Death Penalty for “Hate Speech”? The View from the Universities By Charles Taylor (Florida)

Mrs Vera West ended her recent article on stealthing with the observation that if capital punishment was still the law, this crime could be punished by the death sentence. I note that the Left in the US want hate speech to be punished by death as well. Now, Biden has said that Trump supporters are semi-fascists, so all conservative political speech, such as opposition to abortion on demand and infanticide, would be seen as hate speech. Would the US Bill of Rights prevent a law which condemned conservatives to death for speech deemed unwoke? I would have thought that the US First Amendment, on free speech, would be sufficient, but the Left is unimpressed with this, arguing, or at least their law professors argue in the law reviews, that the First Amendment was not written to cover such speech. After all, the US Supreme Court in Obergell v. Hodges (2015) found that same sex marriage was a constitutional right. That is based not on originalism, what the Founding Fathers thought, but on the living constitution idea, that the constitution must fit contemporary, that is Left wing judicial interpretations. So, anything is possible. Constitutional fundamentalists, both here and in Australia seem to forget that in the end, judges decide what he constitution means, and that interpretation is always highly political:

“Calls for diversity on campuses and in Main Street businesses and banning hate speech, even that protected by the First Amendment , are no longer issues to fight over for college students.

Now, it’s a reason for the electric chair .

In a remarkable shift showing how students, many lining up for President Joe Biden’s loan forgiveness plan, have turned left since the 2020 election, a new Yale survey suggests that America’s best and brightest are giving up on key constitutional freedoms and even embracing socialism.

In the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale University national student survey, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates and provided to Secrets, big majorities want companies to require employees to declare support for workplace diversity just to get a job.

And when it comes to speech, nearly half believe the death penalty is OK to shoot down hate speech.

While the results might please left-leaning college professors, it is stirring concerns for those on the Right who already feel that the Left is turning every position it has into a “hate crime,” from abortion to immigration.

“The college student disillusionment with free speech is growing at an alarming pace,” Buckley Program founder and Executive Director Lauren Noble told us.

“More students are intimidated from speaking freely, and more students are willing to intimidate others from speaking freely than at any time in the history of the survey. In many ways, America’s undergraduate student body seems to be abandoning the very ideas that made America the great country it is today,” said Noble.

The survey is the eighth time the Buckley Program has surveyed students for their support for the Constitution and the furthest it has found students straying from basic American freedoms and values.

Some examples:

67% demand professors and companies declare a commitment to “diversity.”
48% are OK with the death penalty to punish those accused of hate speech.
51% agree that colleges can bar some issues from being discussed.
33% prefer socialism, 33% capitalism, and 35% are unsure.

What’s more, many students are already feeling the pressure to cave into the expanding liberal wave sweeping over college campuses. The survey said that more students than ever feel too intimidated to challenge the positions of professors or fellow students.

“The results are scary,” said pollster Jim McLaughlin.

“They are more likely to support socialism over capitalism. The ideology that gave us Nazism and fascism and has led to the deaths of over 100 million across the world is the preferred system of America’s college students,” he added.

McLaughlin also said that campuses more and more are just becoming “indoctrination mills.”

He told us, “They support free speech until they disagree with it. Talk about a lack of tolerance."

"Is it any wonder why the Left wants to continue to support free college when the current higher education system seems to have become nothing more than indoctrination mills for their radical, big government socialist agenda?"