Update (10/16/23): The Illinois man who fatally stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy had reportedly been worried about the “day of jihad” and had “been listening to conservative talk radio about the Israel-Hamas war and became increasingly concerned about his Muslim tenants.”
Right-wing media spent days fearmongering about potential mass violence happening on Friday after a former Hamas political leader was reportedly mistranslated as advocating for a “day of jihad.” Despite a lack of evidence of a related threat to the United States, some called for increased surveillance and others gave advice on how to best avoid an attack.
Every democracy that I can think of has laws against hate speech, including all of the ones that score higher on the freedom index than the US. Outlawing hate speech increases freedom. All of the questions about who gets to define what constitutes hate speech and where to draw the line have already been answered. Different countries have arrived at different answers, but the US clinging to the right to continuously blast hate and weaponize far-right ideologies into terrorist attacks in the name of “liberty” is idiotic. A Nazi group marching down Main Street chanting about how they want to kill the Jews doesn’t make society more free. It terrorizes society. It makes it less free.
And in any case the US regulates the crap out of speech. Theres no lack of regulation as to what constitutes legal and illegal speech. There’s laws against libel and slander. Many on the far right - including Donald Trump have both taken very liberal advantage of those laws and have called for them to be made stronger. They are the ones calling the press the enemy of the people. We also have laws against making false statements, against deceptive advertising, against counterfeiting, against passing bad checks. We have laws against verbal assault. We have laws against making terroristic threats. We pass those laws because speech can and does produce harm. If you falsely and maliciously accuse someone of rape, if you write a bad check and defraud someone out of their car, if you call in a bomb threat, you are causing harm with speech.
250-odd years ago, they were still figuring that shit out. We’ve had a couple of centuries since then to better understand democracy and political dynamics.
Somehow, it’s only hate speech that people want to hold up as the linchpin of liberty. Hate speech decreases freedom because it increases fear and because it empowers the enemies of freedom. It is the paradox of tolerance. No country is perfect and everyone is dealing with a bizarrely well funded and strangely internationalist far right, but at least hate speech laws offer the opportunity for at least some level of control.
We put the power in the hands of the government to criminalize, well, basically everything we consider criminal, including speech.