This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 15th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The call for regulation or prohibition of so-called hate speech has grown just a bit louder

recently with pieces supporting restrictions in two of the largest newspapers in

America. But the arguments for relatively less than unfettered freedom of speech don't hold up according to Cato's Matthew Feeney we spoke this week

There have been a couple of pieces that have been published fairly recently first in the New York Times in early October and then much more recently at the

at the end of October in the Washington Post that essentially make the argument that the two

headlines are free speech is killing us and the

other headline is why America needs a hate speech law and some of the the general

tenor of these the claims that are made by these these authors and I think frankly it's a little

surprising that two major American newspapers chose to publish these things is that is the notion that speech unpopular speech

what one author calls noxious speech is actually causing tangible harm in America and that we need to do something about it.

I think that one of the more striking parts of these articles and a trend we've seen recently of people calling for America to have

hate speech laws is how frankly undeveloped a lot of the ideas are.

One, the article you discussed briefly, the Washington Post article was depressingly enough,

actually written by a former journalist and a former diplomat who seems to make a couple of errors in arguing for why

America needs a hate speech law. One is just historical. It's quite interesting that in the

article the author talks about hate speech laws that have been written since World War II saying that these laws have started out as protections against the kinds of anti-Semitic bigotry that gave rise to the Holocaust.

What he doesn't mention is that actually the Weimar Republic did have what we today would call hate speech laws and

they certainly weren't sufficient to deter the rise of the Nazis.

And there's of course the broader question which I think people struggle to define which is, well, what is hate speech and who gets to decide what hate speech is and these are important questions and they're not flippant.

Anyone with the authority to put people in prison is also in these kind of situations

...