https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/former-time-editor-wants-hate-speech-laws-thinks-trump-might-violate-them-and-misses-the-irony/
It’s ironic, but it’s not new.
A former Time editor claimed that the United States needs a law banning hate speech, and that President Donald Trump “might be in violation of it” if there were one — because, apparently, he doesn’t notice the irony of holding both of these views at once.
In a Tuesday tweet promoting his Washington Post piece, titled “Why America needs a hate speech law,” Richard Stengel stated:
Richard StengelVerified account @stengel
My @WashingtonPost piece on why the very broadness of the First Amendment suggests we should have a hate speech law. And if we did, why the President might be in violation of it.
In the piece, Stengel writes that “many nations have passed laws to curb the incitement of racial and religious hatred” in the wake of World War II:
These laws started out as protections against the kinds of anti-Semitic bigotry that gave rise to the Holocaust. We call them hate speech laws, but there’s no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is. In general, hate speech is speech that attacks and insults people on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin and sexual orientation.
“I’m all for protecting ‘thought that we hate,’ but not speech that incites hate,” he continues. “It undermines the very values of a fair marketplace of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect.”
It’s interesting how Stengel actually does acknowledge the fact that “there’s no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is,” and yet he still wants laws banning it. This makes absolutely no sense. After all, when he calls for laws to ban “hate speech,” he is, inherently, giving the government the power to decide what would and would not qualify — the exact same government that is led by Donald Trump, and that is full of people who support him.