Hate Speech And The Second American Revolution

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April 23, 2025, 4 PM ET

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It seems that hate speech, like beauty, lies in the eyes of the beholder. In the eyes of the Left, practically anything that anyone on the center-right says automatically becomes hate speech. Here are some examples:

If you believe in traditional marriage between a man and a woman, you’re anti-gay.
If you don’t believe transmen should be allowed to compete in athletics with biological women, you’re anti-trans.
If you don’t believe transmen should be allowed to use women’s restrooms and locker rooms, you’re transphobic.
If you expressed concern over the open border policy, you’re a racist.
If you object to minors being given puberty blockers and undergoing surgical mutilation, you’re condemning children with gender dysphoria to committing suicide. (Never mind that reputable studies have shown that children who do transition have an increased risk of suicidal ideation.)
If you express concern about importing college students and faculty from the Middle East, you’re Islamophobic.
If you believe that college admissions and employment should be based on merit, not DEI, you’re a white supremacist. (Never mind that on average, Asians score higher on the SAT than whites.)
If you support Israel, you support genocide against Palestinians.

On the other hand, those on the Left view their rants as protected free speech. Here are some typical examples:

Representative Jasmine Crockett (D - Texas) referred to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has been in a wheelchair since the age of 26 as the result of a freak accident, as “Hot Wheels,” and then disingenuously denied that she was mocking his disability. On another occasion she said America needs illegal immigrants to pick our cotton, as Black people won’t do it anymore. Apparently, Rep. Crockett is stuck in a time warp in the 19^th century, whereas her party, which championed slavery back then, is now willing to consign other people of color to a form of indentured servitude.
“A Fresno State University lecturer is under fire for social media posts showing President Trump in a coffin, wishing for the death of Trump and Elon Musk, and for offering her students extra credit to attend a protest against Tesla,” reports Jennifer Kabbany in The College Fix, April 3, 2025.
In a preview of what is likely to come to America, a U.K. couple, Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, whose nine-year-old daughter Sascha has special needs and epilepsy, sent a letter to the school administrator, Jackie Spriggs, objecting to the process being used to hire a new head teacher. Ms. Spriggs issued a letter threatening parents who criticize staff, thereby causing “disharmony” or “distress.” In response, Levine posted critical comments on a private WhatsApp group referring to an administrator as a “control freak” and objecting to the letter. On January 28, six police officers descended on the parents’ home and arrested Levine in front of her three-year-old daughter, while Allen was arrested at work.

The Gold Report comments, “The parents were handcuffed and detained for 12 hours for ‘harassment’ and ‘harmful communications,’ including eight hours in a jail cell. The parents had also been banned from the school, which Allen said ‘had really serious implications’ for Sascha, and were restricted to communicating by email about their disabled daughter’s health and education.” The police ultimately terminated the investigation without filing charges, but the parents are now experiencing a form of PTSD in which they fear police. While this incident is part of a pattern of lawfare against people whose comments displease two-bit martinets in positions of authority, it also reflects a two-tier system of justice adopted by the Labour government headed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has been nicknamed “Two-Tier Keir,” in which police and firefighters flee from immigrant rioters, while arresting those who counter-riot, including one woman who was arrested for making “racially insensitive comments.” The April 2 Gold Report continues, “This week, the U.K. Sentencing Council reluctantly shelved its controversial new guidance that would see minorities receive lighter criminal sentences than White, Christian men.”

In a gesture of pure insanity, the Colorado State House of Representatives passed a bill equating refusal to transition one’s child to child abuse, and one member equated parents’ rights groups to the KKK.
The most alarming statement of hatred was reported by Daniel Greenfield in Front Page Magazine on March 20: “A few days after the anniversary of Oct. 7, the New York Times reported that Columbia University Apartheid Divest officially endorsed terrorism against Jews and withdrew an apology by one of its members for threatening to kill Jews. Over the past weeks, the paper and the entire Democratic Party, including 103 members of Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, [and] the Jewish Democratic Council of America led by Kamala’s former foreign policy advisor, went all in on fighting for Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in CUAD who had defended terrorism, from being deported…

“Columbia University Apartheid Divest is a front group for the college’s suspended Students for Justice in Palestine chapter which reacted to the first anniversary of Oct. 7 by promoting a statement from a Maoist publication, ‘October 7^th was Not “Barbaric” or “Unfortunate” – It was Strategic and Anti-imperialist’ and hailed the ‘moral, military, and political victory of the operation’. This is what the Democrats who condemn Trump’s proposed deportation of a CUAD leader as ‘authoritarian’ now support. Not just terrorism: but the mass murder of Jews… “Democrats and the larger cultural establishment that they represent have moved beyond pretending that they are expressing sympathy for the nebulous concept of ‘Palestinians’ and ‘innocent civilians’ and have moved on to openly associating their movement with supporters of the mass murder of Jews. What was once marginal, is now quickly becoming mainstream.” It is truly scandalous how college faculty and students, as well as media commentators and politicians, have rallied around a terrorist whose “free speech” is being abridged. While the preceding are mainly the handiwork of individuals or organizations with questionable credibility that are directed against the public, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has declared open warfare on other non-governmental organizations. SPLC began in the 1960s as a legitimate civil rights organization, but after the civil right laws of the 1960s reduced the need for its services, it needed a new mission in keeping with the dictum that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) never fade away, they just change their focus. In the case of SPLC, now under Leftist management, it became the arbiter of which other NGOs were racist, which mushroomed into lumping perfectly respectable conservative and Christian organizations into the same category with genuinely racist ones, such as the KKK. Writing in the Daily Signal, Tyler O’Neil observed:

[SPLC] publishes a map plotting parental rights groups; religious freedom organizations, including ADF [Alliance Defending Freedom]; and pro-immigration enforcement groups alongside Klan chapters, suggesting that all sorts of conservative causes are driven by “hate.” The SPLC’s annual report describes all groups on the map as part of the “organizational infrastructure… upholding white supremacy in the United States.” [Their map depicts their following 1,430 hate and antigovernment organizations in 2023, suggesting there is a huge racist movement across America, a ridiculous assertion.]

Specifically, as reported by unherd.com, SPLC contends that the opponents of woke transgender ideology are “supported by white Christian nationalist ideology that seeks to privilege straight, white, cisgender Christians in public policy and replace science and American law with Christian theology.” This report goes on to identify the SPLC’s motive as “the need to discredit the growing pushback to youth gender transition and gender self-ID policies that put males in girls’ sports and women’s prisons. One way to dismiss political opponents is by attaching as many of the following labels as possible: conservative, Christian nationalist, cisheteronormative, white supremacist, male supremacist, creationist purveyors of misinformation and pseudoscience.” Their problem is that about 80% of Americans oppose the LGBTQ agenda in the areas of bathroom use, access to sports, and youth gender transition. Among SPLC’s targets for demonization are “radical-traditional Catholics”; pro-life activists; supporters of school choice; opponents of George Soros, whom they claim are antisemitic (note that Soros’ Open Society Foundation gave SPLC a $75,000 grant in 2016); and such mainstream conservative organizations as Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty, the Center for Immigration Studies, and Prager U, all of whom they smear as being extremists. At the same time, as O’Neil writes, they ignore harassment of Jews on college campuses while complaining about “a faux hypersensitivity toward antisemitism…among right-wing media and politicians in the United States as they utilized the legitimate issue of antisemitism on college campuses to disingenuously further an attack on higher education.” The connections shown between the designation of hate speech and other issues suggests that there is a wider connection among all of them, namely, as some commentators have observed, that the United States is now undergoing a second revolution, which may be dubbed “Jacobin,” referring to the French Revolution, as Professor Victor Davis Hanson describes it, or “Bolshevik,” referring to the Russian Revolution, as I see it, or Maoist, since it is primarily a cultural revolution. In any event, our civilization is being turned upside down. Our history is rewritten in distorted fashion; our statues are torn down; the centrality of Judeo-Christian ethics in our society is denied; victimizers are recast as victims and victims as oppressors. Basic biology is cast aside in the name of “gender identity.” A man who assassinated a health insurance corporation executive is celebrated as a hero, and a teenager who carried a knife to a sports event, sat in the opposing team’s cheering section, and responded to a student’s objection by stabbing him in the heart, is raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for his defense by crowdfunding. Pro-life activists, even ladies in their seventies and eighties, are subject to ten-year prison sentences for obstructing entrance to an abortion clinic under the FACE act (one sneering judge advised the defendant to “try to survive”; I doubt he’ll live to her age), while leftists vandalize pro-life pregnancy centers and, so far, torch Teslas with impunity. Further, the George Floyd riots in 2020 caused 35 deaths, hundreds of injuries, and billions of dollars in property damage with hardly anyone spending a day in jail, while then-Senator Kamala Harris was out raising bail money for the rioters and proclaiming that the riots should continue all year. And naturally, calling for the death of Jews is not only acceptable, but in many quarters de rigueur, especially in education at all levels. In a recent column, Professor Thane Rosenbaum proposed the previously unthinkable – that the time may be coming for American Jews to make aliyah en masse. The bottom line? To borrow a phrase from Dickens’ Tiny Tim, “G-d help us every one.”