Anti Vaxers...Another Radicalized Group?

[CJD]

(03-19-2019, 10:38 AM)GMDino Wrote: I agree it is touchy.  I try to fall on the idea that if the "speech" is directed to harm another group (men, women, religion, ethnicity, etc) it is "hate".  But some would say that "speech" against the groups using "hate speech" is "hate" against them.

I don't feel that way.

If a group says "Jews will not replace us" that is "hate speech".  Speaking out against "hate speech" is not.

But it certainly gets complicated.

I think a perfect example is this whole Jeanine Pirro thing. She said, on air, that since Omar wears a hijab, maybe she follows Sharia Law, which is in direct contrast to the constitution.

Now, a logical person should be able to see that and say "yea, that's definitely hate speech towards Muslims, as she is clearly implying (if not directly stating) that any person who wears a hijab is anti-American."

But then she said she was merely asking a question. She wasn't saying anything definitively, so how could it be hate speech?

And then you have the President who went a tweet storm over the weekend calling for Fox News to put her back on the air and spouting a variety of other things that could very easily be seen as hate speech in themselves ("Be strong and prosper, be weak and die") which appears to be a dog whistle to the same kind of white nationalism that he claims to have condemned just a day or two before.

And then you have King tweeting out hypothetical civil war memes that appeared to threaten violence towards democratic states (and other states that voted for Trump in 2016).

But are dog whistles hate speech? How can we know for sure what people mean by the words they say? It just gets exhausting.