Hate Speech is Scared Speech

Hate Speech is Scared Speech Niles Heckman Download

The insight hidden in plain sight: hate speech is not the roar of strength, but the cry of fear dressed up in armor. When someone unleashes venomous words - when they spit their bile into the public square - it is easy to mistake it for dominance, for power. But if you lean closer, if you listen not just to the words but to the trembling beneath them, you hear something else: fear. Fear of displacement, fear of change, fear of the unknown that looms like a shadow over the familiar world.

Hate speech is scared speech because no one lashes out at what they fully understand. We only vilify what we think threatens us, and what threatens us is usually what we do not yet comprehend. And let's say in India for the misguided Hindu Nationalist, or in our country Christian Nationalist (which is really just Christian Supremacist) who has such low self worth and self esteem they allowed themselves to sink into a theo / fasct cult this is the non-supremacist, immigrant, queer person, the political other - these figures become phantasms onto which fear is projected. And because the psyche cannot say, “I am afraid,” it converts that energy into hate, which feels more forceful, more self-assured. But it is a mask, a brittle shell around a frightened core. Any former Neo Natzi in recovery that evolved beyond it will have done enough development to say in their past it was easier for them to say "I hate them" then the reality which was "I was so scared". 

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