Tag: hate speech

California “Hate Speech” Bill Would Crush Dissent

If enacted and it somehow clears legal challenges, California Senate Bill 771 will be the first online censorship law of its kind in America. It would also likely pave a path for other states run by people with no tolerance for dissent.    

On September 22, the California Legislature sent SB 771 to Governor Gavin Newsom. He has until October 13 to sign it. If he doesn’t veto or sign the proposal, it becomes law anyway.

Mainstream media outlets claim that SB 771 “targets social media platforms for the role they could play in aiding and abetting in hate crimes by pushing content that could lead to a hate crime.”

The bill allows people to sue social-media companies for up to $1 million per violation. If the litigant is a minor, the fine could double.

Tucker Carlson’s analysis of the bill is more accurate than the mainstream media’s. Carlson:

That’s a censorship law.… The state of California, under Gavin Newsom, is about to — we think — censor the opinions of Americans, not to protect anybody, but to shield themselves from criticism so they continue to do what they want to do in secret.

Coerced Censorship

The bill uses broad terms that make it easy to justify censorship. It reads:

California law prohibits all persons and entities, including corporations, from engaging in, aiding, abetting, or conspiring to commit acts of violence, intimidation, or coercion based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or other protected characteristics.

Merriam Webster defines “intimidated” as “to make timid or fearful.” Synonyms include “bully” and “frighten.” Fear and intimidation are subjective emotions that have significantly increased among America’s younger and more unstable generations. People are swimming in pools of victimhood and mental illness today. We constantly hear about a spike in anxiety. What happens when we create laws that allow litigation on the basis of largely subjective emotions?

But the more likely primary intent here is to coerce social-media companies into pre-censoring. The senior vice president of social-media company Parler, Elise Pierotti, said of the bill:

SB 771 isn’t about protecting civil rights, it’s California’s brazen attempt to export its one-party censorship regime to every corner of the internet. This bill hands Sacramento the power to bully platforms into preemptively scrubbing dissent on everything from border security to parental rights. We’ve seen Big Tech abuse vague “hate speech” rules to throttle conservatives for years, including shutting down our platform in 2021; now, lawmakers want to make it mandatory with teeth-shattering fines. This must be stopped before it buries the First Amendment.

Shoshana Weissmann, director of digital media at the R Street Institute, also suspects this is the drafter’s main agenda. She told the Daily Caller that “rather than risk liability for showing users content one could argue (even if it doesn’t actually) violate a law, platforms will over-moderate and remove posts in order to stay out of court.”

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California’s Vague ‘Hate Speech’ Bill Would Force Big Tech To Censor Mainstream Conservative Views

alifornia lawmakers are once again leading the charge — not toward progress, but toward repression. Their latest move, Senate Bill 771 (SB-771), is being packaged as a bold stand against “hate” on social media. In reality, it’s a direct assault on the free expression and constitutionally protected speech of ministries, minority groups, and faith-based organizations.

The bill would force Big Tech to remove content that could be interpreted as “harassment” or “intimidation” based on race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and more — or face financially devastating lawsuits.

If Gov. Gavin Newsom signs this bill into law as expected, it will become one of the most dangerous speech-restricting laws in the country. Cloaked in the language of civil rights, SB-771 is built to punish dissent from progressive orthodoxy.

The target is anyone who dares to speak publicly about values or perspectives that conflict with the state’s ever-expanding list of protected identities. In practice, this means community groups sharing discussions on traditional family structures, cultural views on gender roles, or advocacy for certain social issues may find themselves silenced — not by law enforcement, but by tech giants eager to avoid legal risk.

The bills says:

California law prohibits all persons and entities, including corporations, from engaging in, aiding, abetting, or conspiring to commit acts of violence, intimidation, or coercion based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or other protected characteristics.

 3273.73. (a) A social media platform that violates Section 51.7, 51.9, 52, or 52.1 through its algorithms that relay content to users or aids, abets, acts in concert, or conspires in a violation of any of those sections, or is a joint tortfeasor in a violation of any of those sections, shall, in addition to any other remedy, be liable to a prevailing plaintiff for a civil penalty for each violation sufficient to deter future violations but not to exceed the following:

(1) For an intentional, knowing, or willful violation, a civil penalty of up to one million dollars

(2) For a reckless violation, a civil penalty of up to five hundred thousand dollars.


This language may appear just, but its sweeping terms — “intimidation,” “coercion,” even “aiding” — are dangerously vague. In the hands of ideologically motivated actors, they can be weaponized to silence constitutionally protected discourse under the guise of enforcing civil rights.

That’s the chilling brilliance of SB-771: it outsources censorship to the private sector under threat of state-enforced financial ruin. The law doesn’t need to directly ban speech — it just makes the cost of hosting it too high for Big Tech to tolerate. This will especially impact small ministries, minority-led organizations, and faith-based nonprofits with limited legal or technical resources. For them, one flagged post — perhaps a cultural reference taken out of context — could mean being shadow-banned or deplatformed altogether.

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Canada To Revive Online Censorship Targeting “Harmful” Content, “Hate” Speech, and Deepfakes

A renewed censorship effort is taking shape in Canada as the federal government pushes ahead with a controversial bill targeting what it labels “harmful online content.”

Framed as a safeguard against exploitation and “hate,” the proposed legislation mirrors the widely criticized Bill C-36, which was abandoned after concerns about its vague language and expansive reach.

Bill C-63 would have established a powerful new Digital Safety Commission tasked with pressuring platforms to restrict user content.

If passed, the law would have compelled tech companies to remove flagged material such as intimate images shared without consent or child abuse content within 24 hours.

It also gives both the poster and complainant a chance to respond, but the final decision would ultimately fall to a state-backed regulator.

Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault attempted to justify the new push during a House of Commons committee meeting, stating the bill aims to remove “clearly harmful content” and is “designed to comply with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

He added, “Online safety is certainly about protecting kids, but it’s obviously more than that.”

Beyond images and exploitation, the bill includes a broader mandate to police expression.

It calls for tougher Criminal Code penalties around so-called “hate propaganda,” including a life sentence for promoting genocide. It would create a new offense for “hate crimes” and let judges issue “peace bonds” to restrict someone’s freedom based on a prediction of possible future hate-based offenses.

On top of that, the proposal seeks to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act, allowing individuals to file complaints over online speech that meets a definition of “detestation or vilification,” as outlined by past Supreme Court decisions.

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Free Speech and Its Discontents

The modern concept of the freedom of speech did not dawn until the Warren Court in the 1960s. In two cases, the Supreme Court ruled that there is no such thing as hate speech and the government may not do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly.

In 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the court ruled that all innocuous speech — even that of a KKK leader publicly condemning Blacks and Jews — is protected and all speech is innocuous when there is time for more speech to challenge it. The court had already ruled six years earlier in Bantam Books v. Sullivan that public officials’ threats to punish publishers unless they silenced their authors were prohibited by the values underlying the First Amendment.

At the core of both of these cases and their progeny is the First Amendment principle that the government — once this meant only Congress; today it means all government — may not evaluate or act upon the content of speech; it may only neutrally regulate time, place and manner. Thus, the use of a bullhorn on a public street in a residential neighborhood to advance a political cause at 3 a.m. may be prohibited because it unreasonably disturbs sleep, not because the government hates or fears the message.

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“Hate Speech” Isn’t Real and Pam Bondi Is an Enemy of Freedom

Following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, many critics of Kirk posted content on social media in which they said rude things about Kirk—and even about his family members—while expressing delight about Kirk’s death.  Not surprisingly, many of Kirk’s supporters—and many other ordinary people—found these comments offensive and reprehensible. 

Perhaps as part of an effort to exploit the situation to improve her own political fortunes, US Attorney General Pam Bondi then declared that she, a government prosecutor, will “go after” those who engage in what she called “hate speech.” 

“Hate speech,” however, does not exist. At all. That’s a phrase the Left invented to define speech the Left doesn’t like as outside the legal protections of Bill of Rights. Put another way, the concept of “hate speech” was invented to justify state-enforced censorship of speech. That Bondi buys into this nonsense is made clear by Bondi’s pledge to “go after” people who are guilty of this hate-speech “crime” that Bondi apparently imagines in her head.  

These comments, coming from a sitting Attorney General, are extremely problematic, to say the least. The very fact that Bondi unironically uses the term “hate speech” illustrates how deeply immersed she is in the culture of coercion and despotism that permeates the Washington ruling class. Any politician who promotes the concept of “hate speech” should be considered an enemy of our most fundamental natural rights, and his or her political career deserves to be ended permanently. 

There Is No Such Thing as Hate Speech

Bondi’s dangerous comments on so-called hate speech came as part of her Monday appearance on the Katie Miller podcast. When asked by the host if colleges and universities are somehow complicit in Kirk’s murder, Bondi agreed and stated:

on a broader level, the anti-Semitism—what’s been happening at college campuses around this country— it’s disgusting, it’s despicable and we’ve been fighting that, we’ve been fighting these universities left and right and that’s not going to stop.  There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society …. We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.

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AG Pam Bondi Clarifies Her Stance on First Amendment Following Backlash — Says Her Office Won’t Prosecute “Hate Speech”

Attorney General Pam Bondi is scrambling to clarify her comments after a firestorm erupted over her suggestion that the Department of Justice would target so-called “hate speech.”

The controversy follows an outrageous incident at an Office Depot in Michigan, where three teenage boys were denied service after pre-paying for posters meant for a Charlie Kirk memorial vigil.

The smug employees—one identifying as a supervisor, another as a “manager”—flatly refused to print the order, dismissing the vigil posters as “propaganda.”

Office Depot corporate quickly issued an apology, announced an internal review, and confirmed the employee had been terminated.

But rather than directly addressing the broader climate of hate fueling these incidents, Bondi used her Fox interview to focus on discrimination claims against Office Depot:

“Employers, you have an obligation to get rid of people. You need to look at people who are saying horrible things, and they shouldn’t be working with you. Businesses cannot discriminate. If you want to go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that. I have Harmeet Dhillon right now in our civil rights unit looking at that immediately. That Office Depot had done that—we’re looking at it.”

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh wasted no time unloading on Bondi for what he called a “gratuitous and pointless” use of DOJ resources:

“Get rid of her. Today. This is insane. Conservatives have fought for decades for the right to refuse service to anyone. We won that fight. Now Pam Bondi wants to roll it all back for no reason. This stuff is being handled successfully through free speech and free markets. We need the AG focused on bringing down the left wing terror cells, not prosecuting Office Depot for God’s sake.”

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Pam Bondi Says Government Will “Go After” Hate Speech, Drawing First Amendment Criticism

US Attorney General Pam Bondi has stirred controversy with recent comments seeming to suggest that certain forms of speech could fall outside First Amendment protections, a stance that is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution.

During an appearance on The Katie Miller Podcast following last week’s assassination of conservative activist and commentator Charlie Kirk, Bondi stated, “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society…” She added, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

Her remarks immediately drew sharp responses from across the political spectrum, with many warning that her approach opens the door to dangerous government overreach.

Bondi later attempted to narrow the scope of her original statements in a post on X, writing, “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime.”

She continued, “For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights (FIRE), a civil liberties group focused on free speech, fired back, stating, “There is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment.”

The Supreme Court has long protected even offensive or unpopular speech, with the Court’s view being that the “proudest boast” of America’s free speech legacy is “freedom for the thought that we hate.”

Conservatives who typically align with Bondi’s broader political positions also voiced concern.

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YouTube commenter arrested after allegedly posting threat to ‘shoot and skin’ Black preschoolers

A North Carolina man is facing federal charges over a comment posted online in which he allegedly threatened to “shoot up a black pre-school,” after which the victims would be “skinned,” according to an FBI probable cause affidavit reviewed by The Independent.

Zachary Charles Newell, 25, was arrested Monday on one count of making an interstate threat to kidnap or injure.

On Sunday, a cybercrime team at Google flagged a disturbingly violent YouTube comment to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center, the affidavit states. It says the comment had been uploaded to the video-sharing site four days prior, at 10:37 a.m. local time, by a user with the screenname “CommentatorsHateMe.”

Posted beneath a video by YouTuber “Andrew Esquire,” a Florida lawyer whose real name is Andrew Clifford d’Adesky, CommentatorsHateMe wrote, “I’m gonna shoot up a black pre-school. 20 black babies will be shot and then skinned like the animals they are,” the affidavit goes on.

In the video, d’Adesky was discussing a reported Los Angeles police investigation into Raja Jackson, an MMA fighter who apparently went off-script while making an appearance in a professional wrestling match and put his opponent in the hospital with severe injuries.

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Germany Targets X Executives in Unprecedented Criminal Probe over Refusal to Hand Over User Data in “Hate Speech” Cases

German authorities have opened a criminal investigation targeting three managers at X, accusing them of “obstruction of justice” for refusing to directly provide user data in online speech-related cases.

Two of the employees are American, and one of them is reportedly Diego de Lima Gualda, the former head of X’s operations in Brazil, who previously faced off against legal demands in his home country before resigning in April 2024.

The alleged problem for Germany is X’s policy of forwarding German requests for user data to US authorities, following procedures established under a bilateral Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT).

That treaty lays out the legal framework for cross-border data sharing, requiring requests from German prosecutors to be reviewed and processed through US legal channels before X is compelled to hand over user information.

Despite this legally grounded process, prosecutors in Göttingen have decided to treat the policy as criminal interference, marking what appears to be the first time in German legal history that social media executives are being investigated for how they respond to international legal requests.

German prosecutors have reportedly been frustrated by X’s unwillingness to grant them direct access to account data, particularly in cases involving posts that include banned symbols like swastikas or comments that authorities allege may amount to defamation.

The inability to obtain data has resulted in stalled investigations and dropped cases, including one where a post containing a swastika could not be traced to its author.

Although X restricted that post within Germany, the company declined to release identifying information.

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South African Politician Who Called For Killing White Farmers Convicted On Hate Speech Charges

It was the White House ambush that shocked the world.  A South African delegation headed by president Cyril Ramaphosa arrived in Washington DC with big grins and smug confidence, ready to milk the American taxpayer for even more foreign aid.  What they received instead was thorough embarrassment.

Trump confronted Ramaphosa on the issue of race-based land seizures through the Expropriation Act of 2024, which largely targets white farmers for confiscation (There are 140 race based laws that oppress whites in SA) .  The land is then redistributed to black citizens who often run the farms into the ground. The leader has denied that land confiscation is taking place.  The South African government and the leftist media has spent the better part of the year trying to spin the issue and deny their motives.  

When asked by reporters what he could do to convince Trump that there was no threat of “white genocide” in South Africa, Ramaphosa chuckled and shrugged off the accusation, suggesting that Trump had been misinformed.  Trump surprised the leftist political leader with a video montage proving otherwise. 

The South African government, dominated by woke political activists, has tried to cover up the targeting of white farmers by race communists for years.  Their efforts to expropriate land from those same farmers sent a clear message that they are in support of the ethnic cleansing of whites.  

Trumps montage featured a number of speeches by communist EFF party leader Julius Malema.  Malema represents around 10% of South African voters, but all parties in South Africa are essentially socialist or communist in their ideals and Malema’s sentiments are shared by many of their members.  White conservatives in SA have near-zero representation in the government.  Malema’s chant of “Kill the Boer” (kill the white farmer), is not limited to members of the EFF. 

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