The Danger of ‘Hate Speech’ Laws is Exposed

I have argued that freedom of speech is absolute.* This absolutism forbids hate speech laws, which fortunately America doesn’t [yet] have. Freedom of expression means simply the right to express oneself, regardless of what is being expressed—hateful or not, controversial or not, offensive or not. (I also oppose so-called “hate crime” laws, as explained in my Objective Standard article Hate Crime” Laws are Gateways for Censorship and Statism.)

Another reason is that “hate speech” is a vague term. It is objectively undefinable, which means laws banning hate speech are of necessity arbitrary and non-objective; meaning, the banned “hate” speech is whatever those framing the law say it is.

A good example of how this process works in practice is highlighted by an incident at Stanford University. As John Daniel Davidson reports for The Federalist in The Left Is Conditioning College Students To Hate Free Speech:

[I]n January, . . . a trio of students, Araceli Alicia Garcia, Mayahuel Victoria Ramírez, and Jessica Reynoso, print[ed] out 200 yellow fliers bearing the hotline number and post[ed] them throughout the dormitory. The fliers read, “Protect our community, report ICE activity.”

In response, another student, Isaac Kipust, decided to satirize the fliers and posted his own, which read: “Protect our community, report legitimate law enforcement activity! Call to receive immediate support if you see law enforcement authorities doing their job. Beloved community criminals deserve protection from Trump’s tyranny.”

The fliers were promptly taken down by order of the university. In an op-ed for the student newspaper, Kipust described his meeting with several school officials—including an associate dean of students who’s in charge of Stanford’s policies on “acts of intolerance”—along with Garcia, Ramírez, and Reynoso:

According to them, my flyers were ‘hate speech’ and hence inappropriate for the Kimball community. Because they apparently mocked a flyer protecting an identity group, they constituted an act of intolerance. Most egregiously, because of their effect on the three crying students at the table, I was not permitted to repost my flyers.

Stanford faced harsh rebuttal, and reversed its decision. But that is beside the point. What if the university administrators were government officials?

As a private institution, Stanford has every right to allow or disallow whatever speech it wants, including political speech (stupid as that would be, especially considering Stanford is an educational institution). The point here is not to challenge that right. The point is to highlight the problem of defining just what constitutes hate speech, and thus the danger of any attempt to legally ban hate speech.

Hate speech laws are bad enough if they are narrowly construed to refer only to overt bigotry (bigoted speech is still freedom of speech, and thus protected speech). But as we can see in the Stanford episode, the definition of hate speech can easily escape these narrow bounds of to encompass differences of political opinion.

To repeat, what if these were government officials? One may plausibly argue that government officials would not be able to get away with the ban, either. Well, perhaps not today. But what about tomorrow or next year or in 2030?

When we accept the proposition that certain forms of intellectual expression constitute hate speech and should be banned, even if the expression is objectively hateful, then we’ll eventually elect politicians who would pass laws legally formalizing the ban. When we do that, we will put government officials in charge of determining what constitutes acceptable vs. unacceptable forms of expression—that is, ideas. We will have handed some future authoritarian regime the main tool it needs to silence dissent, jail its political enemies, and consolidate its power. Once we go down that road of hate speech laws (no matter how “well intended”), we start down the road to censorship and an end to the only guardian of a free society—freedom of speech.

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* Properly understood: See Tara Smith, THE FREE SPEECH VERNACULAR:
CONCEPTUAL CONFUSIONS IN THE WAY WE SPEAK ABOUT SPEECH, particularly Part I. “ABSOLUTE” AND “EXCEPTIONS”, page 60.

Related Reading:

How to Overcome Bigotry in a Free Society

Budding Grassroots Campaign Against ‘Hate Speech’ is shallow, childish . . . and Dangerous

Cohen: Hate-Crime Laws are "Totalitarian Nonsense"

Free Speech, not Self-Censorship, is the Answer to 'Offensive' Free Speech [UPDATED]

J.K. Rowling Laudably Defends Free Speech On Principle

Protecting Rights vs. Sanctioning Action

John Farmer's Understanding of Free Speech Rights as Non-Absolute is Dangerous and Wrong