There's No Such Thing as "Hate Speech"

By David Josef Volodzko

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has produced a glut of commentary about the consequences and limits of speech. I asked journalist and TRIGGERnometry guest, David Josef Volodzko, to give his take on this debate. You can read David’s own Substack here.

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In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Americans are being tested not just in grief but in principle, as the tragedy is already being used as a pretext for calls to clamp down on so-called “hate speech.”

Yesterday, Nexstar Media Group said it will stop airing Jimmy Kimmel Live! on its 32 ABC affiliates. That’s because on Sept. 15, Kimmel said on the show:

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

Many critics — Megyn Kelly, Piers Morgan, Matt Walsh, and others — accused Kimmel of lying. If he did so intentionally, his remarks are disinformation. If unintentional, yet false, it’s misinformation. Now, I happen to think it’s possible to charitably read his comment as a sloppy speculation rather than an outright lie, but either way, the decision over what to do about a host potentially spreading disinformation ultimately belongs to Nexstar. Where this becomes a problem is when the federal government pressures a private company to fire one of its employees for protected speech. Specifically, days after Kimmel’s remarks, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr went on The Benny Show and said:

This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. [...] There’s calls for Kimmel to be fired. I think you could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this.

What’s worse, this is not an isolated incident, but part of an emerging pattern. Just this week on the Katie Miller podcast, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested her office would target individuals for speech deemed hateful, saying, “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.”

Thankfully, there was instant pushback by conservatives. Tucker Carlson accused her of lying, Erick Erickson called her a “moron,” and Matt Walsh wrote, “Get rid of her. Today. This is insane.” Within a day, Bondi walked her statement back. Nevertheless, there remains a growing sentiment on the right that it’s okay to go after people for “hate speech.”

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott called for an investigation into a teacher who called Kirk’s assassination “karma.” Vice President JD Vance told Americans that if they see someone celebrating Kirk’s death, “Call their employer.” And there have been a slew of firings for vulgar and immoral comments made on social media. People, we’re starting to look like the UK.

Make no mistake, this is a desecration of the legacy of Charlie Kirk, who not only practiced and preached free speech, but vehemently opposed “hate speech” laws. This emerging trend among conservatives is a greater insult to Kirk and his ministry than when a leftist college student storms through a memorial in his name, kicking the candles over. And it should enrage us.

Elsewhere he said,

My position is that even hate speech should be completely and totally allowed in our country. The most disgusting speech should absolutely be protected. As soon as you use the word “hate,” that’s a very subjective term. All of a sudden, it is in the implementation of whoever has the power.

If we are to take this moment seriously, if we are to honor his legacy at all, we must resist the impulse to confuse words with violence. Consider how Germany, scarred by the legacy of the Holocaust, enacted strict hate speech laws after World War II, with strict bans on Nazi symbols, and later passed the 2017 NetzDG law requiring platforms to remove “hate speech” within 24 hours or face massive fines. Predictably, companies over-censored, and users now find perfectly lawful content deleted. Moreover, all this was done to prevent racist propaganda from fueling new violence, yet recent surveys show antisemitism in Germany is rising. In 2024, antisemitic incidents nearly doubled to 8,627, and a 2025 Bertelsmann poll found 27% of Germans believe “Jews have too much influence in the world.”

You simply cannot censor your way to tolerance — though you can do what Charlie Kirk did, and get there by way of open dialogue, moving hearts and minds one person at a time.

In the United Kingdom, the Public Order Act and related laws have produced cases so absurd you’d think they fell out of an episode of Black Mirror. In one, a woman was fined for thinking in the wrong place. In another, a teenager was investigated for posting rap lyrics in honor of her dead friend (it was his favorite song). In Canada, comedians have been fined under human rights codes for telling offensive jokes, even after Section 13 of the Human Rights Act was repealed.

But here in the United States, we have long upheld an extraordinary commitment to free expression. In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Supreme Court made clear that only speech directed to inciting “imminent lawless action” may be restricted. There is no First Amendment exception for “hate speech.” This is not an oversight. It is a deliberate firewall against government arbiters of acceptable thought. The deeper danger is cultural.

As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman observed in his excellent book Thinking, Fast and Slow, people often act out of emotion rather than reason. We think too fast, and fast thinking is really more reacting than thinking. In moments of crisis, fear and anger push societies toward quick, reactive choices that feel satisfying in the moment, but carry lasting costs. We must instead slow down. Slow thinking is methodical and reasoned. For if we truly wish to reduce hate, the answer lies not in censorship, but in engagement — extremism grows in silence and isolation.

Sunlight, argument, education, and open debate are stronger antidotes than bans. Laws can silence, but only culture can persuade. The real solution, as radicalization expert Steven Hassan once told me, is open dialogue. A psychologist known for his work on cults and extremism, he explained in an interview I had with him that we must not shut down speech, or isolate friends and family who express hateful views — that is what radical groups want you to do — but instead, engage more deeply. When individuals are isolated, silenced, or driven underground, their ideas harden and become more resistant to challenge. But when they are met with conversation, fact-checking, and open dialogue, there is room in that fertile earth to plant a seed.

This is not to say that the kind of rhetoric we are seeing, and that Bondi is concerned about, should be shrugged off as harmless. As advocates for free speech, we must not be blind to such concerns. Yes, speech does influence behavior. Yes, rhetoric can legitimize violence in the minds of some. Just witness the reaction of people on the left who cheer over Charlie Kirk’s assassination, based on their belief — one that has long been fed to them by distortions of what he actually believed and taught — that he was a fascist. As Konstantin Kisin recently explained, “When you call people Nazis [...] you are creating an environment in which some crazy people [...] will feel that they are entitled to use violence to prevent the fake fascist takeover that you keep banging on about.”

But even though speech influences behavior, we must draw a line between speech and violence if we are to maintain a free society in which the marketplace of ideas still exists. We must be careful and honest about the fact that certain rhetoric does create permission structures for violence. It moves the Overton window. Indeed, one of the first stages of genocide is genocidal rhetoric. Nevertheless, rhetoric is not violence. And the more we blur that distinction, the more we create another set of permission structures — for the erosion of the very spine of our republic. We must never give in to censorship of any kind even, or maybe even especially, when it comes dressed in the language of safety.

We must think slow, as Kahneman put it. And, if we are to honor Kirk’s legacy — and the constitutional tradition that protects us all — we must resolutely reject the idea that words are violence, even if our knuckles itch every time we see another person online mocking Kirk’s death, or spreading racist lies about Jews, or Trump, or whatever it may be. We must defend the culture of free speech almost as dearly as we would our own children, for in doing so, we defend the world in which they will live when we pass on.

Words are not violence. Even the most disgusting speech must be tolerated. This is a crucial test of our commitment to our most noble ideal, our greatest freedom, and our most American principle. And we must pass this test, for the fate of our nation.