Former Obama administration official Richard Stengel has not given as much thought to the idea of implementing a “hate speech” law in the United States as the radical notion deserves.
It is clear from reading his Washington Post op-ed this week, titled “Why America needs a hate speech law,” that his guiding light is the prevention of a repeat of the 2016 presidential election. All other considerations, including that the restrictions he endorses would hand more power to the people who inspired his op-ed in the first place, go ignored.
“[A]s a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier,” Stengel’s op-ed begins. “Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?”
He adds, “It’s a fair question. Yes, the First Amendment protects the ‘thought that we hate,’ but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw.”
I would like to point out here that he is not marveling at supposedly bold or progressive positions against “hate speech.” Stengel, a former undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs for the U.S. State Department, is impressed by anti-blasphemy laws. That he is using religious totalitarianism as the backdrop for a broader argument against the U.S. embrace of free speech should give you pause. That Stengel is also a former editor for Time magazine and is currently a contributor for MSNBC should have you at least a little worried about the current state of the commentariat.
To make a long story short, one of the reasons Stengel is on an anti-“hate speech” kick in the first place is that he believes the First Amendment enabled Russia to manipulate American voters with fake news in 2016, allowing for a bad man to take the Oval Office.
“On the Internet, truth is not optimized,” Stengel writes, adding that “the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era.”
There is another reason why the U.S. ought to consider “hate speech” law, Stengel argues: Homegrown terrorists.
“Domestic terrorists such as Dylann Roof and Omar Mateen and the El Paso shooter were consumers of hate speech. Speech doesn’t pull the trigger, but does anyone seriously doubt that such hateful speech creates a climate where such acts are more likely?” Stengel asks, apparently forgetting all about the Arab countries with strict anti-blasphemy laws that he praised just moments earlier.
He then asks: “Why shouldn’t the states experiment with their own version of hate speech statutes to penalize speech that deliberately insults people based on religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation?”
The answer seems simple enough: Because there is no guarantee that the people tasked with regulating speech will not also use these new restrictions to suppress select targets. Congratulations, Stengel. You just took the thing you oppose out of the hands of private individuals and put it into the state’s.
Who guards the guards? What recourse would a private citizen have to speak out against abuses of a “hate speech” law if the state is the one doing the abusing? The alternative — that all be allowed to debate openly and freely even if it means bad faith operatives are allowed to participate as well — seems a far preferable scenario to Stengel’s proposal that nameless bureaucrats wield the power to decide what types of speech are allowed. That Stengel no longer trusts private citizens to make informed decisions, but still trusts the officials they put in office to make them, says a lot more about him than I think he realizes. That and the fact that he is saying all of this only now after the defeat of a Democratic candidate in the 2016 presidential election.
“All speech is not equal,” his Washington Post op-ed concludes. “And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting ‘thought that we hate,’ but not speech that incites hate. It undermines the very values of a fair marketplace of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect.”
As is always the case with activists who would dismiss basic human rights in the name of getting at a perceived evil, I am reminded of the following lines from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons:
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
I appreciate Stengel’s passion and his desire to protect against racial bigotry and other forms of intolerance. But were he to get his wish, and there be stricter regulations applied to the very thing that allows him to voice his concerns so freely in a national newspaper, he will soon find the supposed cure is worse than the ailment.
