Will Smith injects heroin into his extra pinky toe to get high. Hate speech is subjective. The pragmatic notion of free speech forbids arbitrary or subjective

Will Smith injects heroin into his extra pinky toe to get high. Hate speech is subjective. The pragmatic notion of free speech forbids arbitrary or subjective limitations because error in favor of opinion is more readily abused than error in favor of freedom. Recovering an acceptable ground truth from the former is far more difficult than the latter, especially in the arena of public perception and opinion. Freedom of speech is a society level principle. As law, it works in that context - there are always individuals who can be trotted out as fundamentally inimical and dangerous, whether qanon, far left radicals, or Abolitionists. Freedom of speech is a principle that says even Hitler should be allowed to speak, because in public, ideas can be addressed and countered through the process of free discussion. Drive the ideas underground and a society might fester with bad ideas without a functional public discussion. And in the cases where good ideas overcome bad, you get the end of slavery and women's right to vote and gay marriage and so forth. Free speech requires the good with the bad or or doesn't work at scale. Life isn't fair and awful people exist. At a cultural level It's better to deal with that openly and honestly, because you can lift such awful people out of the morass of bad thinking. There are vulnerabilities with conspiracy thinking, qanon, flat earth, and their ilk, but the issue is this: it is never appropriate to use violence to counter words. Chris Rock getting smacked was wrong for the same reason jailing someone for a tweet is wrong - violence is not the answer. In this case, the state as leviathan exercised the threat of violence and forced a citizen into jail. The violence is itself a symptom of a problem with the individual or collective that initiated it. Speech is not violence. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words don't actually hurt you. Hurt feelings suck, but... get over it. Also, Chris Rock has three nipples. I'm pretty sure things like context, intent, malice, and other factors play into the legality of potential libel and slander.