This is really quite provably wrong, and an extremely dangerous position to take.

The 'pen' amplified by the media - is much, much, mightier than the sword.

It is mass/social media that creates waves of outrage that compound unto themselves, without this, general uprisings are really quite hard to fathom.

This is exactly what happened in the Rwandan Genocide.

In Rwanda it was 'radio jockeys' on a daily basis would spew really crazy hate speech all day, every day: "The Tutsi/Hutus are like cockroaches, one day, we will exterminate all of them! They are vile creatures, from hell, they rape our children, the rape our women, soon we will rise up!"

And then it gets worse, and worse until one day "The time is now, come out of your homes, rise up and kill them!"

Now imagine people coming out of their homes, with machetes, hacking up their neighbours with knifes.

It's uglier than a zombie film.

Pregnant women hacked to bits, on the side of the road. Roving gangs of people, literally blood in their hands, burning down buildings with people inside them. Breaking into catholic girls schools, grabbing the girls, raping them, then hacking them up.

Unthinkable stuff.

The Rwandan genocide was not 'Force A' (pro this) and 'Force B' (pro that) fighting one another, it was more or less widespread ethnic warfare - a lot of regular people on the streets coming out to fight one another.

When General Dallaire (Cdn. General overseeing the tiny UN mission) tried to take action - it was to go the radio station to try to get them to appeal for calm, because that was the primary means of mass communication.

It's really, really easy to ferment 'hate' in the populist sense of the word.

It's one thing to talk about 'hate speech' in the sense of 'some guy said something terrible about another' - that's more or less an intellectual concept.

But when it starts to be organized and compounded, it becomes a serious problem very quickly.

Nobody cares about the redneck next door - but when people start forming mini-local movements ("Kill all the Cops", "Kill the Negros", "Kill the White People") then it will get out of hand, fast.

I have seen on TikTok in the last few days, some really scary stuff: A young Black man referring to some kind of African 'God' that will come and wipe out all the 'pale skins' and the 'sun will wither their white skin away'. Literally calling for genocide. And a young white guy with sunglasses, just staring at the camera with a note: "Hey, what if we didn't have any Black People in America. Just sayin' ..." Which is directly more or less a controversial, rhetorical question, but it has some pretty heavy/scary overtones.

This stuff can get out of hand very fast.

Finally note that the press - including CNN/Fox/MSNBC etc. have drastically toned down their coverage of protests. There are protests all over the nation right now - if you turn on TikTok it's crazy - there is a lot going on. The press realizes their 'complicity' in that covering such activities gives rise to the notion in other people and I believe have 'turned it down' on purpose on some level. Certainly the 'pro Biden' press is very wary because they realize images of violence hurt him.

Consider the 'Tea Party Movement'. It was a relatively small movement, but when Fox decided to 'go all in' on it, it got very big, very fast. When a small movement is thrust into the homes of millions of people, led and supported by 'respected advocates' then such things can grow quickly. Without national coverage, it's very difficult for movements to get big - which is of course one of the central sources of problematic editorial bias for cable news: they 'decided' what is going to be 'national news' by virtue of where they point the lens.

This is why propaganda works, and it's how you can get millions of ostensibly civilized people to put millions of other civilized people into gas chambers.

We can be smart as individuals, but mostly petty plebes when in groups and we are easily manipulated especially with anger.

Organized hate speech is different than 'individuals expressing their angry opinions'.