Can you point to the court case (court case that was not subsequently overruled)? The reason I dont believe this is that would be extremely arbitrary. If hate speech is in fact banned it likely has a very narrow and explicit definition in the ruling, most likely circling back to direct threats of harm.
Chaplinsky v New Hampshire found that a law forbidding abusive speech in public was Constitutional because the words in question "by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace."
We're so far down in the comments I forget who's arguing for what but I don't think that case is relevant.
That case gave rise to the "fighting words" doctrine or test which has (thus far) only been applied (successfully) to speech that is so vulgar or offensive as to provoke violence. A good representative example is the recent Twisted Tea smackdown video that made the rounds. If a police officer had swooped in and arrested the instigator before he got hit the arrest likely would have been kosher under the doctrine because the n-word is generally so vulgar you don't expect to be able to use it in that manner and not start a fight. Basically it's used to justify arresting someone for speech so inflammatory that even though you are not picking a fight someone is inevitably gonna pick a fight with you whether you want one or not.
I can't think of any case where it was used to prosecute someone for calling for "adjacent to violence" type behavior. I am unaware of any cases (that have not been overturned) where fighting words doctrine was used as a justification for suppressing political speech. If you know of any examples I'd be interested to read them.
There's sort of a catch to the way you're framing the question. Instances of speech that are forbidden are generally not considered political speech, even if there are political issues involved. For example, if I threaten the President because of his policies, there is obviously a political angle to that, but it is also a fairly uncontroversial felony.
For a concrete example of nominally political threatening speech that was found not to be protected, see Planned Parenthood v. American Coalition of Life Activists, where it was found that certain anti-abortion ads were not protected by the First Amendment because they reasonably caused the targeted doctors to fear for their safety. I don't believe they explicitly invoked the "fighting words" doctrine, but it relied on the same principle as Chaplinsky — that if speech has the effect of creating a real-life threat, the speech isn't necessarily protected by the First Amendment.
(To be clear, the point wasn't that Chaplinsky is the be-all-end-all, just that the concept of "hate speech," where the consequences of some speech make it unworthy of free speech protections, is not a recent invention.)
> that if speech has the effect of creating a real-life threat
>(To be clear, the point wasn't that Chaplinsky is the be-all-end-all, just that the concept of "hate speech," where the consequences of some speech make it unworthy of free speech protections, is not a recent invention.)
Yes, but those consequences must be imminent and unlawful.
The point of Chaplinsky isn't that it's a real life in the moment affront to civility so offensive that it's bound to cause a fight.
Planned Parenthood v. American Coalition of Life Activists is about specific threats, e.g. "I'm going to specifically kill you".
Both examples of non-protected speech are under totally different doctrines (I forget how far back the specific credible threat doctrine goes and what the real name for it is but it's really old, older than planned parenthood) that were more or less condensed into the "imminent lawless conduct" test established in (Brandenbyug).
It's going to be very hard for anything that is published in an asynchronous medium that isn't a direct call to lawless action by someone who can credibly get people to pull it off to fail the test because in order for the lawless action to happen people must do things that would be premeditated crimes on their own. There is no current US court doctrine for limiting free speech with regard to hate unless the content and situational details add up to something that fails the Brandenburg test.
v New Hampshire. I dont know much about this one (which is limited to a single state) but 1) it can be overturned by the supreme court, 2) if its an old ruling there may be an updated ruling 3) I have not seen the parameters that justify abusive speech, its probably quite specific.
