HATE SPEECH—AN AMERICAN TRADITION

One of the things I love about America is hate speech. In many countries, engaging in it will land you in prison, a gulag—or worse. But here in the US, you may be socially ostracized, and more recently sentenced to forced unemployment, but we’re still leagues above many of our despotic world neighbors, some of them Western allies.

Defining “hate speech” is the challenge. To the radical Left, it’s anything they disagree with, that doesn’t conform to the ideology and narrative of the day. And because on the far Left it’s subjective, inconsistent and ever-changing, the followers tend to eat their own with regularity; interestingly, the current Israeli crisis has created a rift in the ranks. Things that used to be common ground on the left and the right, such as the values of meritocracy, color-blindness, and objective sexual identity, are now cause for outrage and charges of racism, microaggression, and exclusion—hence, hate speech. Thus, the rationale for defending it—as tomorrow your views can be the new hate speech. And without disagreement and dissent, there is no discussion, and no seeking the truth, which often lurks somewhere in the middle, in that safe zone between Tyranny and Chaos.

The battle to reclaim this right to speak freely, especially for conservatives in the current climate with radical leftist ideology controlling the halls of power, has resulted in a casualty of the war against evil: the ability to call out and effectively fight it. With this spiritual paralysis, we become at best amoral, and at worst immoral. And the confusion surrounding free speech and hate speech dampens our ability to deal appropriately with the ubiquitous pro-Palestine/pro-Hamas public displays of unity. Where does the extent of freedom of speech end? Even Nazis have been permitted to publicly and peacefully march in support of their demonic beliefs. In the past, the bounds of this freedom were well defined, ending where calls for violence began. This no longer seems to apply. Cries of “kill the Jews” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, ” even when accompanied by actual acts of vandalism and assault have been insufficient to move the authorities to aggressive enforcement with imprisonment, deportation, or defunding, except in the most extraordinary circumstances. They’ve been weak, abdicating responsibility to individual agents, such as the now-awakened ex-benefactors of irresponsible universities that play a big role in the problem, instead resorting to appeasement and naively trying to defuse a situation well beyond the point of a diplomatic solution with “both side-ism,” with ludicrous exhortations of faux moral equivalency between the two sides.

If we can’t deal strongly with hate speech in the circumstances described above, it becomes almost impossible when dealing with less clear-cut circumstances. Take the recent TikTok posting of Osama bin Laden’s treatise on the rationale for 9-11 that triggered multiple online demonstrations of approbation by young people. Yes, they’re ignorant and have been programmed like others on the left to only understand the concept of oppressor vs victim, not of right vs wrong. But what’s to be done? The decision by the Chinese owners to remove the treatise in response to the blow-back seems, at first blush, to be reasonable. But is it? We’re not China, and we used to abhor censorship. And if bin Laden’s words hadn’t been publicized, the problem would have remained under the radar. Posting this written excrement didn’t create the issue, only unmasked it, and taking it down doesn’t solve it.

What about the recent kerfuffle regarding Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) response to the post “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them”? He replied, “You have said the actual truth.” And the subsequent tweet in the thread declaring, “Everyone is allowed to be proud of their race, except for white people, because we’ve been brainwashed into believing that our history was some how ‘worse’ than other races. This false narrative must die,” followed by Musk’s response of “Yeah, this is super messed up. Time for this nonsense to end and shame ANYONE who perpetuates these lies!” This was roundly censured as antisemitism by the Anti-Defamation League. But is this really hate speech? I’m a Jew by birth but not religious practice and consider antisemitism as abhorrent as any form of racism, yet found myself agreeing with what I believe was the intent of Musk’s words: A large segment of the secular Jewish community, as opposed to the orthodox, or practicing Jewish community, has been a strong supporter of most of the far Left’s progressive policies. So “hate speech” is often a byproduct of a lack of clarity or misunderstanding. (Not surprisingly, a formal statement from the CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino, followed, condemning antisemitism and discrimination.)

The bottom line is that there is no free speech without “hate” speech. But ignoring calls for violence to remain without consequence by people who do not share our American values and will never assimilate, especially those who are here either illegally or legally as non-citizens, is foolish and a sure recipe for societal collapse. I hope we’re smarter than that. There are some encouraging signs—i.e., the 300,000 person-strong march against antisemitism in Washington, DC.

It will be a long, hard journey, but good will win out. And that’s something to be truly grateful for this Thanksgiving.

FREE SPEECH VERSUS HATE SPEECH

To the young and uninitiated, as well as the older who have not attained wisdom, legislating against “hate speech” is a no-brainer. I used to believe the same even in the pre-indoctrination/3Rs era of education. It’s easy to cite evil doctrines such as Nazism as justification. It takes a lot more work to understand why a free society should give such odious teachings air to breathe. But it must, to remain free.

The belief that permissible viewpoints can be legislated requires that the believer assume that people, the legislators in particular, are inherently wise and good. It ignores a history that demonstrates ad nauseam that people do good and evil, and that the former does not express itself automatically, but requires constant attention. The carnage of even the last century dramatically illustrates this. Those with good intentions that would give the power to government to decide which views are acceptable precisely to avoid repetition of a bloody past, seem unaware that the relinquishing of individual liberty is what leads to the calamity they seek to prevent.

The idea of legislating speech is a difference of opinion lying at the core of the current division between the Right and the Left. A true conservative will defend the Constitution’s guarantees of the right to speech even for the Nazi, to use the most extreme example, to express his views as long as he is not actively promoting violence, while simultaneously opposing the evil with all the resources at his command. A Leftist will argue that speech alone can be “microaggression,” or even violence, and should be banned.

The danger of the Leftist view, of course, is that any viewpoints that are at odds with the beliefs of those in power will be deemed unacceptable and can be designated as hate speech, as conservatives are now experiencing, and the country becomes a dark shadow of the America our Founders had struggled to birth. We are seeing examples of this in real time, the so-called “cancel culture” being the inevitable endpoint of this way of thinking. An illustration of the downstream effects is the anti-racist movement. Ill-intentioned and well-intentioned people alike find themselves supporting overtly, or tacitly by inaction or ignorance, teachings based on the premise that racism directed against whites is acceptable and even desirable. The doctrines have real-world consequences for those they purport to help. For instance, long-standing social problems such as fatherlessness and sub-par educational choices in black communities to go unresolved or are exacerbated by by ill-conceived policies informed by viewing everything through a hyperbolic racial lens to the exclusion of everything else. The existence of inequity, always present in just and unjust societies, is used to conjure up the specter of predominantly racially-motivated inequality, ignoring the evidence demonstrating that past abuses contributed to but have been largely overshadowed by other, eminently correctable, social issues. “Anti-racists” reach back into a troubling past to paint the changed present as unchanged to foment polarization and resentment, the necessary sparks to kindle the flame of “fundamental change.” It’s always the time-worn siren call to the failed paradigm of socialism. “This time it will be different,” we’re told. The process is always the same, the end result always foreseeable, tragic, and confoundingly unavoidable.

I used to believe, like many still do, “it can’t happen here.” But it is, and those outside our borders, especially those that lived or are living through it, see that clearly. My awakening occurred slowly over 10-15 years, with denial evolving to suspicion, and finally acceptance. We don’t have another decade to wake up, as the transition accelerates. A sharp U-turn, a fracture, or a descent into a darkness the well-intentioned don’t wish to face is coming.

NEWSFLASH FROM THE US OF P: BIDEN-HARRIS WON

This is my first newsflash from the government-controlled United States of Puro Free Press. Sorry for the late report but communications in and out of here are affected by the prevailing winds. The country at my border is a fascinating exercise in democratic evolution; it used to be a lot like mine but now has little in common but a slowly divergent language.

The top leaders, including the president-elect, having successfully defined their country, in contradistinction to my own, as systemically racist based entirely on the notion of outcome inequity, now in similar fashion openly regard their peace officers as racist. It is currently accepted in the higher echelons of power that the police would have acted more brutishly if the insurrectionists/rioters at the Capitol weren’t white, the deaths of several rioters and a policeman (evidently racist) notwithstanding. Both sides roundly and quickly condemned the riot/insurrection, but this is not deemed relevant, any more than both sides condemning the rogue behavior of an individual cop in the George Floyd incident. Nor is the fact that Democrat leaders turned a blind eye to or supported the BLM rioters for weeks to months during the mostly peaceful protests. This was way back in the Time of Trump.

In the new, more progressive US of A, where non-Left speech is microaggression or hate speech and hate speech is violence, corporations can now have their open censorship of noncomplying free speech sanctioned as the only acceptable social behavior. It’s fair to suppress Trump’s speeches on Facebook, ban conservatives (especially Trump) from Twitter, and push impeachment redux. It’s nothing less than a social imperative for Google, Apple and Amazon to cancel the Parler app, where disenfranchised Trump voters fled to escape cancellation. After all, their words and beliefs threaten to undermine democracy; the assault on the Capitol proves this, the rapid and vociferous censure of the riot by the Right notwithstanding. US of A citizens are expected to be more progressive, since any good during the last 4 years is tainted by Trump and must be disregarded and obscured. Biden-Harris has made it clear that national unity is now a priority, as long as it is under the banner of progressivism.

While those of us in the US of P think the words of the new leaders and the actions of the big tech companies are far more dangerous and deserve at least as much attention than the actions of a the contingent of misguided radicals, clearly the majority of our neighbors, the American voters, disagree. In the US of P the irony of the characterization of the outgoing leader as a corrupt liar while a blackout on the disturbing evidence of the president-elect’s compromised state with respect to China is not lost. Be assured, these concerns will be addressed by our ambassador at a future date (when we have an ambassador and a reliable means of communication, as I’m planning to close my Twitter account and there’s no guarantee I can engage on Parler, that reputed hotbed of conspiracy theorists).

Until such time as the serious dissension on our border is alleviated, I’ve decreed that we should erect a wall. Unfortunately, my HOA rules don’t allow it. If necessary, I can be reached by carrier pigeon.

P.S.: Please include #birdpoop in the footer on any communications for security purposes, as my sources tell me I’m being monitored by Russian agents and Google.