It's Official: Suspicion is Now Nine-Tenths Of The Law

 

Here’s the uncomfortable truth, and I’ll say it plainly.

We’ve crossed a line.

For years, writers, comedians, philosophers, and ordinary people joked about a future where thought itself became suspect. Where intention mattered less than interpretation. Where saying the wrong thing, or being perceived the wrong way, was enough to place you under scrutiny. It sounded dystopian. Overcooked. A little too Orwellian to be taken seriously.

And yet here we are.

With these latest hate speech laws, something fundamental has shifted. Not just legally, but culturally. Suspicion has crept into the center of the room and quietly taken a seat at the table. Not proof. Not action. Not harm. Suspicion.

And suspicion, once elevated to moral authority, is a dangerous thing.

This is not an argument for cruelty, hatred, or abuse. Let’s be clear about that from the outset. Societies have a responsibility to protect people from genuine harm. Violence. Threats. Harassment. Incitement. These things are real, and they matter. Laws already existed to address them. They worked imperfectly, as all human systems do, but they were grounded in something essential: evidence. Action. Demonstrable intent.

What we are now seeing is a move away from that foundation and toward something far more nebulous.

The idea that how something is received can outweigh what was said.
That potential harm can eclipse actual harm.
That interpretation can override intent.

And once that door is opened, it does not close neatly behind us.

Suspicion is not truth.
Suspicion is not justice.
Suspicion is not safety.

Suspicion is projection wearing a badge.

When suspicion becomes law-adjacent, everyone becomes a risk. Everyone becomes a possible offender. And that changes how people speak, write, joke, question, and think. Not because they’ve suddenly become hateful, but because they’ve become afraid.

And fear is not a moral teacher. Fear is a censor.

One of the most corrosive aspects of these laws is that they collapse the difference between malice and misunderstanding. Between attack and inquiry. Between criticism and harm. The law begins to hover not over actions, but over tone. Over implication. Over what someone else might infer.

That is an impossible standard for any writer, speaker, or thinker to meet.

You cannot write honestly if you must preempt every possible interpretation by every possible reader in every possible emotional state. That way lies paralysis. Or worse, conformity.

This is where suspicion becomes nine-tenths of the law.

Not because the law explicitly says so, but because the culture around the law does.

People begin to self-police.
Editors become risk managers rather than champions of ideas.
Institutions retreat into safety language and empty statements.
Writers soften edges, remove questions, avoid friction.

And slowly, without any dramatic crackdown or midnight knock on the door, the intellectual temperature drops.

The most dangerous thing about this shift is not that it targets obvious villains. It doesn’t. Those people were already dealt with under existing laws. The real impact is on the thoughtful middle. On artists. On teachers. On students. On people asking genuine questions in good faith.

Especially questions about identity, power, history, and culture.

Once suspicion becomes the dominant lens, curiosity looks like hostility. Nuance looks like evasion. Silence looks like guilt. And disagreement becomes indistinguishable from danger.

That is not a healthy society. That is a brittle one.

Writers feel this first.

Because writing is, by nature, an act of exploration. It involves stepping into voices not your own. Questioning assumptions. Testing ideas. Sometimes saying the wrong thing on the way to something true. It is messy. It is human. It is unfinished by design.

But a suspicion-driven culture does not tolerate mess.

It demands certainty.
It demands alignment.
It demands visible compliance.

And the result is not kindness. It is sterility.

History is unambiguous on this point. Societies that prioritize emotional safety over intellectual freedom eventually lose both. You cannot protect people from harm by erasing disagreement. You cannot create empathy by outlawing discomfort. And you cannot build trust by encouraging citizens to view one another as potential threats.

Trust is built through dialogue, not surveillance of thought.

There is also a deeper, quieter cost here. One we rarely talk about.

When suspicion governs speech, inner life shrinks.

People stop articulating half-formed ideas. They stop asking naïve questions. They stop thinking out loud. And eventually, they stop thinking deeply at all. Because deep thought requires risk. It requires the willingness to be wrong in public. To be misunderstood. To revise.

A culture that punishes misinterpretation more harshly than malice produces shallow minds and brittle souls.

And that, ironically, creates more resentment, not less.

You cannot legislate empathy.
You cannot mandate moral purity.
You cannot shortcut the hard, slow work of social understanding with broad legal suspicion.

All you can do is drive it underground, where it festers.

This is where the joke stops being funny.

For years, “thoughtcrime” was a punchline. A warning. A literary exaggeration. Now it feels uncomfortably close to policy logic. Not because anyone explicitly says, “We are policing thought,” but because the criteria for wrongdoing have drifted away from action and toward perception.

And perception is unstable.

What offends today may be orthodoxy tomorrow. What is protected now may be prohibited later. Once suspicion becomes precedent, the scope always expands. It has to. That is how systems justify their own existence.

And writers, thinkers, and teachers are always the first to feel that expansion.

So what do we do?

We tell the truth carefully, but we still tell it.
We refuse to confuse kindness with silence.
We defend the difference between harm and discomfort.
We insist that intent matters, even when outcomes are messy.

And we keep writing.

Not recklessly. Not cruelly. But honestly.

Because the alternative is far worse.

A society where everyone is watching everyone else for signs of transgression is not compassionate. It is anxious. And anxiety does not produce justice. It produces conformity.

Suspicion may now be nine-tenths of the law.

But it should never be nine-tenths of the culture.

If we allow that to happen, we won’t need censorship. We’ll do the work ourselves.

And by the time we realize what we’ve lost our freedom, we’ll struggle to even name it.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell