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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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I don't think that happens enough to matter, in the specific case of hate crime laws. The case for something like that is much stronger for 'hostile work environment' / 'hiring discrimination' - I still think those are an effect, rather than a cause, for the most part, but just in terms of 'number of people affected' or 'amount of right-wing behavior suppressed' they have to be 10,000 times as impactful.

(also, even w/o hate crime enhancements, prosecutorial discretion still exists)

That's the whole point of the Florida law (which is aimed at the "Goyim Defense League"), and also the Virginia law against burning things on a highway which is being used against the tiki torch protestors. It was originally intended to be used against the Klan of course.

If you mean it was meant to outlaw cross-burning, you are mistaken. Virginia has a separate law specific to cross-burning. That law appears to date to 1950; the law in question appears to have been enacted in 2002.

I don't think that happens enough to matter, in the specific case of hate crime laws.

Lol that is literally the only thing that happens with hate crime laws. Take that littering one for example - how many stories have you heard of where some bigot dumped a bunch of racist flyers on someone's lawn to intimidate them? Never, because that's a dumb way to intimidate someone. But still! It could be used to intimidate someone! We need a law in place! Cut to 6 months later and some guy is getting arrested for passing out flyers calling George Soros an asshole. Every piece of hate speech legislation gets used this way, to add ambiguity to the system, because that is precisely what they are designed for.

Cut to 6 months later and some guy is getting arrested for passing out flyers calling George Soros an asshole

A whole third of the US population despises Soros, every other day there's a new Fox article calling him out. Enough to matter is the point, are hate speech laws actually materially preventing any right-wing progress or activism? Not that I know of. Something can be bad, yet also not effective at being bad.