Yesterday day I heard
a politician from my state (Jeff Merkley) call a free speech pro-Trump rally a
hate rally. Needless to say my blood boiled at how clueless this man who
represents my state truly is. Calling a rally for free speech a hate rally just
lays bare the truth of his intentions. Yet he carried on with this statement,
despite several claims by the organizer that he wanted a peaceful rally and
publicly stated that white supremacists, Nazi’s and KKK were not welcome at the
rally. As well as rejecting the man accused of murdering two men on the MAX
train from his previous event. It would seem that this rally for free speech
was anything but hateful. Yet Merkley still called it a hate rally while our
other senator (Ron Wyden) from my state (Oregon) was on the news saying
“You have to take hate
speech off the table.”
To hear both Senators
from my state speak in such a way I thought I should look into what hate speech
is. Dictionary.com defines hate speech as “speech
that attacks,
threatens, or
insults a person or group on the basis of national origin, ethnicity, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability.” Sounds reasonable, right? Who would
want any of this to happen? Real life is not a simple dictionary definition. As
seen from Senators Merkley and Wyden, what is considered hate speech can have a
wider range of interpretations. If a pro-Trump free speech rally can be
labelled as a hate rally, then what is to stop someone from labeling a feminist
rally as a hate rally? They clearly stand against the patriarchy and talk about
toxic masculinity. Is that not speech that attacks, threatens or insults
someone based on gender? Will black lives matter be considered at hate group
under this definition? With signs that say fuck white people and saying that
all white people are racist, is that not speech that attacks, threatens, or
insults a group based on color or ethnicity? The only thing that you’ll get out
of hate speech is censorship from people in positions of power.
Hate speech in its own
right is a problem but when you combine it with the idea being pushed on
college campuses of intersectionality that is when you have a recipe for
disaster. Dictionary.com defines intersectionality as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class,
and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating
overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.” You
often hear people while talking about intersectionality saying that everything
is racist and everything is sexist you just have to look for it. It is from
this same idea that we get the ‘logic’ that white males are privileged and
everyone else is oppressed. So if you are white and female you are oppressed by
white males, but if you are black and female you are doubly oppressed simply
because of the color of your skin and the type of genitals you have.
When
you combine hate speech and intersectionality you have a system that says
everything is racist/sexist/etc and falls under the category of hate speech and
should be removed from the conversation. This is also why the Progressives want
to change the definition of racism to Power + Privilege making it ‘impossible’
for people of color to be racist. To add it all up if white men have both power
and privilege, then they are racist consciously or unconsciously and so
everything they say or do it a form of hate speech since they are inherently
racist. So white men need to shut up and let everyone else talk, which if you think
about it, if white people (and white men in particular) are inherently racist,
would it not be the moral thing to do to place them into camps so their racism
won’t hurt anyone. In fact to completely eradicate racism you’d have to
eradicate white men altogether, they are inherently racist after all and can
never be changed. I don’t think it will go that far but the leap is not as far
as it used to be (removes tin foil hat).
These
ideas put up by Ron Wyden and and Jeff Merkley remind me of a quote by C.S.
Lewis, “Of all
tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the
most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under
omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep,
his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our
own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their
own conscience.” Do not be drawn
in by the seemingly innocuous idea of hate speech, instead question everything
and refuse to let those pushing this idea define and dictate the words you use.
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