This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 9, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Speech that is extreme still deserves protection from government censorship

and drawing the line between acceptable speech and

extremist or hate speech is virtually impossible.

Cato Senior Fellow Fleming Rose spoke with me about extreme speech, and the effort currently underway in Italy

and elsewhere to begin regulating so-called fake news. I see protesters who are

holding up signs quite often.

One in particular, it said, hate speech is not free speech.

And hashtag take a knee.

And the idea was that, guess sort of mixing the various memes and protest movements

one is arguing that freedom of speech does not include speech at the extreme ends and

that a silent protest of taking a knee of quietly protesting something.

This is appropriate.

This is how we're meant to make use of our rights to free speech.

You draw a distinction that a lot of people don't draw. You draw a distinction between speech that is

merely offensive or awful in a way and speech that is dangerous.

So why is it important that we make that distinction between extremist speech and speech that is dangerous?

Because the fundamental First Amendment principle is viewpoint neutrality.

And when it comes to hate speech, first there is no clear definition of what hate speech is.

You know, one man's hate speech may be another man's poetry.

And if you engage in, or if you try to define the limits of free speech with references to extremist speech or hate speech,

...