New Social Justice Push is to Make ‘Nerd’ and ‘Geek’ Hate Speech Punishable by Law
A female academic for Britain is calling on the state to classify “nerd” and “geek” as hate speech punishable by law, according to a report in The Telegraph.
Psychology lecturer and psychotherapist Dr. Sonja Falck is leading this push after studying the impacts of bullying on children with high IQs. She believes that the terms are “divisive and humiliating” and discrimination against the intelligent is the “last taboo” that must be tackled by government action. She is calling for Britain to classify “nerd” and “geek” alongside homophobic, religious, and racial slurs as illegal free speech.
During her eight years of research on high IQ individuals, she found that these terms really hurt her subjects’ feelings and made them feel like they didn’t belong.
“That was a really big one,” Falck said. “That’s where being taunted with names like ‘nerd’ or ‘egghead’ or ‘brainiac’ comes in because the person is being set apart as being different to others and feeling like they’re a misfit and they don’t belong.”
She compares the negative treatment of high-IQ individuals with how bigots treat black people. She believes the necessary cultural shift can be forced by government intervention.
“The N-word was common parlance in the UK until at least the 1960s. Other insulting slurs about age, disability, religion and gender identity remained in widespread use until relatively recently,” she said.
“Society at the time turned a blind eye to their impact by passing them off as harmless banter. It is only with the benefit of hindsight and academic research that we realise how wrong we were,” she added.
Falck wants other slurs toward intelligent people to be classified as hate crimes as well. She is basically calling for an open-ended ban on any criticism of the elite.
“The same can be said about anti-IQ words like ‘nerd’, ‘brainbox’, ‘geek’, ‘egg-head’, ‘smart-arse’, ‘dweeb’ and ‘smarty-pants’,” Falck said.
“Slurs such as these will continue to be used unabated at the expense of the brightest members of society unless and until legislative action is taken,” she added.
Falck herself is a member of Mensa, a group of individuals with high IQs, so she is essentially calling for the state to ban criticism of herself.
“The government says it is committed to creating an outward-looking, inclusive society yet continues to tolerate divisive, discriminatory language,” she said. “In the short space of time since racial, homophobic and religious hate speech was banned, it is now seen by most as morally abhorrent.”
“It would be progress for British society to come to feel the same way about hate-filled, prejudicial slurs against our high-IQ community,” she added.
Her partners at Mensa are seemingly behind her proposal to further erode freedom of speech in order to protect their precious feelings.
“Very high-IQ individuals often experience isolation or bullying from people around them because they are perceived as being different from the majority,” said John Stevenage, CEO of Mensa.
“Mensa as an organisation gives people with very high IQ a community which is non-judgemental and inclusive of difference,” he added. “Put simply, everybody is different, so no-one is.”
Perhaps if these eggheads were bullied more growing up, they wouldn’t feel so emboldened and empowered to infringe upon core freedoms.
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