Richard Stengel: “Why America needs a hate speech law”

Extremely dangerous idea down the rabbit hole towards annihilation of open society. Reprehensible, but not imminently-dangerous, speech must be allowed because that is, unfortunately, the price (tradeoff) of an open and free society. Otherwise, it becomes a more closed, fascist society with thoughtpolicing and political correctness enforced by law by the fashions of those with power. F that!

There really isn't such a thing as "hate speech", so a law could never be defined.

https://youtu.be/Ea2ntXnCD_M

> That’s partly because the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era.

There's no engineering here.

The Bill of Rights are meant as enumerated inherent ("god-given") rights.

They're not engineered for anything other than codifying the natural rights of people.

His argument invokes the idea of a "marketplace of idea" and "truth" which essentially reduces natural rights to matters of utility, when they're more of a moral declaration that free people can speak.

The problem is that when you establish broad exceptions for anything, they tend to get abused. Hate speech is terrible and I hate it myself, but it could be even worse that someone could legally define or interpret someone’s speech as hate speech. How would judges decide these cases? What burden of proof would prosecutors need? We would need extremely narrow guidelines and even then it likely wouldn’t even cone close to being sufficient. There are already plenty of local laws and ordinances against inciting violence and disturbing the peace; the US therefore does not need “hate speech laws”, whatever that really means.