Sargon has now been banned from Patreon, for — imagine my shock — hate speech.

What is curious is the precise sentence that the political activists at Patreon chose as their demonstrative example of Sargon’s hatred:

This is what I mean about the chat, I just can’t be bothered to deal with people who treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, you’re acting like a bunch of niggers, just so you know. You act like white niggers; exactly how you describe black people acting, is the impression I get, dealing with the Alt-Right.

This is, as I likened to Avialae last year, akin to condemning Orwell’s writings for advocating totalitarianism. In a comment clearly critical of white racists, Sargon gets banned for hate speech, for accusing Nazi trolls of projection. The idiotic notion that this might be hateful towards black people because of the use of “nigger” requires a complete suspension of the reader’s understanding of how the English language works. A single word cannot convey an emotion, or even an unambiguous meaning, because words are associative and familial in their meanings, not dictated in a top-down manner. It’s why we make sentences, rather than grunt syllables.

Unfortunately, the general tack that most moderate-left and right-wing people have taken has been to deny their own hatred. “It’s not really hateful!”

This is ineffectual for the same reason that it is dishonest. Aside from the inherent subjectivity in determining what does and does not sound hateful, some expressions of hatred are perfectly legitimate statements — morally and politically.

Consider:

I hate child rapists.

I will personally give $100 to anyone who can persuade me that the above statement is morally flawed.

I will go further — who would dare to even question the validity of such a statement in public under their own name?

This is an obvious example, but there are less obvious examples too. I will go out on a limb and presume that Jack Conte — or perhaps some of his employees — hate Nazis, or at least, don’t have a problem with hating Nazis. Q.E.D., hatred — in and of itself — is not evil.

As long as people backpedal and claim that they’re not really hateful, they will be tacitly granting the right of censorship to the Sauron of Silicon Valley, so long as the censored can reasonably be construed as having said something “hateful.”

Which, of course, is trivially easy.