Let’s get two things clear right out of the gate. First, the former member of UNLV’s Turning Point USA chapter that was videotaped shouting “white power” is a reprehensible human being. Second, hate speech is not protected speech.

The first point is pretty straightforward, so I’m not going to belabor it.

Charitably speaking, he and his girlfriend (or whomever it was that was egging him on while he held her on that bed) displayed a poorer understanding of irony than Alanis Morissette. The point of irony is to say or do one thing while clearly intending the opposite - given that definition, the only ironic part of the video was that it’s rare to see two less-superior people on video without a goat kicking someone between the legs. Slightly less charitably speaking, those two were trying to be edgy and, in the process, ran headfirst into the Rule of Goats, demonstrating once more that nobody cares about your motives when you’re videotaped making love to a goat. They just care that you’re someone that makes love to goats.

Speaking as charitably as those two actually deserve, they’re a pathetic couple that maintain unearned airs of superiority by hijacking the achievements of better people and claiming those achievements as their own, merely by virtue of the shade of their Vitamin D-deprived skin. Speaking as a white male, my accomplishments absolutely do not belong to them, and I find it utterly repulsive that they would attempt to derive power or privilege from them. They are leeches of the worst sort and should be peeled off from the skin of society before their parasitic behavior drains any further energy from the productive capacities of the rest of us.

The second point, however, is going to require a bit more explanation.

Let’s say I have my hand around your throat and promise not to strangle you. Would you say that I am protecting your throat? Of course not - not only am I not protecting your throat from anyone else that might strangle you, but I am also directly threatening your throat through my hand’s presence. This is analogous to the relationship between government and speech: The government does not protect speech, but it absolutely possesses the power to strangle it.

As I’ve discussed here previously, our current understanding of when the government might strangle speech is a relatively modern invention. Prior to the early 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for the government to restrict speech, and, even today, there are still laws on Nevada’s books that prohibit certain forms of political speech. However, thanks to a clever combination of the 1st and 14th Amendments, the federal government not only promises to avoid strangling speech most of the time, it also prohibits state and local governments from strangling speech. This was infamously tested in 1977 in National Socialist Party v. Skokie, in which the Supreme Court decided that even Nazis don’t get to have their freedom of speech strangled by the government. That led to an amusing cinematic scene a few years later and is why UNLV, as a public university, cannot kick either of those two out of school, any more than UNR could when one of their own was found participating on the wrong side of the Charlottesville protest.

This isn’t a bad thing. When our government exercises its power to strangle speech, it rarely does so to protect those who need protecting. Even today, our government is more interested in protecting well-off real estate developers than independent journalists, and our government behaved with far less restraint in the past.

A lot of white supremacists, however, and those that sympathize with other ideologies that were rightly left to molder in history’s refuse, enjoy using the government’s forbearance to claim that, if the government doesn’t get to strangle their speech, then nobody has a right to criticize or confront it. This is disingenuous on multiple fronts. For starters, white supremacy only values freedom of speech when they’re the ones doing the speaking, as the corpse of Heather Heyer can attest. More importantly, we are not the government. There are many things the government is allowed to do that we are not (kill people, for example), and there are many things we are allowed to do that the government is not. The 9th and 10th amendments are rather explicit about this point, in fact.

One thing we can do, as individuals, is refuse to provide a suitable habitat for white supremacy. White supremacists wish us to view hate speech as protected speech for the same reason environmentalists seek to protect the sage grouse - they want more of it, and they want us to provide an environment in which it may flourish. This, however, is a positive right that white supremacists want from us, and we are under no moral or legal obligation to provide it.

Morally and legally, we are under no obligation to employ or hire white supremacists. We are under no obligation to live with them, be romantically involved with them or have white supremacists as friends. We are under no obligation to attend social events that tolerate white supremacists, and we are under no obligation to host social events that tolerate them. We are under no obligation to stay in the room while they espouse their beliefs, and we are under no obligation to remain in contact with anyone that would put them in the same room as us. We are under no obligation to walk away from them quietly or politely.

Morally and legally, we are under no obligation to normalize their beliefs. We are under no obligation to allow them to be a part of society while holding those beliefs. We are absolutely under no obligation to give them the benefit of the doubt, to assume they’re only kidding, to assume they’re espousing their views ironically, or that they’re only trying to “own the libs.”

Nevada’s government does not have the right to expel students for their views, nor should it. We as Nevada’s citizens, however, are absolutely allowed to make these two students, and anyone else that openly peddles ideologies of hatred, feel extremely unwelcome.

Learn their names. Remember their faces. Then get to work.

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].