Hate Groups

The Ku Klux Klan, the Black Hebrew Israelites, and the Westboro Baptist Church: one or more of these hate groups want nothing more than to see people attacked simply for what they were born with, and all three and 914 more hate groups are currently legal in the United States (Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC], 2017). Under the First Amendment, hate groups are allowed the right to free speech, but a list of exceptions has grown out of several landmark Supreme Court cases that have evolved the conditions of free speech, with the most important aspect being violence. Many hate groups throughout the history of the United States have called for the mass murder of whatever particular group they are against, and the legality of such speech has been
As stated in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, free speech is where, “Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech …or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances” (Legal Information Institute [LIT], n.d.-f). Despite the brevity, the one sentence that is the First Amendment has proven to be a vague clause that has arbitrarily seen the freedom of hate speech and the persecution of free speech. As pointed out by Tsesis (2016), the First Amendment merely acknowledges the importance of the freedom of speech and of its existence in the United States, but does not define what free speech actually is (p. 1021). The importance of specifying that only “Congress shall make no law” implies that it is the duty of the Supreme Court to determine what is allowed under free speech, as the Constitution was meant to be a be a “living document” to be added on to as the United States changed over time (United States Courts [USC], n.d.-a). However, this poses a problem, as since there have been two and a half centuries of cases decided by the Supreme Court, many people outside of the criminal justice system are dangerously unaware of what exactly their freedom of speech entitles them to. This applies even more so to hate groups, whose
(2015, p. 9)
This may seem to go against Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, where fighting words that pose a clear, violent threat are not legal, but the FBI only goes so far as ‘malice’ rather than ‘clear and present danger.’ But this is not a legal definition, only an informal definition written by the FBI, but since this definition is what is used by law enforcement, it is the ‘law’ that applies to Americans. As of 2017, there has been no Supreme Court decision related to truly regulating the actions of hate groups. Even Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the closest the Supreme Court came to regulating violent hate groups, only concerned individuals, but not large organized hate