Lately I’ve been feeling like I live in an alternate reality, full of alternative facts and alternative history. I mean, where else would it be considered fair turnabout to smear immigrants by making up a terrorist attack? Or to erase the primary victims of genocide from history, as the Trump administration did in their laughable statement acknowledging Holocaust Remembrance Day? It’s no accident that both of these incidents targeted religious minorities. In our brave new world, incidents such as these are par for the course, and they’re easy to spot. Religious hatred, the thinking goes, is like porn – you know it when you see it. But I’d like to argue otherwise. We don’t always know religious hatred when we see it. And that’s the problem.

For example, who doesn’t like YouTube? Who doesn’t like following particular YouTube channels and eagerly awaiting their next video? (Well, me, for example, but let’s set that aside for now). Fans of YouTube star PewDiePie got a nasty surprise on January 11th when he posted a video featuring men holding a sign that read “Death to the Jews,” and they got another on January 22nd when he posted a video of a man in a Jesus outfit who stated that “Hitler did absolutely nothing wrong.” These two incidents were only the latest in a series of anti-Semitic content disseminated by PewDiePie since last August. Some people are angry with PewDiePie for this, including several companies who back him. Some people are angry with the rest of us, for our inability to “take a joke.”

In general, Western popular culture has been able to agree on only a few things: Movies based on comic books are good, movies based on popular young adult novels are bad, and Nazis suck. Lately, the latter assumption has come under fire from all corners of the political spectrum. On the right, conservatives are defending the “alt-right” and their constitutional right to free speech. On the left, liberals are…defending the “alt-right” and their constitutional right to free speech? Apparently so. We’ve gone so far down the rabbit hole that we can’t even agree that Nazis suck anymore. O brave new world, which has such people in it.

The problem with this free speech crusade is that, while it pays lip service to fundamental human rights, it is fundamentally anti-American. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, according to the Declaration of Independence, and whenever I hear a liberal or conservative defend a Nazi’s right to spread their poisonous views unchecked, my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is threatened. Free speech is a fundamental value of American society. But the right to free speech stops where another person’s right to survive and thrive begins. Just like I don’t have to let someone shout “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater, I don’t have to smile and nod while people who support the genocide of Jewish people talk about ways to finish the job. I don’t have to act like these are views deserving of respect.

When I hear comments like the ones PewDiePie endorsed, I don’t hear a joke. I hear someone taking the genocide of people like me and saying, “This doesn’t matter. This is funny.” And in a time like this, when Neo-Nazis are ascendant and religious minorities are being persecuted in the United States, I’m not laughing. Regardless of your feelings on free speech, you shouldn’t be, either. How do you recognize religious hatred? You can recognize it by the way it seeks to warp reality, to change history, in order to make itself more palatable. Maybe that means fabricating a terrorist attack where none existed. Maybe it means lying about the victims of genocide. Or maybe it means filming a person saying “Hitler did nothing wrong” and deciding that hey, this might make a funny joke.

I’m paying attention. I’m not laughing.