> "hate speech" is a term that was coined in recent years to silence people. Americans have been struggling with hate speech and censorship for well over a cen

> "hate speech" is a term that was coined in recent years to silence people. Americans have been struggling with hate speech and censorship for well over a century. The most obvious example is the censoring of the film The Birth of a Nation back in the late 1910s, but there are examples even further back in US history. Our interpretation of "freedom of speech" (both philosophically and as protected by the First Amendment) isn't immutable and has changed since the Bill of Rights was adopted. Prior to the 1950s, the supreme court upheld the censorship of books and film for reasons that we now interpret as unconstitutional, and censorship remained the law in many states for decades after. I would argue that our current expectation for "free speech" and this idea that it is "nearly absolute" is far more liberal than what we've seen through most of American history.