| Long. Worth it. Herewith the opening paragraphs: |
[AmericanMind] ...replying to Arthur Milikh, "'Hate Speech' and the New Tyranny of the Mind". The securitization of so-called hate speech.
On September 27, 2012, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was arrested for making a movie which supposedly offended Muslims. That was not, naturally, the official charge. On paper, Nakoula was arrested for the parole violation of having used a computer and alias. Which he did, while making the video in question.
Yet no less esteemed a personage than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it perfectly clear that the real reason why Nakoula was dragged out of his home one night by sheriff deputies was that he had made a movie.
As the story went, Nakoula’s Youtube video was directly responsible for the sacking of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya—an attack which killed the U.S. ambassador, a member of the consulate staff, and two highly trained military contractors working for the CIA. As Charles Woods, the father of slain Navy Seal Tyrone Woods, told Fox News, “I gave Hillary a hug and shook her hand. And she said we are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of my son.”
I could not help but think of the story of Nakoula as I read Arthur Milikh’s “’Hate Speech’ and the New Tyranny of the Mind” on the rising tide of the “Hate Speech” movement both globally and in the United States. Milikh’s report was an excellent contribution to documenting the increasingly worrisome threat to our liberties. When one considers Nakoula, the tyranny Milikh describes is less a speculative dystopian future than an increasingly actualized dystopian present.
Nakoula’s story demonstrates an element of the growing threat to free speech rights which is largely not covered by Milikh but which I would call the “securitization of hate speech.” That is, that the suppression of speech, and the categorization of certain types of speech as impermissible, is increasingly justified on the grounds of security.
Milikh accurately notes that American free speech rights were never understood to include incitement to immediate criminal violence. He also correctly identifies the long-accepted standard that in order to be illegal such incitement must be intentional, imminent, and specifically targeted.
But a subtle shift has been underway for some time now. This traditional understanding has transformed us from the common-sense position that it is reasonable to prohibit someone from deliberately inciting a mob to arson, loot, and murder, into an Orwellian drama where a California-based YouTube video can be held responsible for an orchestrated attack on a consulate half a world away by battle-hardened jihadists. 
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