When Freedom of Speech Turns into Freedom to Hate. Hateful Speech and ‘Othering’ in Conservative Political Propaganda in the USA

In 2016, Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator, begun touring university campuses around the USA advocating for his views on politics and society. In his speeches he underlines the importance of free speech opposed to hate speech, suggesting that no government should decide what is acceptable to say and what is not acceptable. This chapter aims at analyzing the way othering and hate speech are constructed linguistically and discursively in Ben Shapiro’s speeches. The analysis highlights the discursive practices used by this conservative political icon to disseminate his rightist, traditional and unprogressive views by disguising hate speech as free speech. The analysis focuses on eight lecture-videos given by Shapiro in which were live-streamed and then made available on the online platform YouTube. The data is analyzed qualitatively within the framework of Critical Discourse Studies.