Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Similarly, one man’s (or woman’s) serial hater is another man’s Lover of Life and Romantic hero.”
(—Nicolas “Nic’ Leobold).

All speech is entirely subjective, not objective, especially because speech, in and of itself, exists solely on a cerebral and conceptual and holistic level, and thus contains all aspects of the Creative and Metaphor and Vision-Illusion characteristics; at least for speech independent of physical action, only in the linguistic or spoken form.

Since all speech and writing is subjective, not objective, all purported “hate speech” is also entirely subjective and relative. If I call Donald Trump “a Nazi”, half of America will already believe it (and many have already said it) and the other half of America will label it “hate speech”. What if I said the Anti-Defamation League “are Nazi fascist slime”; or if I made the “dubious” claim that Adolph Hitler was “a Nazi fascist slime”. Again, there are actually many Jews, not to mention hundreds of millions of others, who would disagree with both statements!

If I run down the street screaming, “blacks are Satan!”, there are probably many people who would run after me and beat me up. What if I ran down the street screaming “blacks are beautiful!” Again, incredibly, there would be many people who, simply for the reason of differentiating about “black” people, would want to beat me up.

If I showed up in a hospital emergency room with soiled clothes and had been homeless for a week, and told the nurse I’m afraid of Western medicine and afraid of things like psychiatry, she would probably interpret that as suspicious and I would be more likely to be seen by a psychiatrist and “admitted” to the hospital. If I told the doctors I hate Western medicine because it’s the leading cause of unnatural death in America, and I physically resisted their treatment, they might very well label my physical resistance a “hate crime”, or the authorities might.

Which brings up the question, do we ever have a “Right to Hate”? Hate is a human emotion, one that billions have experienced. If we tried to deny hating certain things, even doctors would say that our denial of our feelings is unhealthy. Yet people, through experience or misfortune or actual crimes, could actually have legitimate reasons for hating certain groups, in a general sense, like blacks, whites, women, men, mothers, gays, etc. If a boy was repeatedly raped and molested by gay men, does he not have a right to hate gay men in general? After all, gay men are disproportionately sexually promiscuous and sexually experimental. For the abused young man, hating gays and homosexuality might be understandable and natural.

Also, different people have different standards of acceptable speech and different standards of what is actual “Hate”. One person might react to a statement with horror, another might find the same statement totally benign. Another person might interpret the same statement as a joke and laugh at it. Are social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter really qualified to judge what is “hate” at all? Do we want these platforms to be deciding for us which speech is acceptable and not acceptable, and which speech we can see and not see, before we even have a chance to see it?

The whole concept of “hate speech” is as fallacious and contemptible as the concept of “hate crimes”, where murder is more wrong because the victim belonged to a protected group the perpetrator “hated”. All of this is ridiculous, and we must roundly condemn social media companies and the Establishment for promoting the concept of “unacceptable hate”.

Hate is an emotion, is completely subjective to the subject and object and witnesses, and further, Speech must remain a totally free domain where ideas and notions must stand the test of scrutiny and remain accepted or die on the rack of public exposure.

If we do not protect free speech and free expression, much greater evils are sure to befall us.

Nicolas ’Nic’ Leobold is a businessman/artist/athlete/consultant/coach and a longtime libertarian voluntaryist activist and leader. He has a wide variety of experience in numerous fields and industries and an extensive list of accomplishments and achievements. Nic Leobold is a Voluntaryist Libertarian Anarcap fusion write-in candidate for u.S. President and All Offices. His campaign website is www.NL4PREZ.com, his facebook is www.facebook.com/nleobold.