Let's discuss the concept of hate speech and the practical implications of bringing charges against it.
I first got into this subject in the ugly days right after Charlie Kirk was murdered, when the online reaction split into two camps: people mourning a man who'd been shot for the crime of talking, and a smaller, gleefully vicious chorus treating his death as a punchline. I made the point then, and I'll make it again now that the midterms are bearing down on us and every side is dusting off its favorite conversation-ending weapon: "Hate speech" is what people call an argument when they can't beat it.
When logic fails, evidence fails, persuasion fails, and the uncomfortable possibility of being wrong starts looming over the room, there's always another option: slap a moral scarlet letter on the other guy and declare the discussion over. It's a remarkably efficient debating technique. You don't have to prove him wrong. You don't have to produce evidence. You don't even have to understand what he said. Just call it "hate." Congratulations — you've won the argument you refused to have.
Except, you haven't. You've surrendered, and you've asked everyone watching to applaud the white flag as though it were a trophy.
Start with something remarkably few people who fling the term around seem to understand: "Hate speech" is not a legal category in the United States. It never has been. It's not tucked into some overlooked appendix of the U.S. Code, and no, your congressman didn't quietly vote it into existence while you weren't paying attention. As First Amendment scholar Nadine Strossen has explained, the phrase isn't a legal term of art with a tidy statutory definition — it's a label used to stigmatize and suppress a wide range of expression, deployed with all the precision of a blindfolded toddler swinging a bat at a piñata.
The Supreme Court has been emphatic about this, repeatedly, to the point that you'd think the message would've sunk in by now. In Matal v. Tam (2017), the Court unanimously — unanimously, a word that gets used so rarely about that bench it should come with confetti — rejected the government's attempt to discriminate against offensive expression in trademark registration. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the "proudest boast" of American free-speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express "the thought that we hate." Not the thought we tolerate. Not the thought we find mildly cringe. The thought we hate.
Then there's Snyder v. Phelps (2011), where the Court protected the Westboro Baptist Church's revolting funeral-picketing signs, 8-1 — a group so universally loathed that "protecting their speech" is basically the free-speech equivalent of eating your vegetables. And if that isn't uncomfortable enough for you, consider the Nazis: In 1977, courts protected their right to march through Skokie, Ill., a community full of Holocaust survivors. If "hate speech" were some magic exception written into the First Amendment in invisible ink, actual, literal, swastika-wearing Nazis would have been exhibit A. They weren't. Because the amendment doesn't exist to protect speech everyone likes — everyone likes plenty of speech already, and it needs no protecting. It exists precisely because handing government the power to decide which ideas are too hateful to hear is an engraved invitation to abuse that power, cashed by whichever party happens to be holding it at the time. A definition of free speech that evaporates the moment somebody gets their feelings bruised isn't free speech. It's permission, revocable at the pleasure of whoever's currently in charge of feeling offended on your behalf.
And that's the tell, every single time. When somebody needs the government, a university administrator, a corporation's HR department, or a sufficiently online mob to physically shut the other guy up because he simply will not stop making his argument, they've already told you the one thing they didn't mean to admit out loud: they don't think they can beat him.
Watch the label in action, because it never stays put for long. Take J.K. Rowling — whatever you think of her views on biological sex, she made actual, challengeable claims about words, biology, and single-sex spaces, the sort of thing you'd think grown adults could argue about with footnotes instead of pitchforks. Instead of a rebuttal, 58 prominent British artists and writers signed a letter in the Sunday Times condemning what they called the "hate speech" directed at her. So one side calls Rowling's position hate speech, and the other side calls the denunciation of Rowling hate speech — at which point the word has become so elastic that everybody's using it as a blunt instrument against everybody else, and it has stopped meaning anything at all except "I am currently mad at you."
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Scotland took it further, because Scotland always takes it further. Its Hate Crime and Public Order Act criminalized "stirring up hatred," a phrase with all the legal precision of a horoscope, and Rowling responded by publicly daring authorities to arrest her over statements about biological sex. They didn't. And even Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said people shouldn't be criminalized for stating common-sense facts about biology, which is a genuinely low bar for a head of government to have to clear in public. That's where the concept eats itself alive: Once you've handed the government the job of deciding whether a biology statement qualifies as criminal hatred, you've handed bureaucrats a question with no objective answer and a badge to enforce their guess. What's the test? Where's the line? Who draws it, and what happens the next election cycle when the people drawing it change? That's not a minor technical hiccup to sort out in committee. That's the whole rotten foundation.
And before anyone on my side gets too comfortable settling into the recliner — this isn't a left-wing affliction. It's a human one, and humans on every team reach for it the second they're losing.
This year, Attorney General Pam Bondi invoked "hate speech" against people mocking Charlie Kirk's death online, and free-speech advocates pushed back — including the conservative-leaning Maine Policy Institute, which correctly noted there is no such unprotected legal category, full stop, regardless of who's asking. Good. They should push back. Because if conservatives object to government suppressing speech it finds offensive under a Democratic administration, they had better object with equal volume when a Republican administration reaches for the exact same lever. At the same time, I should note in fairness that Bondi's approach was about calling out the left when they do it, which our supposed mainstream press has been unwilling to do.
The First Amendment doesn't come with a partisan exemption card you flash at the door depending on who's in the Oval Office. The temptation to reach for "hate speech" instead of a counterargument isn't ideological. It's what people do — any people, any party — when they'd rather end a conversation than win it, and midterm season is about to make that particular temptation nearly irresistible on every channel you own.
American law already draws the real distinction, and it's worth noticing how much heavier lifting the actual categories require. Speech that can lose First Amendment protection — true threats, incitement of imminent lawless action, defamation, obscenity — all have elements. A threat has to be a threat, with the specificity to prove it. Incitement has to meet a defined legal standard, not just "he said something I found alarming." Defamation requires falsity and a list of other conditions a lawyer actually has to prove in front of a judge. These require facts, evidence, standards, proof — homework, in other words. "Hate speech" requires none of that, which is precisely why it's the weapon of choice for people who'd rather skip the homework entirely: there's no agreed threshold, no calibrated hate-o-meter sitting in some federal lab, no courtroom machine that flashes HATE DETECTED the instant somebody's feelings have been sufficiently bruised. There's only the accusation — and apparently you're supposed to shut up now, no receipts required.
That's not an argument. It's a demand for surrender dressed up in a blazer. Real arguments are expensive — they require defined terms, evidence, answered objections, survived cross-examination, and the humiliating possibility that you might actually be wrong in front of people. "Hate speech" is wonderfully, insultingly cheap by comparison: You don't demonstrate falsity, you don't identify the logical error, you don't produce a shred of contradictory evidence. You just declare the proposition morally contaminated, and now anyone still asking follow-up questions gets to be contaminated right alongside it, guilt by association with basic curiosity.
Which brings us to the simplest test of all, and the one worth bringing to every dinner table, comment section, and campaign ad between now and November. Next time somebody calls something "hate speech," don't take the bait and argue about whether it's hateful — that's their turf, and you'll lose by definition because there's no scoreboard. Ask the far more inconvenient question instead: What, specifically, is false about what he said? Ask for — no, DEMAND — the evidence. Ask which premise fails. Then just watch. If they answer, congratulations, you've got yourself an actual debate, a rare and endangered species this time of year. If they just repeat "hate," "bigot," "racist," "extremist," or whichever label happens to be fashionable that particular afternoon, you've learned something considerably more useful than anything they intended to teach you — they were never rebutting the argument at all. They were trying to make it too radioactive to touch, so nobody has to actually answer it.
That's not victory. It's not persuasion. It's a conversation-ending tantrum posing as moral authority, thrown by people who've apparently confused volume for evidence. And the accusation gives away the game every single time: When "hate speech" is the strongest argument you've got against the words, you've already told everyone, in writing, exactly how weak your argument is. You just put a fancier label on the concession — and dressed the surrender nicely enough that half the room mistakes it for a win.
The left has gotten a lot of miles out of the argument of "anti-intellectualism," but after decades of watching this stuff, I submit that the usual leaning on the charge of "hate speech' is about as anti-intellectual a ploy as I can think of.
