Musk over here trying to conflate gender-affirming hormone medication being taken by 16-17 year olds with the mutilation of children’s genitalia.
This is thinly veiled hate speech. They are straw-manning those they see as “other”, for the purpose of placing themselves in a morally superior position. It is arguably defensible lies (I didn’t mean, I just meant…), functioning as a dogwhistle to manufacture outrage over imagined extremes that aren’t actually happening, all to stir hatred in the public against LGBTQ+ people and ideologies. And they cap it off with a call to action.
This is painfully similar to how hate speech against the Jewish people started.
I know this will be an unpopular opinion in this thread but this isn’t hate speech in Canada. It’s a vile perspective shared by someone with many impressionable followers but it’s not hate speech. Labeling this exchange as hate speech weakens this term and is not useful in shifting discourse or people’s opinions.
When you use the phrase, “hate speech in Canada,” it is clear you are using the specific legal standard for criminal speech in Canada. That is not the only definition of hate speech. More generally, anything intended to express or incite hatred is hate speech, it need not be legally found to be a crime.
Nearly any discourse can be considered hate speech using your broad definition. And when everything is hate speech nothing is hate speech, it loses it’s usefulness as a term. Let’s use accurate language
This is painfully similar to how hate speech against the Jewish people started.
“The Cultural Marxists are promoting deviant behaviour to weaken Western Civilization.”
“The Jews are promoting deviant behaviour to weaken the Aryan Race.”
Yeah these guys are saying the same things now as were being said a hundred years ago. And lately a lot of people are dropping the code words.
We know what this kind of thing led to in the past.
So yeah, it’s very painfully similar.
Genetic evolution stopped when civilization started and we were no longer small tribes killing each other for survival. Our brains work on that level.
Fascism is basically just a modern iteration of feudalism. Our instincts make it feel right to have traditional hierarchies based off of ancestry and we should kill the other tribes to make our tribe stronger. Of course those instincts are destructive to civilization, but because of civilization we’re always going to have them.
