postyX - September 16, 2025
Maple Syrup & Mayhem #9-Words as Violence
Episode Stats
Words per minute
161.94678
Harmful content
Toxicity
16
sentences flagged
Hate speech
10
sentences flagged
Summary
On the heels of the Charlie Kirk shooting, the right-wing conspiracy theories and mass firings in the wake of the shooting, I talk about the history of hate speech, and the role of words as actual violence. I also talk about when we started shifting from words being just words to words being actual violence, and why we should be worried about what we say.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Well, the Toronto District School Board is investigating after a teacher reportedly showed
00:00:04.180
part of the video of Kirk's assassination to some young students. The school board has not
00:00:09.660
released the name of the teacher, only that they were a staff member at the Corvette Junior Public
00:00:14.340
School. I thought I'd do a quick check-in after yesterday and all of the drama. I want to
00:00:18.860
reiterate that it is not wrong or unethical or unkind to laugh at the misfortunes of terrible
00:00:25.340
people that Charlie Kirk incited violence. That's what he did.
00:00:34.300
So, I'm recording now. Would you like to give your name? No. Okay. Why are you here protesting
00:00:45.020
at the Charlie Kirk vigil today? I actually don't want to give an interview. You don't
00:00:48.820
want to do an interview? This man is worse than the death of children and said that any deaths
00:00:53.640
of gun violence are worth it for the Second Amendment. What else do I need to say? I don't
00:01:01.820
Charlie Kirk got shot and he's dead. Ha ha ha ha. Finally, finally, somebody with a gun,
00:01:07.960
which is almost everybody in the fucking states, grew a pair and fucking went and shot somebody
0.99
00:01:12.040
on the right side. Thank you. Can we keep this up, please?
1.00
00:01:14.780
I think that this push for mass firings could become quite significant and it already, already
00:01:20.720
is. I mean, compared to the aftermath of January 6th, this does seem to be turning into a very
00:01:26.380
aggressive attempt to purge not just, you know, government officials or in the Hexeth example
00:01:32.340
in the Defense Department, but also specifically people who work in education, who work in health
00:01:37.920
care, who work in government. Those are the fields that a lot of these right wing figures
00:01:41.680
have been mentioning over and over again when talking about how just random internet users
00:01:46.540
have responded to this shooting. 24 hours later.
00:01:51.200
So I received information that I've been doxxed on X, so I'm going to have to step away for a little
00:01:56.460
bit and the AFP have been contacted and also the eSafety Commission as well have been contacted
00:02:04.040
because there's been a large number of threats coming through. And the irony of this situation
00:02:11.140
that all I did was say some words that offended some people and now people have decided to take
00:02:18.080
that into the real world and start, you know, threatening and harassing and abusing people
00:02:25.240
out in the real world based on their inability to manage their emotions.
0.99
00:02:29.740
What the fuck are you supposed to do when you get fired? You just take it? You just take it like a man?
0.99
00:02:36.860
I'm unemployed. What am I supposed to do now, dude? I go home and goom? Like, guys, what do I do?
00:02:48.300
I woke up, I told him I took the ship of the 22nd ship of yesterday, what the fuck?
0.99
00:02:55.580
What the fuck, y'all? I thought y'all would think I could be fired when y'all did it!
1.00
00:03:02.900
So, on the heels of the whole Charlie Kirk assassination and inevitable cancelling of the left,
00:03:12.180
I thought I would talk about the whole words as violence because this is where, this is what this is,
00:03:20.220
like, where it's coming from. This is initially, you know, what started this whole thing is
00:03:24.480
the fact that many, you know, mostly liberals, feel that words are actual violence.
00:03:31.600
So, I wanted to look into the history and where that came from and when did we shift
00:03:36.180
from words being just words to words being actual violence.
00:03:41.820
We transitioned to a societal shift regarding hate speech mid-20th century, post-World War II,
00:03:48.520
although it did gain momentum from the 60s onward, it gained actually more momentum,
00:03:53.400
but it did actually come out of the results of World War II. It was peddled as efforts to combat
00:03:59.660
discrimination and promote human rights. However, the elephant that still remains in the room is
00:04:06.160
what humans deserve those rights. So, when they say human rights, do they mean, you know, humans from
00:04:12.640
that? Like, I guess I should say when they say human rights, they kind of are using that term to make
00:04:17.540
people feel bad, but it really should be citizen rights, the citizens of that country, right? That's
00:04:22.880
where it really, you know, should be, but they say human rights. It coincided with the shifts in
00:04:28.660
immigration policies, which is obviously another video, and there's many more people more educated
00:04:33.940
on that that can actually, you know, give a more in-depth look at that. But it did start with the
00:04:39.180
whole, you know, shift in immigration policies and diversity that, you know, we've all come to
00:04:44.240
enjoy. You know, in my opinion, the Jews really wanted to punish the Aryans for the attempts to
0.99
00:04:53.320
remove them from Germany. But I digress. The key milestones of this was 1940 to 1950, laws emerged in
0.87
00:05:02.860
Europe, particularly Germany, to prevent the resurgence of the National Socialist ideology.
00:05:09.920
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, it set the tone and it influenced the later laws.
00:05:18.040
Then we get to the 1960s and the 70s, where the civil rights movement in the US, Canada, Europe
00:05:22.800
pushed for laws to protect against racial and ethnic discrimination. Canada's criminal code added
00:05:29.200
hate propaganda provisions in 1970, and the UK's Race Relations Act of 1965, criminalized incitement
00:05:37.780
to racial hatred. Now, what I noticed while I was doing this research is that you, the laws are
00:05:44.780
purposely vague, so as to be as far reaching as possible. What does incitement to racial hatred even
00:05:51.860
mean? After the Jews were successful in pushing through these laws that are really nothing more than
0.98
00:05:57.840
censorship and attacks on free thought. They, in typical Jew fashion, pushed for even more
1.00
00:06:03.660
restrictions. And then we got into the 80s and 90s, where this is where, you know, they really, well,
00:06:09.160
this is where they really started to get some clout in this area and get some leverage. So laws expanded
00:06:17.420
to cover more groups, a whittled down more specific focus, religion and sexual orientation, who, if you are
00:06:25.580
a noticer like me, you'll notice, or you'll realize rather, that the religion of Christianity and the
00:06:31.500
sexual orientation of heterosexual were excluded from these protections. At this point, the EU began
00:06:39.480
harmonizing hate speech regulations, and countries like France and Germany strengthened their penalties.
00:06:46.400
Fortunately for Americans, they remained somewhat of an outlier due to the First Amendment.
0.96
00:06:51.340
However, they did impress that words are violence agenda on the school campuses and workplaces
00:06:57.120
under, you know, vague harassment laws. So from 2000 to the present, due to the internet and the
00:07:03.780
anonymity of it, the Jews felt too many people were able to notice things, and therefore even stricter
00:07:10.220
laws were required, especially in Europe. And when I say Jews, I know, you know, people are like,
00:07:14.940
it's the Jews, it's the Jews. But if you do look into, and I know it sounds kind of tongue in cheek and
0.95
00:07:19.180
stuff like that. But if you do look into it, you'll find that the people behind this are more than
00:07:25.880
likely of the Jewish, I guess you could say religion. So sorry, in the US, the historical driver of lack
0.90
00:07:34.860
of stronger laws, and the lack of them wanting to repeal the First Amendment, is that they still
00:07:41.320
believe strongly in individual liberty. The hate speech definition there is quite narrow, it actual
00:07:48.020
threats, or incitement of violence is really the barrier that you have to hit in the US. And there
00:07:54.940
really hasn't been a whole lot of precedents setting it. Overwhelmingly, the Supreme Court orders in
00:08:00.280
favour of free speech up until well, that's how it's been, who knows how it's going to change. In
00:08:05.360
comparison, though, to most other Western nations who have a very broad definition, such as insults and
00:08:11.320
mean words, can actually put you in jail. We've seen it, right? Many such cases. So why do so many
00:08:17.800
people feel that words are actual violence? Because this is something that has just, like, it blows me
00:08:25.520
away. And as somebody who has a daughter who is, you know, a liberal arts, fucking, you know, whatever,
0.98
00:08:31.420
all the things, right? This is her actual ideology. And it always has blown me away. Like, it's constant,
0.98
00:08:39.140
like, you know, I'm a terrible person, because I think this or because you said a mean thing, that means you
00:08:44.200
deserve to, you know, have the worst things happen to you. So I just, I guess, as a, I don't know, I guess,
00:08:51.660
because of when I grew up. I mean, I firmly believe that this is largely due to the indoctrination
00:08:57.460
factories, that is our current education system. The ideology that words are literal violence does
00:09:03.580
have other, you know, less relevant causes, though. Expanded definitions of harm was one of them, and
00:09:09.560
more specifically, psychological harm as violence. Modern psychology is actually more focused on
00:09:15.500
prescribing than curing. And again, this is something that I'm sure people are aware of. It's, you know,
00:09:21.520
in the benefit of drug companies and that to keep you unhealthy or sick. And that
00:09:27.280
includes mentally unhealthy as well. And the reality is that most of these psychological
00:09:32.220
problems can actually be eliminated with self care. And I mean, actual self care, not I'm going
00:09:37.520
to get a manicure, or I need to sit in my pajamas all day and, you know, eat ice cream like that,
00:09:43.480
you know, maybe there's a place for that once in a blue moon. But when I say self care, I mean,
00:09:48.240
like actual self care, like, you know, exercise, community, family, and, you know, even your diet
00:09:53.500
would, you know, it's beneficial. The American Psychological Association or Psychiatric Association,
00:09:59.220
they did a study in 2017, claiming that verbal harassment can cause stress, anxiety, and trauma,
00:10:05.820
which is akin to physical harm. Now, as someone who went to high school in Toronto, in the 90s,
00:10:13.640
that was just the quintessential high school experience for me. But again, what do I know,
00:10:18.960
right? I'm just a filthy racist. So now another one of these things, you know, when I was doing
1.00
00:10:24.860
the research they came that came up with is that there is now something called trauma informed
00:10:29.660
frameworks. Before I started on this, most of the advocates of trauma informed frameworks have never
00:10:36.880
actually experienced a trauma in their life, like an actual trauma. The rise in discourse on
00:10:43.860
university and activist spaces frame certain speech, and even microaggressions, which is also a bullshit
0.95
00:10:51.640
word as triggering and traumatizing. The reality is people who prescribe to this nonsense have never
0.59
00:10:58.760
been told no, and are very likely part of what I like to colloquially refer to as the participation
00:11:05.760
trophy generation. Critical theories like postmodernism and critical race theory argue that language shapes
00:11:13.000
reality for them because they never leave their echo chambers. Their reality is not the actual
00:11:19.060
reality that the rest of the people, you know, do or the normal people have or experience. Liberal arts
00:11:25.300
scholars like Judith Butler and Michael Foucault push the narrative that words perpetuate systemic
00:11:33.140
oppression, making it a form of violence. Of course, this is most common in academic settings,
00:11:38.420
like I just mentioned earlier. And then one of the other, you know, newer theories, or I guess you
00:11:44.300
could say frameworks that society tends to follow that is contributing to the whole words as violence
00:11:50.860
phenomena, is the harm principle and the expansion of the harm principle. Critics like Jonathan Haidt and
00:11:58.260
Craig Lukanoff wrote in their book, it's called The Coddling of the American Mind, that equating words with
00:12:05.080
violence infantilizes people. And I actually tend to agree with this a lot. Everything in current society
00:12:12.040
is structured to infantilize, demoralize, undermine resistance. I mean, they even cite studies showing
00:12:19.320
exposure to different viewpoints builds psychological strength, which is why pre hate speech laws, you could
00:12:26.420
have a best friend who held differing opinions, and you were still able to remain friends. There was many
00:12:32.420
cases I have seen and, you know, heard of, of people in the 50s, the 60s, you know, grant my
00:12:39.640
grandparents, stuff like that, who, you know, one was a whatever, a liberal, and one was a conservative,
0.74
00:12:44.060
and they were, you know, best fucking friends, like, it didn't matter, because people were mature.
0.87
00:12:49.880
They understood that words are just that words, and they were able to have, you know, civil discourse.
0.97
00:12:56.260
The thing with the hate speech laws and words as violence, it's a slippery slope, like all of these
00:13:02.980
tyrannical measures that they keep bringing in. This primarily applies to America, given that they
00:13:10.260
still have some speech protection, or pretty, actually pretty decent speech protection in
00:13:14.060
consideration to the rest of the Western world. But free speech advocates warn that labeling words as
00:13:19.140
violence risks censorship of unpopular opinions. And the US has consistently protected offensive speech,
00:13:26.260
rightfully acknowledging that there is a clear distinction between words and physical acts.
00:13:32.600
Ask a lefty liberal that and they would beg to differ. Subjectivity also leads to inconsistent
00:13:38.900
enforcement and application of the law. However, most intelligent people agree that defining hate
00:13:44.420
speech is too subjective to regulate fairly. In summary, with the Charlie Kirk cancel culture,
00:13:51.600
the lefties and commies and Jews are currently currently is simply karma playing out on a long enough
0.99
00:13:59.780
timeline, in my opinion, as all these things do.