by: JD Heyes
unpopular speech in mind.
That is, they wanted to specifically protect speech that wasn’t common, wasn’t popular, and could even be considered revolutionary in a literal sense of the world.
They also had protecting criticism of the government uppermost in their minds. That’s because they had just spent more than a decade fighting a tyrannical British monarchy headed by a king that did not permit such speech and in fact, punished those who criticized him and the Crown in general.
But in recent decades, so-called “hate speech” laws have made a mockery of the First Amendment’s speech protections. Words and phrases that political apparatchiks and authoritarians in government have ‘deemed’ as ‘harmful’ or ‘hurtful’ have been criminalized under such laws, with real consequences for people found to have violated those speech codes.