"44 percent [of U.S. college students] — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students — 51 percent — think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20 percent also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking."
Well, f* you millennials, I suppose ?
Why do you think the First Amendment is necessary? Because criminalizing speech has always been popular, as long as it's Bad Speech.
(I say this as someone who strenuously agrees with the NYT article overall).
This sort of flamebait amounts to trolling. Would you please not vandalize HN threads like this?
We've already had to ask you to post civilly and substantively or not at all. Eventually, throwing Molotov cocktails (or peeing in the swimming pool, or whatever this is) will get you banned on HN.
edit: clarity
Most speakers being "no-platformed" on American campuses these days absolutely do not "encourage violence towards specific groups of people".
It seems sufficient that they challenge prevailing viewpoints to be shouted down.
There's this totalitarian attempt at labelling any disagreement as "micro-aggressive", to equate it to hate speech that must be suppressed. But none of that remotely reaches the threshold for legally defined hate speech in most countries. It's even usually completely orthogonal to that scale.
updating for the angry: hate speech, as in "fighting words," which is to say language used to incite violence towards a specific person.
When college students say that it's appropriate to use violence to stop speech, they mean to stop Charles Murray, not Charles Manson.
"A huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.” —regarding his book, Losing Ground, quoted in “Daring Research or Social Science Pornography?: Charles Murray,” The New York Times Magazine, 1994
“The professional consensus is that the United States has experienced dysgenic pressures throughout either most of the century (the optimists) or all of the century (the pessimists). Women of all races and ethnic groups follow this pattern in similar fashion. There is some evidence that blacks and Latinos are experiencing even more severe dysgenic pressures than whites, which could lead to further divergence between whites and other groups in future generations.” —The Bell Curve, 1994
Unpopular speech is not unprotected speech. In fact, it's the only speech where protection means anything.
--- Fighting Words and True Threats
So-called “fighting words” also lay beyond the pale of First Amendment protection.19 The “fighting words” doctrine began in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, where the Court held that fighting words, by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace and may be punished consistent with the First Amendment.20 In Chaplinsky, the Court upheld a statute which prohibited a person from addressing “any offensive, derisive or annoying word to any other person who is lawfully in any street or other public place,” calling “him by any offensive or derisive name,” or making “any noise or exclamation in his presence and hearing with the intent to deride, offend or annoy him, or to prevent him from pursuing his lawful business or occupation.”21 The state court construed the statute as forbidding only those expressions that “have a direct tendency to cause acts of violence by the person to whom, individually, the remark [was] addressed.”22 Given the limited scope of application, the Supreme Court held that the statute at issue did not proscribe protected expression.23 ---
Most hate speech falls under this category. For instance, advocation of the murder of a large group of people would obviously be unprotected hate speech.
It really isn’t. Every day there are thousands of people in this country that say something to the effect of, “We should nuke the entire Middle East and turn it into glass”.
That is not a crime. You may find that idea repugnant, but it’s not “fighting words”.
Where did you think this was going to get you? Did you think people wouldn't click through to read it?