Given the evils of hate, any argument for protecting hate speech is, at best, an uphill effort and, at worst, simply misguided. Many people either accept, or at least wonder whether they should accept, an argument that goes something like this:

As an advocate of almost absolute protection of free speech, I should explain the grounds for my valuation of free speech and rejection of the just mentioned claim. That explanation, it turns out, is too ambitious for this essay. Nevertheless, Section II of this chapter describes but does not defend a theory of why racist or hate speech should be protected – a theory that I believe provides the best, albeit often unrecognized, explanation of existing American case law but one that is surely a controversial, probably minority, view even in the United States. There are, of course, arguments that emphasize different evils about hate speech, evils presumably less dramatic but more common than those just mentioned, about the harms caused by hate speech. Although these will mostly not be discussed here, my expectation is that the arguments for and against prohibitions discussed here will, with variable force, also apply to those arguments – and I will occasionally note how a focus on these rationales could weaken or strengthen arguments against regulation.