When is it hate speech?

Hate speech is constitutional because the framers took the greatest pains to protect political speech, however unsavory.

As noted before, there is no Nazi or KKK or communist exception in the Constitution. People can say just about whatever they wish when it comes to politics without fear of government reprisal; indeed, government must take steps to protect their ability to say it.

This hardly means that those spewing blatantly racist and anti-semitic speech should be invited to utter such words on college campuses and other public settings. To say that obnoxious speech is protected, and its protection necessary to ensure that the free speech principle is preserved, is not to say that it should be solicited.

But the rub comes in deciding where the expression of legitimate disagreement ends and hate speech designed to demean or intimidate begins—you know it when you hear it doesn’t quite work because it depends upon who is doing the hearing.

This is a crucial point because for many on the contemporary left, the side of the spectrum now most discomfited by an absolutist free-speech position, speech with which they disagree is increasingly considered “offensive,” the first classificatory step toward “hateful.”

Use of the “n-word” is most likely hate speech

(or at least highly offensive, racist speech) but what about criticisms of racial preferences? Or a scholarly article pointing out that many of the claims made by the Black Lives Matter movement regarding police brutality, including that Michael Brown never said “hands up, don’t shoot” in Ferguson, Mo., aren’t true?

Going further, is it acceptable to raise the possibility that hostile relations between black communities and urban police forces might have less to do with the alleged racism of the police than the wildly disproportionate levels of crimes committed in such communities by young black males?

Would such speech be judged “hurtful” or “offensive” to certain “marginalized” groups and thus subject to restriction in certain settings (like college campuses)? If the overriding goal becomes to protect people from speech they disagree with, and if the mere exposure to such speech is viewed as traumatizing, then how can there be any result other than suppression?

More to the point, should the expression of any ideas that challenge in any way the social justice agenda of the left be forbidden?

Such questions are relevant when considering that a central plank of the contemporary left is that conservatism itself is inherently racist, sexist, and homophobic; that advocacy of limited government, market economics, and individual freedom (including freedom of speech and expression) is little more than a ruse designed to uphold a white patriarchy of oppression and “white privilege.”

This is a notion that first germinated in more modest form during the presidency of Barack Obama, when his supporters attributed conservative resistance to his policies to his skin color rather than their liberal nature.

Such accusations were insidious because they smeared the loyal opposition with the brush of racism as a means of delegitimizing the idea of opposition. If some people who opposed Obama were racists, then all who opposed him in some way must somehow prove that they weren’t.

A similar tactic is now being pursued by the proponents of “intersectionality” theory, with its claims that American oppression is built upon a racial/gender hierarchy with white straight Christian males at the top, single gay black women at the bottom, and everyone else somewhere in between based on their race, gender, and sexual preference. And that the value of speech, and thus whether it should or shouldn’t be permitted, hinges solely upon the color and gender of those uttering it; that identity determines truth.

Based on such thinking, traditional conservatives are increasingly branded with the “white supremacist” label simply by virtue of their holding conservative beliefs, and it becomes possible to smear one’s ideological opponents through a mendacious little semantic two-step: if we define conservative ideas as racist and existing for no reason other than to support a system of white supremacy, then speech uttered by conservatives can be conveniently defined as “hate speech” warranting suppression.

For many on the left, speech they disagree with becomes “hate speech” because, in classic totalitarian fashion, ideological opposition has been redefined as “hate.”

Given such assumptions, even to speak in favor of the free-speech principle, and thereby defend the concept of the marketplace of ideas to which it contributes, is to become suspect because complicit.

Such ideas are vastly more inflammatory and divisive than the incoherent rantings of fringe neo-Nazis and KKK types because they seek to undermine the very notion of civil discourse crucial to self-government; they take the “politics” entirely out of politics by denying the legitimacy of different points of view (and equating all but their own with hate).

The give and take of democracy requires that each side extend the benefit of the doubt to the other; to believe that, at a minimum, we all seek the advancement of the great American experiment in freedom and quality, even if by different means.

This can’t happen if one side equates support for limited government and free markets with racism and sexism.