Liberty: Going Going Gone!

By Michael Rozeff

American politicians are fond of rallying Americans around Great Britain as an ally and a prime exponent of freedom and the free world. More and more, the “free” part is a lie.

Laws against hate speech in England and Wales deny free speech. They attempt to delete free speech. Hate speech is criminal in England.

If a person says or writes the words “I hate England” or “I hate the prime minister” or “I hate England’s participation in the Syrian War” or “I hate immigrants” or “I hate you” or “I hate Protestants” or perhaps even “I hate tigers”, they risk being arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to prison for as long as 7 years.

Expressing hatred is a moral bad in some systems of morality. It’s a social bad in some systems. It does not follow that a society should turn it into a crime. That’s the same kind of step as when the possessors of legal force use that force to stamp out a practice, like drinking alcohol, smoking, homosexuality, swearing or smoking marijuana. The government force turns non-criminal acts of citizens into criminal acts; but hate speech, being speech, is in and of itself a non-criminal act. It’s an expression of thought and feeling that doesn’t necessarily damage a person’s rights or property as public slander or libel might.

Speech should not be confused with an imminent threat to do bodily harm or commit an actual violent crime, like assault or beating someone up. It shouldn’t be confused with a crime like damaging property by painting hateful slogans or symbols. Having one’s feelings hurt because someone has insulted you doesn’t mean necessarily that you have been the victim of a crime. Expressing hateful opinions, making racial slurs and publishing anti-religious tracts are not crimes.

The next totalitarian step is to make it a crime not to express hatred. Both John McCain and John Brennan want Trump to express more hatred toward Putin; and they’ll support laws forcing Trump to be more belligerent if they can devise them and get them passed.

If that sounds far-fetched, then consider that one already risks being a social outcast by not endorsing some politically correct point of view or using the politically-correct and approved pronouns. The movement toward the totalitarian begins, not necessarily with a government law, but with political and social correctness exerted on people by social forces and at social levels short of the direct presence of government. Yet government is there behind the scenes via regulations and broad laws that have a totalitarian impact. Laws aimed at equality often have this effect when fleshed out with agency and department directives.

The presence of hate speech laws shows that the incisions into social behavior made by political correctness have graduated into deeper wounds made by government laws exerting the power that it only possesses. In ways like this, political correctness becomes more powerful.
 On American campuses, political correctness in the form of anti-hate speech can no longer hide its totalitarian face. Universities show their totalitarian face by imposing language practices and codes upon students. Long lists of microaggressions accompanied by demands to punish them are totalitarian in nature.

The totalitarianism is defined at the university level by their attempts to impose one view on everyone by force and sanction. Universities are in a position to do this because they can sanction students in many ways.

Furthermore, being recipients of federal aid, they are subject to federal sanctions themselves if they do not adhere strictly to various totalitarian federal regulations. In this way, the force of government regulations permeates universities.

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