Bad ideas that start in Europe eventually end up in the United States. The most recent bad idea in Europe is that hate speech should be criminalized.
The European Union has pushed this, and now, Scotland is pushing it. Scotland has a brand new hate crime law which has come into force.
The BBC reported on this, saying:
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. … The maximum penalty under the new act in Scotland is a jail sentence of seven years. A person commits an offence if they communicate material, or behave in a manner, “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive,” with the intention of stirring up hatred based on protected characteristics.
The claim of the Scottish government is that this does not…
