LIMITS ON FREE SPEECH

Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech. It’s Violence in Disguise

One of the immutable constants of human life, and perhaps of the universe itself, is that what goes around comes around. That truth is freshly relevant in light of the death of Charlie Kirk, who spent his public life preaching a poisonous mixture of hate and violence under the banner of “free speech.”

Like many on the far right, Kirk cloaked his rhetoric in the First Amendment, arguing that anything he said was protected, no matter how inflammatory or reckless. Yet he went further: he openly rationalized violence as a necessary consequence of speech, insisting that provocation and aggression were the natural, even desirable, outgrowth of his so-called defense of liberty.

But here is what too many forget: free speech is not absolute. The law has long recognized its limits. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously explained that one cannot falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater without consequence. Why? Because speech that predictably causes harm is not speech at all. It is incitement. It is a weapon.

We need to explain this clearly and enforce it consistently: hate speech is not free speech. It is an expensive speech. It costs society peace, civility, and sometimes lives. It is disproportionately deployed by those who want to provoke violence in the name of their cause. And in today’s America, that cause is overwhelmingly on the far right.

The political left is not without flaws or excesses, but it does not organize around systematic hate speech designed to justify violence. That is the domain of the modern right — a movement that has normalized cruelty, demonization, and threats as part of its daily discourse. From talk shows to rallies, hate is broadcast as if it were a patriotic duty.

But the First Amendment does not protect the deliberate stirring of mobs or the rhetorical targeting of minorities. Nor should it. Hate speech undermines the very premise of free speech, which is to enable a free and fair exchange of ideas. When speech becomes weaponized to silence, intimidate, or incite, it ceases to be speech and becomes a form of violence.

What goes around comes around. For years, Charlie Kirk and others like him treated hate as a game, a tactic, a means of building an audience and consolidating power. They dismissed warnings that words have consequences, that violence once unleashed cannot be controlled. Now those consequences are undeniable.

The lesson is stark: a society that tolerates hate speech under the pretense of “free speech” is not protecting liberty; it is undermining it. Actual free speech empowers debate, dissent, and truth. Hate speech does the opposite. It poisons discourse, breeds violence, and destroys the very freedom it claims to defend.

If America is to remain a democracy, we must draw this line clearly. Hate speech is not free. It is costly, and the bill is always paid in blood.

William James Spriggs