Heed Orwell's Warning On Policing Hate

"Meanwhile, to avoid inadvertently ending up on the Hate List, people begin to watch their words, meaning they begin to watch their thoughts..."

By Wanjiru Njoya, Mises Institute

One of the problems with trying to police “hate” is that it gives the Thought Police an incentive to persecute their fellow citizens, and if they do not find a sufficient number of haters lurking in their midst, they invent them. There is now an entire sector of “experts” dedicated to eradicating hate, and it seems they are now concerned that there may not be enough hate to sustain their hate-finding activities.

Leading the Thought Police in the fight against hate is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a multimillion-dollar Orwellian Ministry of Love. In Orwell’s 1984, he writes that, “The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one.” It is the arm of the party machine charged with designating who is guilty of Hate and forcing them to confess their thoughtcrimes.

Although many were highly amused by the fact that SPLC has been indicted for paying people millions of dollars to organize hate activities, and many hilarious memes were doing the rounds making fun of them, it is no joke to end up on the SPLC Hate List. The Hate List is widely disseminated in the public sector as well as the corporate and non-profit world, and anyone who ends up on the Hate List is likely to suffer real world consequences. That, after all, is the whole point of identifying those guilty of hate—to punish them and ultimately to eradicate them from society.

SPLC recently came to public attention when they put Charlie Kirk on their Hate List just before he was assassinated. They are now back in the limelight after the Justice Department charged them with eleven counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering. As explained by NYT,

The indictment focused on the law center’s past use of paid informants to infiltrate far-right groups. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, accused the group of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”

In his book Making Hate Pay, Tyler O’Neil explains that the SPLC “bankrupted many KKK groups, but it now needed a new host of current villains. In one case, the SPLC tried to create a blacklist to attack pro-life groups. The eventual ‘hate group’ list essentially manufactured hate, listing defunct organizations that extremism experts say didn’t exist.”

Njoya

SPLCs defense to the grand jury indictment is, essentially, that they did nothing wrong as they were paying anonymous informants millions of dollars in an effort to infiltrate hate groups with a view to dismantling them. They argue that for the safety of their informants they had to mask the nature and purpose of the financial transactions, and they remind their critics that they share all their hate data with the police, the FBI, and the Justice Department. They see themselves as vital support for law enforcement. This is not an unreasonable argument, given that the Justice Department does indeed encourage people to report hate, saying on its website that:

It is critical to report hate crimes not only to show support and get help for victims, but also to send a clear message that the community will not tolerate these kinds of crimes. Reporting hate crimes allows communities and law enforcement to fully understand the scope of the problem in a community and put resources toward preventing and addressing attacks based on bias and hate.

Indeed, both SPLC and its hate-industry ally ADL were treated by the previous leadership of the FBI as partners in fighting extremism. SPLC’s efforts towards that goal could be straight out of Orwell. SPLC produces Hate Lists, maintains an interactive Hate Map, and issues Year in Hate reports and Hatewatch newsletters explaining to Americans how many Hate Groups have been found in their country. So far, they have not proposed a Hate Week or a Two Minutes Hate, but that may soon be in the works if they continue down this trajectory.

Hate is, by its nature, a thoughtcrime. It pertains to hostile feelings to another person by virtue of his personal characteristics. According to SPLC, a Hate Group is a group with “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” According to the Justice Department definitions, it refers to:

Hate Crime: At the federal level, a crime motivated by bias against race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability.

Bias or Hate Incident: Acts of prejudice that are not crimes and do not involve violence, threats, or property damage.

As previously discussed, it would be naïve to expect solace from the First Amendment protection of freedom of expression, because the definition of conduct under hate crime laws also includes causing distress with hateful speech. Thus, words, beliefs, and conduct are indirectly conflated in the prosecution of these crimes. The Justice Department says:

However, the First Amendment does not protect against committing a crime, just because the conduct is rooted in philosophical beliefs.

So SPLC and the Justice Department agree on the premise of prosecuting Hate, but disagree on the methods of smoking out haters and on who exactly should be defined as a hater. Here, we would do well to heed Orwell’s warning. As long as Hate Lists are being kept anyone is at risk of finding themselves on it. Orwell depicts this outcome as inevitable:

Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same… Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

Many Republicans are now keen to clarify the boundaries of hate so that “mainstream” conservatives are not caught up in the net. They argue that the Democrats are in fact the real haters. SPLC should go after the real haters, not ordinary conservatives, is now their main concern. SPLC collaborated with the Biden administration in policing hate, but the Trump administration believes that SPLC has been going after the wrong types of people.

Some now argue that SPLC should not have targeted Charlie Kirk or Moms for Liberty. They can go after churches that hate homosexuality, as that is hate, but they should not go after mothers who disagree with teaching pornography in schools, as that is not hate. In this way, the debate has moved on from debating whether hate should be criminalized, to debating how to define hate so that only the real haters—those who really hate others for their race, sexuality, or gender—are targeted by SPLC and other hate-finders.

Far from being against the Ministry of Love, this framing of the debate implies that we do need a Ministry of Love—how else would we determine who the real haters are? Each party wants to keep the Ministry of Love so it can use that machinery to go after the other party, who are, after all, the real hate mongers.

The form taken by this debate should concern all defenders of liberty. In an essay written in 1949 titled “Orwell’s Big Brother: Merely Fiction?” Murray Rothbard picks up on the sinister implications of this institutional war on hate. The drive to stamp out hate masquerades as love—and, after all, who would not want to promote love?—but in reality, it is the expression of a collectivist drive to acquire total control of citizens. Rothbard explained:

George Orwell’s collectivist Utopia has plugged all the loopholes. There is no hope at all for the individual or for humanity, and so the effect on the reader is devastating. Orwell’s future is run by a Party whose job is the total exercise of Power, and it goes about its job with diabolic efficiency and ingenuity… All ideas are of course treasonable and subversive—the only persons permitted to live are those who unthinkingly parrot the Party Line. Any man with a bent for independent thought is subtly encouraged in his heresy by the Thought Police.

The Party’s ultimate goal is to acquire power. As Orwell expresses the Party view, “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement—a world of fear and treachery and torment.” That is no more than you would expect from people devoted to debating hate, researching hate, becoming experts in hate, and studying annual hate reports from the multimillion-dollar Ministry of Love.

Meanwhile, to avoid inadvertently ending up on the Hate List, people begin to watch their words, meaning they begin to watch their thoughts. If we accept the premise that we do indeed want to stamp out hate, we acquiesce in this erosion of our freedom of thought, which is ultimately an erosion of our very humanity.

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