Personally, because I support victims of oppression, any words that disagree with me are hate speech.

Because everything I do is in service of victims of injustice, my actions are just.

There is no “cycle of violence”, only hidden power structures of oppression to be destroyed.

And who defines what constitutes as hate speech?

If I tell you to jump from a bridge to your death, is it my fault for telling you or your fault for acting upon it?

Punish actions, not words. The moment you punish peoples words, you remove the ability to debate, converse, express, rectify, understand.

The “fighting words doctrine” was established in the US in 1942.[0].

> [The Supreme Court] held that "insulting or 'fighting words', those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace" are among the "well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech the prevention and punishment of [which] … have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem."

At least some things classified as hate speech, like racial slurs, seem to me to fall clearly under the category of fighting words. Is the fighting words doctrine fully unsound? Unsound only when applied to social media? Is hate speech just another name for it, or is it an expansion of it?

EDIT: My original link does not include the narrowing of the doctrine. [1] is a better source:

> the Supreme Court redefined the scope of the fighting words doctrine to mean words that are "a direct personal insult or an invitation to exchange fisticuffs."

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fighting_words

"Hate speech" is free speech. If I hate someone, then that's my God-given right to believe what I want and express my opinion, no matter how unwise that opinion is. If I commit or threaten violence, then I am breaking the law, and you can throw me in jail. But not a moment before

Actual leftists (e.g. Emma Goldman) don't say something as dumb as "free speech doesn't mean unlimited speech", but very few Americans are exposed to actual leftist thought on a regular basis. We mostly get pale imitations like "the squad".