“You Are Not Allowed to Speak the Truth”
How do you define hate? Well, you just said you allow the purported target of the hate to define it. What they do is they say that they feel hated, so it's a second-order form of evidence. The primary evidence, in principle, is their subjective emotion, but you don't have access to that, so you have to accept their record of their subjective emotion. You accept that in a manner that isn't questionable. There's no higher authority than their say-so.
The problem with that is this: it's a variant of the problem with the informants. That only works well, or it would never work—let's get that clear. But that only works in the ideal situation where people have perfect understanding of the motivation of others, which they don't. Also, they're not lying. The problem with that definition of subjective harm is that it lays the gates wide open to the melian and the psychopaths.
Yes, yes, and you're also touching on two other important things, right? So number one, unlike most criminal offenses which require intent of some kind, the intent is not on whether the speaker meant to be hateful. Yeah, it's not intent; it's not relevant, right? That's terrifying! And also the other thing that's not relevant is truth. If you speak a true fact that is interpreted as a hateful fact and has its effect on somebody, well, that's not going to be a defense either.
Right, right. So you aren't—essentially, one of the effects of this kind of legislation is to say you are not allowed to speak the truth, right? Because that truth, regardless of intent, regardless of intent, and regardless of historical fact, yeah, we are outlawing an effect.
Right, right, right. Absolutely. Okay, and to expand that even further, with comedy, it's interesting because, of course, Scotland, where some of the most ridiculous legislation is being passed, is the place that hosts the biggest arts and comedy festival in the world: The Edinburgh Fringe. Right? And to your point about truth, well, you don't even have to be saying something true at this point. Now they've passed a bill which means that comedians could be investigated for jokes they make. Now, that is a level of detachment from context and reality that is even a level above simply—oh, someone made a true comment.
What if I said something sarcastically on stage as a comedian? And what's interesting is comedy seems to be particularly targeted. But nobody goes to Macbeth at the theater and says, "Oh, I went to the theater, and then this guy went crazy and stabbed his friend." No, no one says that. But with comedy, for some reason, the character on stage is increasingly being perceived as having the opinions that he's jokingly saying.
And so that—that's another level. So what? Right? There's no distinction between the role and the actor. Quite. And what's interesting, if you abstract even further from that, if you've watched Game of Thrones, the scene where you really truly discover that King Joffrey's gone mad is when he cuts off the tongue of the jester in his court. This symbolism is perfect; it's been used throughout history to portray the final conversion into tyranny of a ruler. That's why there were jesters; that was one of the ways everybody could tell the king wasn't a tyrant, right? Is that he could tolerate his own jester's fool, or welcome him, or find him amusing. That would be best.
And this is something that happened when Vladimir Putin first came to power in Russia under Boris Yeltsin. There was a kind of liberalization; there was an opening up. Because in the Soviet Union, you didn't make fun of the political leaders. Nothing was funny in this. That was true. The jokes that people told at the kitchen table were funny, but not in public, of course.
But under Boris Yeltsin, there was an opening up, and we had this amazing TV show, which was the equivalent of the British Spitting Image. I don't know if you had a similar thing. Did you have Spitting Image?
No, I know of it, though.
Yeah, and it was basically puppets portraying the different political characters. And the first thing Vladimir Putin did when he came to power was to shut that down. So historically, throughout literature and other things, if you're looking for symptoms of tyranny, the shutting down of jokes and humor is—as far as I'm concerned, comedians and automobiles are canaries in the coalmine.
Yeah, yeah! Well, they're so emblematic of personal autonomy. Every tyrant hates the automobile, so even though they all want to have one.
Okay, so let’s delve into the hate issue a bit more too, because in Canada, we have protected categories of hate. Right? So, it's a hate crime if it's—I want to make sure I've got this definition right—it's a hate crime if it can be shown that your utterance can be shown to discriminate against a protected class.
Well, yes, so it's not merely that you hurt people's feelings, right? It's that they have to hurt them for a particular reason. Well, it's a discriminatory term. So we have these two realms: the human rights realm and the criminal realm. And we've had hate speech restrictions in our criminal law for a good while, and they're rarely used.
The human rights provisions are much more frequently used because they're much less serious and much easier to trigger, much easier to complain about. And they don't go to a court; they go to one of these tribunals.
Right? But one of the problems is the dovetailing of this hate speech discriminatory practice idea along with the equality problem that I was just describing before. Right? So, as with any rule, this rule is going to be applied and interpreted in one direction and not the other. What I mean by that is, if you go around saying that white people are hateful or privileged or colonists or whatever the case may be, that's pretty hateful.
If you say that if you're white, you are X, you're being stereotypical, and you're making a blanket statement about all these people who are white. That's not going to be entertained as hate speech because of the way that our equality law has been interpreted. This is one thing that the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal said fairly recently: they said people who are white cannot be discriminated against.
Yeah, yeah, really. But you're not a protected group. They are not a protected group. Some animals are more equal than others.
Exactly! So this kind of law, the hate speech law, is likely to be interpreted in that way, which is, oh, you can only utter hate speech against protected groups. If you utter hate speech against those other people who are not in one of those, there's no hate speech against the oppressor classes; it doesn't qualify.
And by the way, this isn't theory. No, this is so—in Scotland for example, they passed this bill on the 1st of April, of course they did recently. In the first week of it being passed, there were more reports of hate speech than there had been in the previous several years.
The reason was that many, many people reported a speech given by Hamza Yousaf, the First Minister of Scotland, in which he was being openly racist against white people. Right? And of course, this isn't considered a hate crime.
And, you know, it was the BBC interviewed Hamza Yousaf, where the interviewer and he himself laughed, sort of, you know, almost gratuitously. "Oh, how silly," you know, people would—of course, this is complete nonsense. And frankly, he said, "I'm not aware of anyone who's not on the far right who would report this as hate speech."
Right, it's an absolute case of some animals being more equal than others. And the law is, I'm sure you would agree, written specifically to create that situation. Absolutely.