Freedom to be a shithead is one of our long-cherished liberties.
Be very careful about tampering with that.
*I live in Kentucky, which went heavily for Trump in '20. I haven’t seen a MAGA hat in ages.
This matches my attitude. But in the U.S. such deplorable conduct is, and should remain, legal.
As others have noted, it’s hard to have a debate about “hate speech” when the term is not defined.
And this, is the crux of the problem that pollutes the whole thread. Assholes should be permitted to continue wearing MAGA hats.
Yep, and if other people choose not to do business with them, so be it. Asshole is not a protected status.
Not any more! 
Red Hat = HatRed
Wearing a MAGA hat indicates that you have a deep hatred for at least half of your fellow citizens of the US.
Whether that is hate speech or not is debatable, but there is no question that anyone who dons the hat is full of hate.
While some of the wearers are actually hateful, most are being manipulated by fear and lies to hold certain beliefs and that hat is a degree of comfort to them. Trump will tell them what they want to hear and establish a sense of ‘normality’ by lies, but since these people are afraid of change, they will cling to anyone who appears to offer stability regardless of their past history or credibility. They have been in a near ape-shit panic since COVID and are in serious denial of it and have been used to spread the deadly disease by those saying that it’s just another flu, not real, ect.
This fear if left long enough will development into hatred, but for most they are just being herded around by a false shepherd and will eventually end up in a hateful place, but few are actually in that place now.
From the poll I started over here (thanks to all the participansts!) I guess I can say that the problem of wearing MAGA hats is not a serious one, as only two (edit: 3 of 85 now) respondents out of 84 so far wrote that they see them often, none sees them all the time, a small minority sees them every now and then, the rest (75%) sees them seldom or never.
Therefore when you actually see one, it is shown with a purpose, and that purpose is nefarious: provocation, owning them f*cking libruls, thus, yes: hate speech or on the way there.
This, or you are not representative at all. But I believe you are.
I have to disagree. As nasty as Trump is, he is not the moral equivalent of Hitler. I see a MAGA hat as a dog whistle for Trumpism, including white supremacy. But not Naziism, not yet anyway.
If you were sitting, alone, by a lake, and saw a white supremacist and a Nazi, both drowning……
Where would you go for lunch?
First I’d find time for a leisurely skipping of stones.
Trump is nothing like Hitler. Hitler actually served in his country’s military.
< rimshot >
Well in the US hate speech is just a label people use. It definitely has no legal implications. Now concerning the MAGA hat? Symbols mean different things to different people.
Technically Hitler served in the Bavarian Reserve Infantry rather than the Prussian Army. But your point is taken; as the eloquent Walter Sobchak observed, “Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
If Trump “is not the moral equivalent of Hitler”, it’s because he such a void of any moral conception whatsoever. He certainly has no qualms about branding entire peoples as criminals, stirring xenophobia over refugees trying to escape humanitarian crises, encouraging violence and abuse against political opponents, and of course embrace self-identified white nationalists and neo-fascists. If anything, his moral fungibility gives him even wider appeal to a broad range of people under the thesis that he’s not as overtly racist as Hitler, even though he’d happily step over corpses of Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants children, et cetera if it meant applause of his followers.
Stranger
If MAGA hats are hate speech, what kind of trigger warning is suitable for this Halloween costume?
Anyway, MAGA hats aren’t hate speech. They’re jackass speech.
Speaking as someone who lives in a country that does have hate speech laws (Canada), I would say that neither the hat nor the chant would be considered hate speech. They’re not targeting individuals based on protected personal characteristics. They’re clear examples of political speech, which is not hate speech.
Hitler was not a citizen of Prussia, nor of the German Empire. He was an Austrian, from the town of Braunau am Inn, a little town right on the border between Austria and Bavaria. It had actually flipped back and forth several times between Bavaria and Austria, so it wasn’t unusual for him to join the Bavarian infantry.
I’ve never seen a talking hat, so the answer is no. It may be true that hats are often worn by people whose speech is not better than their silence. Sometimes they speak in public outside the House of Commons. More rarely, they are critical of protected groups. More rarely still, they are doing a ventriloquist act and it is unclear whether the hat or its hatstand is doing the talking. Sometimes a tree falls in the forest and reveals a stump speech - or a simpleton.
So you could wear a shirt saying “I want to murder (Person X] because he is a foreigner” and that would just be a personal wardrobe choice on your part?
Got a non-paywalled version?