I suppose it shouldn't surprise us that some knucklehead liberal would use the Paris terrorist attacks as a basis for an hysterical rant against conservative "hate speech." 

But what surprises us here is that the author, Salon's Chauncey Devega, apparently has an incredibly low threshold in identifying "hate speech" - a lot like the campus activists who are roiling schools across the country.

In recent months, the right-wing media has used language such as “terrorism” and “violent,” or that the latter is “targeting police for murder” to describe the Black Lives Matter movement. Such bombastic and ugly screeds–which are wholly unfounded, with no basis in empirical reality–have also been used by right-wing opinion leaders to describe the African-American students who are fighting against racism at Yale and the University of Missouri.

Well, in at least 3 separate protests, BLM activists were caught chanting "Pigs in a blanket. Fry 'em like bacon." Now, Chauncey might make the argument that the activists were simply chanting a breakfast order and that we're all racists for thinking they wanted more dead policemen. 

Bill O’Reilly has declared “war” on Black Lives Matter and in doing so described them as a type of contemporary Ku Klux Klan (KKK). At its height of popularity in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the KKK was America’s largest terrorist organization. It was responsible for the murders of thousands of African-Americans. In contrast to the KKK, Black Lives Matter is a group dedicated to protecting the human rights of all people against state-sponsored violence and police thuggery and murder.

Ben Carson, in his designated role as a black conservative whose primary purpose is to disparage black Americans and to excuse-make for white racism, recently told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly that the black and brown students who are advocating for their full rights and respect at Yale University are ushering in “anarchy” and “this is just raw emotion and people just being manipulated, I think in many of these cases, by outside forces who wish to create disturbances.”

Likewise, Fox News has repeatedly described the student protesters at Yale and Missouri using the same language. O’Reilly has even gone so far as to suggest that Black Lives Matter and the students who are protesting racist treatment are part of a cabal that is engaging in “fascist” behavior and “running wild” against white people. Trumping his allusions to “fascism,” on his October 22, 2015 episode of his TV show, Bill O’Reilly even made the absurd claim that Black Lives Matter is akin to the “Nazis.”

All three of these individuals may have exaggerated their rhetoric, but that does not constitute hate speech. And how this connects to the events in Paris is a downright loony idea. In fact,  Chauncey never bothers to connect the Paris attacks to right wing hate speech. He just wanted to grab your attention today in order to make explicit threats of violence against his political enemies:

These are implicit threats and overtures to violence as racial authoritarian fascists are a clear and present danger to democracy and freedom. Thus, they must be eliminated by any means necessary.

In case you've forgotten, "by any means necessary" was a favorite threat made by Malcolm X back in the day. And don't you find it a bit strange that a rant against white racism and violence would include a threat to "eliminate them" - short for murder?

No doubt racists and white supremecists are bad people and should be denounced. But murdered? When liberals start equating exaggerated political rhetoric with the kind of hate speech made by Kluxers, skinheads, and others, you have to wonder just who it is they want to target. And why.