Daniel sent us this one — and it lands right in the middle of something that actually just happened. The UK Home Office, on May 15th, barred Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur from entering the country under a section of the Immigration Act from 1971 that lets the Home Secretary exclude people whose presence isn't "conducive to the public good." The stated concern was that their past statements — particularly around Israel, Gaza, Zionism — could stir up racial hatred against Jewish people. The backlash was immediate, and it came from a specific group of people who think the UK got this completely wrong — not because they agree with Piker or Uygur, but because they think the state should never have the power to make that call. So the prompt is essentially: who are these people, what do they actually believe, and how do they square it with the historical evidence that speech can lead to violence?
This is one of those moments where a news story reveals a genuine philosophical fault line. It's not just a culture war scuffle. The people defending Piker and Uygur's right to enter the UK aren't necessarily defending what they said — they're defending a principle about where the line gets drawn.
Or whether there even is a line.
And that's where this gets interesting. Because the UK has a legal framework that says incitement to racial hatred is a crime — that's the Public Order Act of 1986. It makes it an offense to use threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behavior with intent to stir up racial hatred. The US, by contrast, has the Brandenburg standard — speech can only be restricted if it's directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to actually produce it. That "imminent" word does enormous work.
The UK says "this might stir up hatred," and the US says "call us when the riot is already starting.
That's the caricature, but it's not entirely unfair. The US standard comes from Brandenburg versus Ohio, 1969 — a case about a Ku Klux Klan rally where the Supreme Court said the speech was protected because it was abstract advocacy, not a direct call to immediate violence. The Court explicitly overturned the old "bad tendency" test that had been used for decades — the idea that speech could be restricted if it tended to produce bad outcomes. Brandenburg replaced that with a much higher bar.
The UK is essentially still operating on something closer to the bad tendency test.
In a specific, narrow way — yes. And that's what the free speech absolutists find alarming. They look at the UK's approach and see a system where the government gets to decide which speech is too dangerous to allow, and they think that power is inherently corrupting.
Okay, so let's name them. Who are the ideologues? The prompt asks for the actual people and schools of thought behind this position.
I'd group them into roughly three camps. First, you have the First Amendment originalists and civil libertarians — people like Nadine Strossen, who was president of the ACLU from 1991 to 2008. She wrote an entire book called "Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship" in 2018. Her argument, and it's one she's been making for decades, is that hate speech laws are a cure worse than the disease. She points out that throughout American history, speech restrictions have been used disproportionately against marginalized groups — civil rights activists, anti-war protesters, labor organizers.
The mechanism being: once you give the state a tool to suppress speech it doesn't like, it will use that tool against whoever is least popular at the moment.
And she has receipts. During the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested multiple times under various public order statutes. The people who today say "we need hate speech laws to protect vulnerable minorities" — Strossen's response is: look at who actually gets prosecuted under these laws historically. It's not the powerful.
That's camp one. Who's camp two?
Camp two is the libertarian legal scholars — Eugene Volokh at UCLA is probably the most prominent. He runs the Volokh Conspiracy blog, which has been a hub for this kind of analysis for decades. His framework is more of a cost-benefit analysis. He argues that even if you accept that hate speech causes real harm — and he doesn't dismiss that — the institutional risk of giving government the power to define and suppress it outweighs the harm. Because governments change. The people in power change. A hate speech law passed by a government you trust today is a weapon available to a government you fear tomorrow.
This is the classic slippery slope argument, but he'd say it's not a fallacy — it's an empirical observation.
He would, and he's got examples. In the UK, a man was prosecuted in 2018 for calling Islam a "false religion" in a public setting. Now, you might find that statement offensive or not, but the question is whether the state should be in the business of prosecuting theological opinions. Volokh's point is that once you create that category of prohibited speech, it expands. It always expands.
Camp three is the institutional advocates — FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the Cato Institute. FIRE in particular has been aggressive about pushing for what they call "free speech culture" on campuses and in public life. They've defended the speech rights of people across the political spectrum. Their argument is that the solution to bad speech is more speech — counter-protest, rebuttal, exposure.
All three camps converge on the same core belief: that the marketplace of ideas actually works.
Yes, and that's the Holmesian framework — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's dissent in Abrams versus United States in 1919. He wrote that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." The metaphor is explicitly economic: let ideas compete, and the good ones will drive out the bad.
Which is a lovely thought, but markets fail constantly. That's why we have regulations.
That's exactly the counterargument. But the absolutists have a response to that too. They say the marketplace of ideas isn't like a financial market — it doesn't just produce monopolies and crashes. They point to the actual historical trajectory: racist ideas that were once mainstream in the US have been driven to the fringe not by censorship, but by exposure and argument. The Klan didn't decline because the government banned it — it declined because it became socially toxic.
Though I'd note the Klan also declined because the federal government successfully prosecuted its members for actual crimes — violence, intimidation, conspiracy. It wasn't just a debate club loss.
And that's a distinction the absolutists draw carefully — they're not saying all speech is harmless. They're saying the speech itself shouldn't be the crime. If someone calls for violence and violence actually occurs, you prosecute the violence. If there's a conspiracy to commit violence, you prosecute the conspiracy. But the speech alone, even if it's advocating for terrible things, remains protected unless it meets that Brandenburg threshold of imminence.
Let's push on that. The prompt raises the historical record — and this is where the absolutist position gets genuinely uncomfortable. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. The broadcasts explicitly called for the extermination of Tutsis, named specific people to be killed, gave locations. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted the broadcasters for direct and public incitement to commit genocide. That wasn't abstract advocacy. That was a radio station functioning as a coordination mechanism for mass murder.
This is the case that puts the absolutists on their back foot. Their response — and I want to be fair to it — is that RTLM wasn't engaged in "speech" in the sense the First Amendment contemplates. It was engaged in what they'd classify as conduct. The broadcasts were part of an organized military operation. They were essentially giving orders. The absolutists would say: if you're using a radio to coordinate killing squads, that's not a free speech issue — that's a conspiracy to commit murder issue, and conspiracy is already illegal.
That feels like a definitional dodge. Where's the line between "advocating for violence" and "coordinating violence"?
That's the million-dollar question, and honestly, the absolutists don't have a clean answer. They fall back on Brandenburg — was the speech directed to producing imminent lawless action, and was it likely to do so? The RTLM broadcasts would almost certainly fail the Brandenburg test in the other direction — they were so directly tied to specific imminent violence that even the US standard would allow prosecution. So the absolutists aren't saying Rwanda-style broadcasts should be legal. They're saying that case is so extreme it doesn't tell us much about where to draw the line in ordinary political speech.
There's a spectrum between "abstract advocacy" and "coordinating killing squads," and a lot of harmful speech sits in the middle. Let's talk about Myanmar. There was a 2023 study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution that found anti-Muslim hate speech on Facebook preceded a 15 percent increase in localized violence against Rohingya communities. That's not a radio station giving coordinates. That's a social media environment where hatred was normalized and violence followed.
This is where the absolutist position starts to strain against empirical reality. Their counterargument is that correlation isn't causation — that the violence in Myanmar was driven by political instability, ethnic tensions, and military policy, and the Facebook posts were a symptom, not a cause. But I find that increasingly hard to sustain. The study controlled for other variables. The effect was localized and temporally linked to the speech. That's about as good as social science gets in these situations.
The absolutists are basically making a bet: the risk of government censorship is greater than the risk of hate speech leading to violence. And they're making that bet even as the evidence suggests the violence risk is real.
And they're explicit about it. Strossen has said directly that even if hate speech causes harm — and she acknowledges it does — the cure of censorship is worse than the disease. Her argument is that suppressing hate speech doesn't eliminate hate, it just drives it underground where it's harder to monitor and counter. Better to have the bigots out in the open where you can see them and argue against them.
Which brings us to the Skokie case. This is the absolutists' exhibit A.
The National Socialist Party of America — neo-Nazis — wanted to march through Skokie, Illinois, a town with a large population of Holocaust survivors. The town tried to block it. The ACLU defended the Nazis' right to march. And the ACLU took enormous heat for it — they lost members, they lost funding. But they argued that allowing the march actually reduced violence by channeling anger into legal protest rather than making martyrs of the Nazis.
The march in Skokie itself never actually happened — the Nazis ended up holding a rally in Chicago instead, after the courts struck down the Skokie ordinances. The rally was small, heavily counter-protested, and largely ignored. The ACLU's argument is that the whole episode proved their point: the legal system worked, the Nazis were exposed as pathetic rather than powerful, and no violence occurred.
Though you could also argue the legal system worked by eventually giving the town enough tools to make the Nazis go somewhere else — which is a kind of soft suppression.
That's a fair read. And it gets at something deeper: even in the US, speech isn't actually absolute. The First Amendment has exceptions. Defamation, obscenity, incitement, fighting words — that last one from Chaplinsky versus New Hampshire in 1942. The Court said there are categories of speech that are "no essential part of any exposition of ideas" and can be restricted. So when we say "free speech absolutist," we're talking about people who want to narrow those exceptions to the absolute minimum — ideally just the Brandenburg standard for incitement — but nobody is actually arguing for zero restrictions whatsoever.
That's an important nuance. The debate isn't "should there be any limits," it's "where should the limits be, and who should decide.
And that brings us to something the prompt specifically asked about — the Fifth Amendment connection.
Which, let's be honest, is the part where the prompt got the amendment wrong.
It did, but in an interesting way. The Fifth Amendment is about due process and self-incrimination — "nor shall any person be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." It's not directly about free speech. But the connection makes sense once you understand how constitutional law developed in the US. The Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause was the vehicle the Supreme Court used to incorporate the First Amendment against the states.
Most people think the First Amendment always applied everywhere in the US.
It didn't. The Bill of Rights originally only applied to the federal government. States could restrict speech under their own constitutions. It wasn't until Gitlow versus New York in 1925 that the Supreme Court said the First Amendment applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause — which itself echoes the Fifth Amendment's due process language. So the intellectual chain is: the Fifth Amendment says the federal government can't deprive you of liberty without due process. The Fourteenth Amendment says the same about states. And the Court said that "liberty" in that context includes the fundamental rights in the Bill of Rights, including free speech.
The prompt is essentially asking: doesn't the US constitutional framework recognize that speech can be restricted when it threatens ordered liberty?
Yes, and that's exactly the tension. Justice Cardozo, in Palko versus Connecticut in 1937, defined those fundamental rights as ones that are "of the very essence of a scheme of ordered liberty." The question is whether restrictions on hate speech preserve ordered liberty or undermine it. The absolutists say: ordered liberty requires that the government not pick and choose which speech is allowed, because that power is incompatible with liberty itself. Their opponents say: ordered liberty requires that minority groups not live in fear, and that requires restricting speech that undermines their equal standing.
This is Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance. Unlimited tolerance leads to the destruction of tolerance itself. You have to be intolerant of intolerance, or the tolerant society collapses.
Popper made that argument in 1945, in "The Open Society and Its Enemies," and it's become the go-to citation for people who want to restrict hate speech. The absolutists' response is that Popper was wrong — or at least, that his paradox doesn't apply to speech restrictions. They say the best defense against intolerance is open debate, not censorship. And they point to the actual decline of organized racism in the US as evidence. The Klan's membership collapsed after the 1960s not because it was banned, but because its ideas were exposed and ridiculed in public.
That took decades, and a lot of people got hurt in the meantime.
That's the tradeoff. The absolutists would say: yes, people got hurt, and that's terrible, but the alternative — giving the state power to define and suppress dangerous ideas — would have hurt more people in the long run. They're making a utilitarian argument, essentially. They just weight the variables differently.
Let's talk about Jeremy Waldron. He's the philosopher who's made the most sophisticated case against the absolutist position.
Waldron's book "The Harm in Hate Speech" from 2012 is essential reading on this. His argument isn't about violence at all — it's about dignity and social standing. He says hate speech doesn't just offend people; it undermines what he calls the "assurance" that members of minority groups have that they are safe and equal members of society. When you see racist graffiti or hear public hate speech, it tells you that there are people in your community who don't think you belong, and the fact that it's allowed to happen tells you the society isn't fully committed to protecting you.
It's not about hurt feelings. It's about a kind of civic erosion.
And Waldron draws an analogy to libel law. We restrict libel not because it hurts someone's feelings, but because it damages their reputation — their standing in the community. Hate speech, he argues, does something similar to entire groups. It libels them as a class. And just as we don't say "the solution to libel is more speech," we shouldn't say that about hate speech.
How do the absolutists respond to Waldron?
They say his framework is too vague to be workable. Who decides what speech "undermines assurance"? What counts as undermining equal standing? Strossen points out that throughout history, the people who get to define "harmful speech" are the people in power, and they define it in ways that protect their own interests. In the UK, as I mentioned, a man was prosecuted for calling Islam a false religion. Is that undermining the assurance of Muslims, or is it expressing a theological opinion? Someone has to decide, and the absolutists don't trust anyone to make that decision fairly.
There's also the heckler's veto problem. If speech can be restricted because it makes people feel unsafe, then the most violent and intolerant members of society get to set the boundaries of acceptable discourse. All they have to do is threaten violence, and suddenly the speaker they don't like becomes the one who's restricted.
That's exactly the argument. And it's not hypothetical. The ACLU has documented cases where university speakers were disinvited not because of what they might say, but because of threats of violence from people who disagreed with them. The absolutists say: once you create a "safety" exception to free speech, you've handed a veto to anyone willing to be sufficiently threatening.
Let's bring this back to the UK decision that sparked the prompt. Piker and Uygur weren't prosecuted for speech — they were denied entry. It's an immigration decision, not a criminal one.
Right, and that's a different legal framework. Section 3, subsection 5, paragraph a of the Immigration Act of 1971 gives the Home Secretary discretion to exclude someone whose presence is "not conducive to the public good." It's an administrative decision, not a criminal conviction. The standard of proof is lower, and there's limited judicial review. From the absolutist perspective, this is even worse than a hate speech prosecution — it's the government making a purely discretionary call about who gets to speak in the country, with no jury, no criminal standard of evidence, and essentially no appeal.
Though the UK would say: every country has the right to control its borders. The US does this too — it bars foreign nationals for all kinds of reasons, including speech-related ones. The difference is the standard.
The US standard is actually quite permissive. Under current US immigration law, foreign nationals can be excluded for terrorist activities or for endorsing terrorist organizations, but the bar is high. The UK's "not conducive to the public good" standard is much more subjective. The Home Secretary — currently a political appointee — gets to decide what threatens the public good. For absolutists, that's the nightmare scenario: a politician deciding which political speech is too dangerous to allow.
The absolutist position on the Piker-Uygur case would be: even if you find their views abhorrent, even if you think their rhetoric about Israel and Zionism crosses into antisemitism, the solution is to let them in and argue against them. Barring them makes them martyrs and validates their narrative that the establishment is trying to silence them.
There's some evidence for that. After the UK decision, both Piker and Uygur got massive coverage they wouldn't have otherwise received. Their platforms grew. The controversy gave them exactly the kind of attention the exclusion was supposed to prevent. The absolutists would say: see? The cure made it worse.
The counterargument is: that's a short-term effect. Over the long term, if you consistently deny platforms to people who stir up racial hatred, you reduce the normalization of those views. You change the Overton window.
That's the empirical question at the heart of this. Does suppressing hate speech reduce hate, or does it just drive it underground and make it more potent? The evidence is mixed. Germany has strict hate speech laws and lower rates of far-right violence than the US — but Germany also has a completely different historical context, a parliamentary system, and a political culture shaped by the post-war denazification process. You can't just isolate the speech laws as the causal variable.
Germany's Basic Law explicitly rejects absolute free speech. Article 5 protects freedom of expression, but Article 18 says that anyone who abuses that freedom to undermine the "free democratic basic order" can have that right forfeited. Holocaust denial is a crime. The German constitutional framework was built by people who had just watched their country destroy itself, and they decided that protecting democracy required restricting anti-democratic speech.
That's the core philosophical divide. The German approach says: democracy is not a suicide pact. The American absolutist approach says: democracy is strong enough to survive bad speech, and the cure of censorship is more dangerous than the disease of hate. Neither position is obviously correct. They're different bets about which failure mode is worse.
Let's talk about the UK's actual track record with the Public Order Act. Since 1986, there have been approximately 2,500 prosecutions for incitement to racial hatred. That's about 65 per year. It's not a huge number, but it's also not nothing.
The critics say those prosecutions have had a chilling effect. There was a 2018 case where a man was prosecuted for posting lyrics from a song that were deemed racist. There was the case I mentioned of the man prosecuted for calling Islam a false religion. The absolutists argue that these cases show the inevitable creep — what starts as a law against genuine incitement to violence becomes a tool for policing offensive opinions.
Though supporters of the law would say: those are edge cases that get attention precisely because they're unusual. The bulk of prosecutions are against actual neo-Nazis and organized racists. The system mostly works as intended.
That's the question, isn't it? Does the system mostly work? The absolutists say: even if it works 95 percent of the time, the 5 percent where it's abused are catastrophic for liberty, and you can't prevent that abuse without eliminating the power entirely. Their opponents say: every law has edge cases and errors, and the benefits of reducing racial hatred outweigh the costs of occasional overreach.
We've mapped out the absolutist position, the counterarguments, and the empirical evidence. What does this actually mean for someone trying to make sense of these debates?
I think there are two big takeaways. The first is that the debate isn't really about free speech versus safety. It's about who you trust to draw the line. The absolutists trust the marketplace of ideas and fear government overreach. Their opponents trust democratic institutions to distinguish between advocacy and incitement. Your position probably depends on which failure mode you find more frightening — the government suppressing legitimate speech, or hate speech causing real harm.
That's not a question with a right answer. It's a temperamental and experiential thing. If you've seen government censorship up close, you're probably an absolutist. If you've seen hate speech lead to violence, you probably want restrictions.
The second takeaway is that the US First Amendment is an outlier globally. Most democracies — Canada, Germany, the UK, France, Australia — have some form of hate speech law. The US approach is not the global norm. It's a specific historical and legal choice, rooted in the First Amendment's text and the Supreme Court's interpretation of it over two centuries. Understanding that helps contextualize a lot of modern debates — about Section 230, about platform moderation, about the EU's Digital Services Act. The US is playing by different rules than everyone else, and that creates constant friction.
The US rules are themselves not static. Brandenburg overturned 50 years of precedent when it was decided. The Court could shift again. There are justices on the current Court who have signaled interest in revisiting some of these doctrines.
That's right. And the Fifth Amendment connection the prompt asked about — that's part of this too. The incorporation doctrine, the idea that fundamental rights apply against the states through the Due Process Clause, was itself a judicial innovation. It wasn't in the original Constitution. So even the absolutist position rests on a chain of Supreme Court decisions that could, in theory, be revisited.
Though good luck getting anyone to revisit incorporation. That ship has sailed.
But the point is that these frameworks are constructed, not given. They're choices. And different societies have made different choices based on their histories and values.
If someone wants to go deeper on this, where should they start?
Read the actual court cases. Brandenburg versus Ohio is short and readable — you can find it online in 20 minutes. The UK's Public Order Act of 1986 is also worth skimming to see how the statutory language actually works. And then the two books I'd recommend as bookends: Nadine Strossen's "Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship" from 2018, and Jeremy Waldron's "The Harm in Hate Speech" from 2012. They're the best articulations of the two sides, and they're both written for a general audience.
Neither will give you a comfortable answer. Strossen will make you worry about government power. Waldron will make you worry about what happens to vulnerable people when hate is allowed to flourish. You'll finish both books less certain than when you started.
Which is probably the right place to land on a question this hard.
The UK's decision on Piker and Uygur is a test case. If the absolutists are right, this exclusion will just drive their rhetoric into more sympathetic audiences and make them more influential. If the critics are right, it will reduce the temperature of public discourse and signal that certain kinds of speech are beyond the pale. We won't know which is true for years.
There's a future dimension to this that I think about a lot. As AI-generated speech becomes more sophisticated — deepfakes, synthetic voices, automated propaganda — the line between speech and conduct is going to blur even further. The absolutist position may become harder to defend when a synthetic voice can incite violence at scale with no human speaker to hold accountable. What does Brandenburg's "imminent lawless action" test even mean when the speaker is an algorithm?
That's the next frontier. For now, the Piker-Uygur case is a useful stress test for both positions. And the fact that reasonable people can look at the same facts and reach completely opposite conclusions tells you this isn't a simple question.
It never is. That's why we do this show.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early 1500s, Tibetan monks documented a phenomenon they called "singing snow" — the acoustic property of fresh snowpack reflecting sound waves at specific angles during sunrise, creating a sustained harmonic resonance that could carry a human voice for miles across mountain valleys. The effect is caused by the crystalline structure of high-altitude snow acting as a natural sound mirror when the morning sun partially melts the outermost layer, creating a temporarily smooth, acoustically reflective surface.
...right.
This has been My Weird Prompts. We'd love to hear what you think — leave us a review wherever you listen, or find us at myweirdprompts.I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. We'll be back with a new prompt next time.
