Hate Speech is an Authoritarian Religious Concept

"Hate Speech" is a claim that some topics/claims are off-limits, that someone ELSE gets to decide what's off-limit and that you are irredeemably "bad" if you try to apply facts, logic and persuasion. Yes, "hate speech" is the modern secular authoritarian version of "blasphemy" or "sacrilege."

I was provoked to write the above after reading the thoughtful post below by Greg Lukianoff, who was provoked by reading this text messages between Tyler Robinson, the accused Charlie Kirk assassin, and his roommate and romantic partner, per prosecutors:

Lukianoff:

This is going to be a Rorschach test for a lot of people. What I see when I look at this is the harm of a quasi-mystical idea of “hate” as a spectral, even demonic, force. It’s a superstition that allows you to turn off your critical faculties, ignore anything that might contradict a sacred belief on a particular topic or about a particular individual — as in this case — and act with impunity.

It has always been a profoundly anti-intellectual idea, developed by those who saw intellectuals as mere tools for often extremely simplistic partisan ends to allow them to win arguments by brute force rather than logic and proof.

It has spread into the rest of society and across the globe in a way that allows taboo to defeat reason and skepticism almost every time.

I hope it’s an idea — like “speech is violence” — that we can relegate to the dustbin of history. If you believe the world is divided into a simplistic binary of “good people” and those infected with hate, then maybe the post-Enlightenment world is not for you.

And for those of us who believe that human morality and nature is more complex and less flattering than the sacred warriors in this battle, it's time to remember that Enlightenment values are not easy. But they are absolutely worth fighting for because the world without them is a place that lets you excuse the most monstrous behavior and never lose your sense of moral superiority.

That's the trap of the binary.

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Batya Ungar-Sargon: The Political Left Intentionally Cultivate Real Life Violence

Batya Ungar-Sargon makes a strong case that the violent killing of Charlie Kirk is not a "both sides" issue:

I'm finding myself very caught between, on the one hand, wanting to honor his legacy of unity through debate and coming together to take down the temperature, and then wanting to honor his legacy of telling the truth. And the truth is this is not a both sides issue. The killer killed him, according to police reports, because he found Charlie Kirk to be spreading hate. This is a view shared by every single prominent Democrat.

Yes, there are people on blue sky advocating for violence, but what actually caused this was the utterly quotidian, utterly ubiquitous demonization of the political opposition from the left, and it has just led to violence because they said the other side were Hitler and Nazis. They said that speech is violence. To combine those two things together is to sign the death warrant of prominent conservatives, and that is what we are seeing again and again and again.

And it is utterly facetious to suggest that there is any comparison between political violence on both sides. Every example they bring is not actually showing that, whether it's Governor Shapiro whose attempted assassination was from a free, Palestine leftist, or whether it was the Minnesota assassinations, which were from somebody who said he was operating at the behest of Democrat Governor Tim Walz. There is a culture among Democrats at the highest level to suggest that their political opposition are a danger, and that suggests that their lives are forfeit.

And I want to come together. I do. I love what Shanks said. It brought tears to my eyes. I reached for a tissue while you were playing Charlie's words. But at the same time, we cannot unite with people who are lying to our faces about who we are, who will not take responsibility for the fact that they suggested that we are Nazis because of totally legitimate views that reflect the majority of Americans.

So what I say is, let the left say we were wrong. It is legitimate to vote for Donald Trump. It is legitimate to be pro life. It is legitimate to believe that there are only two genders, and we were wrong to suggest that that was not the case. We were wrong to say that that is hateful. When they say that, I am waiting with open arms to take down the temperature.

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Our Class Problem. The Populism Problem of the Super-Rich

Ed Dowd, former BlackRock fund manager.

"What [the U.S. has] is a class problem... 1% of the population of the globe owns 50% of the global wealth... this is... why you're seeing the rise of division. Because the way you control the many is you make the many hate each other."

"What we have in this country is a class problem. We have, you know, 1% of global wealth is the 1% of the population of the globe owns 50% of the global wealth. So this is a class issue. It's been going on for a long time, since the great financial crisis and since 2000. And we have, And this is not just a US Problem. This is a global problem.

"And when we get to these types of situations they're cured one of two ways. The elites pay an existential price and or the system collapses and they're forced to share the wealth again. So this is how it's done.

"I'm not suggesting it's imminent, but this is why you're seeing the rise of populism, and this is also why you're seeing the rise of division. Because, the way you control the many is you make the many hate each other. You make the pitchfork guy look at the torch guy and say, hey, the torch guys are trying to take our pitchforks. And that's what's going on today. We got all this finger pointing. This is a class issue. It's not a black, white, Hispanic, left, right, Muslim. This is a class issue."

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The Words that Cultivate Free Speech

Samual Abrams:

“It’s a free country” signals that disagreement is permissible. “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion” acknowledges dignity in dissent. “Sticks and stones” reminds us to meet speech with speech, not violence or censorship. Without such reminders, the civic muscle memory that protects a free society begins to atrophy. That last idiom in the table — “Address the argument, not the person” — may be the most telling of all. Only 30% of Americans even recognize it, and barely 1 in 10 say it often.

This absence shows up everywhere: in the pile-ons of cancel culture, the readiness to attack a person’s character rather than engage their reasoning and in why viewpoint diversity is so hard to come by on many college campuses. If you never learn the habit of separating people from their ideas, disagreement becomes personal and dissenters become enemies to be silenced.

And in their place? New slogans, often adversarial and absolutist. We hear “words are violence” or “speech is harm” far more than “defend to the death your right to say it.” The FIRE/NORC survey found that a quarter of Americans now say the “words are violence” framing describes their own view “mostly” or “completely.”

Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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