If only we had European-style Hate Speech Laws on the books, we wouldn't have a white supremacist in

[Warren DeMontague]

46. It really seems you don't understand the 1st Amendment, but you're not happy with it as it stands.

You are just "asking questions": Okay, I'll answer them, as best I can.

Yeah, I know there are First Amendment implications to consider. However, I consider what he does is to be more akin to incitement to violence, with what occurred in Charlottesville being a prime example of that. Every white supremacist and penny-ante Nazi has been emboldened by this egregious man's toxic presence in the WH.

If it's not even something specific that the dude has said, but just his presence, how do speech laws apply? Look, I don't like his presence either, but if you want to pass laws against specific expressions you need to define what it is you're talking about.

As it stands, it's pretty easy: Violence is not protected behavior. Even, certainly, crowds showing up with weapons (as they did in Charlottesville) - again, not protected speech. Saying "Go kill that person"- arguably incitement. Holding a rally without a permit, can get you into trouble too.

But none of that is terribly relevant to "hate speech laws", which you CAN'T have if you can't even define "hate speech". Therefore-

The other argument I constantly against the implementation of comprehensive Hate Speech Laws revolves around who gets to decide what constitutes hate speech and why. I honestly don't know the answer to that question.

That's not just a sort of side matter, to be determined later or shunted off. It's really the crux of the biscuit. Because defining some speech or opinion as "hate", while certainly easy from a subjective standpoint, is well-nigh impossible from a legal one. Because we don't have a preferred frame of philosophical reference from a legal standpoint.

However, I'd like to know how is it possible for the Europeans to somehow enforce these laws sensibly and logically but we're somehow incapable of doing the same. Are we dumber than they are? Less civilized?

Okay- do they? Are these laws REALLY making a whit's worth of difference in European countries? Europe still has nationalists, they still have far right wing parties, they sure as SHIT still have things like anti-semitism, homophobia, islamophobia, etc. Where is the evidence that these laws effect some great societal change that would make the US better? In Germany, for some obvious reasons, they have very specific laws pertaining to very specific speech and iconography- like, around Nazis and Nazi symbology. And I would never second-guess Germany's right to manage its own affairs as it sees fit, still in Germany you end up with situations like the Chinese tourists arrested for giving a Nazi salute - likely people who really had little or no understanding of what they were doing or the meaning it conveyed. Certainly they were not on the verge of rekindling widespread Nazi sentiment in Germany. So how much, really, do these laws accomplish?