Hate Speech Is the New Blasphemy
by Don Hall
The modern obsession with defining “hate speech” is the intellectual equivalent of trying to carve the wind into polite shapes. It is a fool’s errand dressed in virtue’s clothing, a bureaucratic crusade for emotional safety that cannot help but become a moral bludgeon. You can trace its ancestry through the long corridors of good intentions—priests burning heretics to save their souls, governments censoring pornography to protect women, tech companies moderating speech to protect everyone—but it always ends in the same place: power deciding which words are permitted to pierce the air. We are told that “hate speech” is not “free speech,” as if that were a revelation and not a hollow tautology. What it really means is that freedom of speech has become conditional upon the comfort of the listener, which means it isn’t freedom at all. Freedom that depends on approval is merely decorum, and decorum is for dinner parties, not democracies.
We’ve reached the absurd moment when the self-proclaimed defenders of tolerance now treat speech itself as a weapon to be confiscated. On college campuses and online platforms, speech is no longer the oxygen of debate but the contamination of purity. Young crusaders, armed with digital pitchforks and moral certainty, patrol the public square to make sure no one uses a word that might bruise another’s identity. They mistake emotional distress for physical harm and then argue that language must be policed with the same zeal we reserve for assault. That’s how you end up with the Orwellian phrase “speech is violence,” as if syllables could bruise a ribcage or knock out a tooth. It’s a perverse redefinition of reality that grants limitless authority to those who claim to be hurt and none to those accused of causing the hurt. In this inverted moral economy, sensitivity trumps reason, and the loudest victim becomes the loudest censor.
The defining of hate speech, we are told, is a noble necessity—a defense against bigotry, a way to shield the vulnerable. But scratch away the PR language and you find something far less noble: the impulse to control. The power to define hate is the power to define heresy, and every generation’s inquisitors have known this instinctively. Once a society begins codifying which ideas are too dangerous to express, it isn’t long before those definitions expand like mold in a damp basement. Today it’s slurs and incitement; tomorrow it’s “problematic jokes” or “harmful stereotypes.” Before long, a dissenting opinion becomes indistinguishable from a hate crime, and everyone starts whispering to avoid the mob’s ears. The chill that runs through the collective spine of a self-censoring population is not progress—it’s paralysis. We are building a nation of tongue-biters.
The Founders of this country, in all their hypocrisy and brilliance, understood something elemental about human nature: the same urge that drives people to speak truth to power drives power to silence truth. The First Amendment was a preemptive strike against that tyranny of moral certainty. It was designed precisely to protect the unpopular, the offensive, the blasphemous. Because once you protect those, everything else is safe. But try explaining that to a generation raised on trigger warnings and algorithmic curation. They’ve been taught that speech is an environment to be managed, not a right to be defended. The internet, which was once the wild bazaar of unfiltered expression, has become a gated community run by tech priests who issue moral decrees in the form of “community guidelines.” They don’t burn books—they throttle bandwidth. They don’t imprison writers—they delete accounts. It’s all very civilized, antiseptic, and in its own way, more sinister than the blunt instruments of old censorship. At least the Inquisition had the honesty of fire.
When Hunter S. Thompson described America as a nation of pimps and thieves drunk on self-delusion, he couldn’t have imagined the current landscape of sanitized outrage, where everyone is both the pimp and the moralist, hustling outrage for likes while pretending to care about justice. The new puritans aren’t burning witches; they’re flagging posts. Their bonfires are viral hashtags. And like all zealots, they believe they’re building a better world while they dismantle the only mechanism that allows one to exist—a world where dissent isn’t just tolerated but cherished. We’ve traded the roar of the crowd for the hum of the algorithm, a new form of thought control so efficient it feels voluntary.
The true test of free speech was your willingness to defend the speech you despise. If you’re not defending the right of your opponents to speak, you don’t believe in free speech at all. But that notion has gone the way of rotary phones and reasoned debate. We now live in the age of “platforming” and “deplatforming,” as if ideas were viruses to be quarantined. What’s most dangerous about this isn’t that some loudmouths lose their Twitter accounts—it’s that we’ve accepted the premise that certain words can’t be heard because they might lead to harm. That premise, once swallowed, digests the entire idea of liberty. It makes us the authors of our own silencing.
Let’s call this what it is: a moral panic in an age of comfort. Hate speech isn’t a category of language; it’s a label for whatever offends the prevailing sensibility of the moment. And sensibilities shift faster than headlines. In the 1990’s, rap lyrics were “hate speech.” In the 2000’s, critiques of religion were “hate speech.” In the 2020’s, misgendering is “hate speech.” The definition expands like a balloon, floating upward until it bursts over everything we once called humor, criticism, or disagreement. The moment you begin legislating feelings, you abandon the realm of rights and enter the carnival of neurosis. A society that can’t distinguish between words and weapons has already surrendered its intellect. It becomes a kindergarten of adults demanding emotional bubble wrap.
The great irony is that hate itself—raw, ugly, irrational hate—doesn’t vanish when you criminalize its expression. It festers underground. It grows teeth in the dark. The suppression of hate speech doesn’t kill hatred; it buries it alive, where it mutates into something worse. People denied the right to speak don’t stop thinking; they stop trusting. They retreat to echo chambers where resentment hardens into ideology. This is how you get radicalization, how you get violence. When you silence a fool, you create a martyr. When you silence a bigot, you grant them the seductive power of the forbidden. Every censorship campaign creates its own villains—and the more you try to control speech, the more alluring rebellion becomes. A banned word gains magic. A forbidden thought becomes a treasure.
The people demanding censorship never seem to grasp that the weapon they forge will one day be aimed at them. Today’s moral majority is tomorrow’s heretical fringe. Every government, corporation, and movement that sets out to define hate eventually finds itself accused of it. Power changes hands, but the machinery of suppression remains. The same laws that once punished anti-gay slurs can later be used to punish pro-gay arguments; the same tech filters that block white supremacists can block black activists. It’s not hypothetical—it’s already happening. Algorithms don’t have context, and bureaucracies don’t have souls. They just enforce whatever rules the last committee scribbled down in panic. This is why defining hate speech is not only futile but dangerous and it creates a permanent pretext for control.
Look around and you’ll see the absurd fruits of this moral engineering: comedians self-editing mid-set, journalists fired for retweets, artists apologizing for the wrong metaphor, ordinary people losing jobs for clumsy jokes. Every apology fuels the machine. Every cancellation validates the premise that words are radioactive. It’s a social economy built on fear, where careers live or die by the interpretation of a tweet. We are teaching an entire culture to fear spontaneity, to pre-digest every sentence like a hostage negotiating for his own ransom. And yet, even in this suffocating climate, the appetite for authenticity remains ravenous. You can hear it in the underground podcasts, the stand-up specials, the whispered conversations at bars. People are starving for the unfiltered, for the dangerous. They miss truth spoken without permission.
The job of an artist—or any honest bastard with a pen—is to speak the unspeakable, to say the thing that scares the shit out of you. That’s the only way culture evolves. The friction of disagreement, the discomfort of hearing what you hate, is how minds sharpen and societies progress. We don’t move forward by muzzling offense; we move forward by confronting it. The whole history of moral progress is offensive speech: abolitionists offending slaveholders, suffragists offending men, civil rights activists offending racists, atheists offending the devout. “Offense” is the tax we pay for enlightenment. To outlaw it is to outlaw growth.
But the bureaucrats of virtue don’t care about growth; they care about optics. They mistake moral performance for moral progress. They believe they can legislate empathy, that compassion can be engineered by deletion. That’s why we get corporate “anti-hate initiatives” written by marketing teams, and HR seminars where employees rehearse the right vocabulary like hostages reading ransom notes. This isn’t compassion; it’s compliance. It’s a secular church of virtue signaling, complete with its own catechisms and inquisitors. Say the right words and you’re absolved; say the wrong ones and you’re damned. The impulse is ancient, only the branding has changed. We used to call it blasphemy. Now we call it hate.
The internet was supposed to democratize speech, but it’s turning into a digital feudalism where lords of code decide who may speak in the kingdom. The platforms pretend to protect users from hate, but what they really protect are advertisers from controversy. The suppression is always justified by safety, but safety is just the new word for obedience. “We’re keeping our community safe” sounds better than “We’re eliminating dissent.” And because we’ve been conditioned to fear discomfort, we let them do it. We hand over our tongues for the illusion of peace. But the only peace that requires silence is the peace of the grave.
There’s a deeper sickness beneath all this, a spiritual cowardice that no policy can cure. We’ve forgotten how to tolerate the unpleasant, how to live among opinions that clash with our own. We’ve become addicts of affirmation, craving the dopamine hit of agreement. And because disagreement feels like withdrawal, we call it hate. That’s the tragedy of this era: we’ve mistaken our fragility for virtue. We call censorship compassion, cowardice empathy, conformity progress. We’re so desperate to be seen as good that we’ve stopped being brave. The cost of that cowardice isn’t just the death of free speech—it’s the death of thought itself. When language becomes dangerous, thinking becomes treasonous.
In the end, defining hate speech is like trying to legislate love songs. The motives may be pure, but the effect is always grotesque. You can’t protect people from words without infantilizing them. You can’t banish malice without banishing passion. The human animal is messy, contradictory, and capable of great cruelty—and that’s precisely why freedom is necessary. It’s not meant for saints; it’s meant for sinners. The measure of a free society isn’t how it treats the polite or the popular, but how it treats the offensive and the damned. When we lose the courage to defend the indefensible, we lose the moral right to call ourselves free.
The only position worth taking is the one you have to defend against the mob. To offend everyone just to prove you’re alive. Freedom is a dangerous bar fight worth having again and again because the alternative is a polite coma. Speech, real speech—the unfiltered, unrehearsed, ugly kind—is the last proof that we’re not yet AI reciting approved scripts. The question isn’t whether hate speech should be allowed; it’s whether we have the spine to live in a world where we might be offended. The answer will determine not just the health of our democracy but the depth of our humanity.
Because here’s the final, unlovely truth: the battle over hate speech isn’t about morality—it’s about control. The people who define what you can’t say eventually define what you must think. They will tell you that silence is kindness, that censorship is justice, that your tongue is a weapon too dangerous for your own use. They will wrap their chains in velvet and call it virtue. And one day you’ll wake up and realize that the only thing you’re still allowed to say freely is how much you agree. That’s not civilization. That’s domestication.
The antidote is brutal and simple: speak anyway. Say the thing they tell you not to. Risk being called hateful, or wrong, or problematic. The health of a society can be measured by how much offense it can stomach without vomiting up its freedoms. The moment you let your fear of being hated dictate your words, you’ve already surrendered the fight. And maybe that’s the real reason we keep trying to define hate speech—because deep down, we’ve grown terrified of each other, terrified of what we might hear, terrified of what we might have to say in return. But courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s the decision to speak through it. The only antidote to hate is more speech—louder, braver, uglier, truer.
So speak. Even if your voice shakes. Especially if it shakes. Because the moment you stop, the silence won’t be peace—it’ll be the sound of the First Amendment gasping its last breath under the weight of our own fragile feelings.
