

Note that all this is so even while merely considering the given definition in the abstract and assuming a relatively fair and even application, which nothing in recent history should lead us to expect.

Read the rest here.