States Are Running “Snitch Hotlines” to Report Bad Speech

​Operator: “Bias hotline.”
 
Puck: “I’d like to report three men who are making remarks that denigrate people’s identities. Some of their remarks have to do with race, some with religion, some with personal characteristics.”
 
Operator: “There are three of them? Are they some kind of gang?”
 
Puck: “Yes, three, obviously some kind of extremist organization, and they are making these remarks in front of large crowds of drunk, jeering people who egg them on.”
 
Operator: “That’s terrible. Do you know who they are?”
 
Puck: “I do. Their names are Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, and Bill Burr.”
 
Operator: “Can you spell those for me?”
 
At first, we at Protect The 1st didn’t believe it. There are a lot of unsubstantiated allegations floating around; this had to be another crazy internet rumor. The idea that blue states, where more than 100 million Americans live, are operating snitch lines to keep records of unsubstantiated accusations of jokes or remarks that are alleged to show bias had to be an internet myth.
 
It just couldn’t be true, we thought. Surely we are not so far gone from the spirit and letter of the First Amendment that our government is taking down anonymous accusations of bad speech.
 
And yet here we are.
 
California, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont are running “bias reporting hotlines” that people can call and report bad or hateful speech. Washington State is preparing to launch its own hotline soon.
 
Like many rotten ideas, the bias hotline started out with a commendable concern. Some high schools and then colleges had hotlines through which students who felt bullied could turn for confidential reporting. In America today, however, no good idea goes unperverted. Once adopted by colleges and universities, the bias hotline morphed into an all-purpose receptacle for anything anyone didn’t like.
 
For example, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reports that a “bias incident report” at the University of California, San Diego, was written up about a student humor publication that satirized “safe spaces.”
 
The bias incident hotline concept then migrated to the states, latching on to legitimate hate crimes hotlines, to include offensive jokes or “imitating someone’s cultural norm or practices.” So we went from reporting hate “crimes,” to reporting vague infractions of anything offensive. So much so that in states like Vermont the police are now keeping faithful records of people accused of making statements that are “biased but protected speech.”
 
Why? In some states, authorities can reach out to the purported offender and urge them to seek counseling. In Oregon, self-reported “victims” of “non-crime hate incidents” can receive public assistance for therapy, security cameras, and even ask the state to pay their rent.
 
The worst aspect of these hotlines is that they are easily weaponized. They give a perfect opportunity for an aggrieved person to snitch on their landlord, ex-lover, or the barista who forgot their skim latte order.
 
Worse, the definition of bias – even hate speech itself – is inherently subjective. It is vague enough to encompass the inoffensive, the tasteless, and the despicable. Yet even what reasonable people would agree is hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. That doesn’t make it okay. But it does make it legal.
 
Consider: While the three comedians’ routines are often borderline, they are used to hold up a mirror to society. And they are worth protecting because Chappelle, Rock, and Burr are funny, edging their comedy with humility and humanity. Of course, genuine hate speech is real. But no government agency can change hearts and minds. Only culture, faith, community, and a little bit of public shaming every now and then can do that.
 
But sending authorities to someone’s house to tell them to tone down their language is a recipe for inspiring more hate speech. And dispatching someone with a gun and a badge to police speech, even if no arrests are made, threatens to create a national speech nanny like the one emerging in the United Kingdom.
 
Why don’t these states get this? “If it is not a crime, we sometimes contact the offending party and try to do training so that it doesn’t happen again,” Saterria Kersey, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, told The Washington Free Beacon.
 
We say if it’s not a crime, the authorities have no business poking their noses into it. And hey, Saterria, you sound like a nice person. Please give us your home address. We’d love to swing by your house and share our take on the First Amendment.
 
Or not: After we re-read that last paragraph again, it sounded vaguely threatening. We certainly didn’t mean it that way, we swear! But that’s the point.

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