The state in a free society should not have power to crush individual liberty based on what they might consider to be “hate.” That many tolerate such encroachments on liberty is a sign that we no longer live in free states.

https://mises.org/mises-wire/hate-symbols-and-meaning-liberty

Mises Wire • Wanjiru Njoya

In tyrannical societies, the state uses its monopoly of violence to dictate what citizens are permitted to say, activities they are permitted to engage in, and cultural symbols they are permitted to celebrate or display. Anyone who violates such edicts can be arrested and imprisoned. Given the tendency of states to become increasingly dictatorial and to trample on their citizens’ liberties with impunity, Murray Rothbard argued that the state itself, by its very nature, is a threat to liberty. In The Anatomy of the State, he argues that the state is a predator: “The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property” including predation of all the liberties that emanate from self-ownership.

Even for those who support the minimal state, they would support state power only on the basis that the state’s monopoly of force will be limited to protecting and defending the rights of citizens, by designating violations of rights as crimes and taking the steps necessary to punish criminals. For example, in his book Restoring The Lost Constitution: The Presumption Of Liberty, Randy Barnett argues that the state has power to enact laws that are “both necessary to protect the rights of others and proper insofar as they do not violate the rights of the persons whose freedom they restrict.”

Western democracies have strayed far from these ideals of liberty. In many countries the state has conferred upon itself the power to tell citizens which heritage symbols they are permitted to display, and to punish them for celebrating any heritage that the state deems to be “hate.”

Anti-Hate Laws

Fueled by critical race theories and the concept of “antiracism,” many once-free jurisdictions are now trending rapidly towards tyranny, expanding their prohibitions of what they refer to in the relevant legislation as “hate.” This takes the form of laws prohibiting hate speech, hate crimes and hate symbols.

In the case of New York, the city has established an office for the prevention of hate crimes. Under “local laws on hate crimes” that office has power to designate hate crimes including the duty to:

Create and implement a coordinated system for the city’s response to hate crimes. Such system shall, in conjunction with the New York city commission on human rights’ bias response teams, the police department, and any relevant agency or office, coordinate responses to hate crime allegations.

The office for prevention of hate crimes designates certain symbols as “hate symbols.” Under Senate Bill S8298B this includes the Confederate battle flag.

Another example of a legally-designated “hate symbol” is the old South African flag. In support of an application to ban the flag, the South African Human Rights Commission argued that displays of that flag are analogous to displays of the Confederate battle flag:

Arguing in support of the ban, the South African Human Rights Commission referred to the case of Dylann Roof, the white man convicted and sentenced to death for the 2015 racist killings of nine Black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, as an example of how the apartheid-era flag retained clear connections to violent white supremacists. Roof once appeared in a photograph wearing a jacket with the flag on it.

On that basis, the South African Equality Court banned public displays of the flag. It was only by a narrow margin (following an appeal by the civil rights organization AfriForum) that South Africans avoided having private displays of the flag also being banned. 

The ADL, an enthusiastic proponent of designating other people’s cultural icons as “hate,” also added the old South African flag to its hate list.

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