some old white racists got fuckin owned by visa and why that's a good thing

Strossen draws attention to the fact that prohibitions of “hate speech” are characterized by unavoidable vagueness and overbreadth. A law is “unduly vague” (and unconstitutional) when people “of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning.” “Hate speech” laws are inherently subjective and ambiguous in their language, with the use of words like “insulting,” “abusive,” and “outrageous.” Specific to laws about speech, vagueness “inevitably deters people from engaging in constitutionally protected speech” (69).

One person’s “hate speech” is another’s anti-“hate speech.” Strossen cites many examples in which certain religious views are assailed as “hate speech” against LGBT individuals, while critiques of those religious views are attacked as anti-religious “hate speech.”

This issue is also prevalent on campus, exemplified by a situation at Harvard University in which a group of students hung a confederate flag from their dorm room. In response, other students hung swastikas from their windows.

Strossen notes the irony of the situation:

Deciding what should count as “hate speech” leaves room for decision-makers to err or disagree about whether an expression constitutes “hate speech.” This arbitrariness of these laws on campus means that “…all members of the campus community face enforcement that is unpredictable and inconsistent at best, and arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory at worst” (77).

Moreover, “given the pervasiveness of individual and institutional bias,” the government is likely to enforce “hate speech” laws, as it has other laws, to the disadvantage of the disempowered and those with unpopular ideas. David Cole, ACLU legal director reiterates this point:

Strossen observes this phenomenon even in countries with established democratic governments. Take Canada, for example, which is more willing to restrict certain forms of speech than the United States. The Canadian Supreme Court explains the word “hatred,” (as used in their laws) as “unusually strong and deep-felt emotions of detestation, calumny and vilification”; and “enmity and extreme ill-will … which goes beyond mere disdain or dislike.” How confident would you be in distinguishing between speech that conveys “disdain,” which not punishable, and speech that conveys “detestation” or “vilification,” which is punishable? The consequence of this innate vagueness and overbreadth is illustrated in the following case:

Canadian customs seized copies of a book being imported from the United States because it was dangerous, racist and sexist. The book was Black Looks: Race and Representation by bell hooks, African-American feminist scholar who was then a professor at Oberlin College. hooks describes the impact of this decision in “Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations”:

Thus, “hate speech” laws are enforced against the certain groups they try to protect. We must resist solutions that embrace censorship, as hate speech laws fall hardest on those they aim to protect. Instead, we should favor the liberal solution, more speech:

what counts as "hostility" in, say, a rough neighborhood in LA is vastly different than what counts as "hostility" at Oxford. clearly, the term is open for interpretation in a very broad way.

these terms are along the same lines of vagueness as terms like "personal attacks", "insults", "being mean", and so on. the CT threads I posted recently (one about the vagueness of terms like "being nice", one about the vaguenss of terms like "insult") show that this isn't immediately obvious to everyone, nor is it self-evident. there's widespread disagreement about what these things mean.

using the term again doesn't make "hate group" less meaningless. it just means you're rolling with a term that hasn't been defined well. "well, like I said, bad people shouldn't get money" where "bad people" = whatever you want.