What is hate? Most people would say it’s anger or prejudice. Those are good answers, but they only touch the surface. Hate isn’t just anger; it is different from a response to being wronged by someone. We’re talking about the kind of emotions and agitations that accompany broad impersonal prejudices like racism and sexism. Hate is a symptom of a deeper psychological inability to cope.
Fearful Reactions
We all have a natural fear of the Other. How we deal with that fear is the difference between maturity and immaturity. A person has hateful thoughts and feelings because they’ve given in to that fear of the Other. It takes a certain degree of courage to accept people for who they are and how they are. It’s easier to deal with and accept people who are similar to oneself. Differences cause tensions, and not everyone has the wherewithal to deal maturely with those tensions. Hateful actions, including racism and other prejudices, are fearful reactions to others. People hate because they can’t cope with difference.
To cover up our fears and justify our fearful reactions, we make up stories about others. Actually, we usually don’t need to. We can adapt the stories that were made up before us. We use the stories to convince ourselves that we’re right to fear and hate others.
Our stories tell us that those who are different from us are inferior to us. They are immoral. Stupid. Deviant. Dangerous. We invent names to dehumanize them and brand them with these labels that become profanities and insults. Hateful labels become weapons powered by fear to harm others and deny them human rights. Labels unite individual fearful reactions into institutional structures like racism. Those structures normalize hate and give it social sanction.
What precedes hate is fear and the psychological inability to cope with fear. Hate is a symptom of giving in to the fear of those who are different and choosing to hide behind false views of other people rather than face the reality of how others actually are. Understanding hatred in this way gives clarity to many things. Let’s look at an example that is fairly benign but illustrates what precedes persecution.
The USNS Harvey Milk and the Cowardice of the Right Wing
Harvey Milk was a prominent person in San Francisco as an advocate for workers’ and human rights. A US Navy veteran, he was the first openly gay city commissioner in the United States, and he helped defeat laws and ballot initiatives prejudicial to nonheteronormative people.
In 1955, Harvey Milk was forced out of the US Navy because of his sexual orientation.
In 1978, he was assassinated by a former city commissioner who may have been motivated by his hatred for gay rights.
In 2023, the US Navy named a support vessel after Harvey Milk to honor his service and partially atone for the military’s past discrimination against nonheteronormative people.
In 2025, the Project 2025-Trump regime reasserted discrimination against nonheteronormative people by stripping the ship of the name USNS Harvey Milk. Reason? None given, but the intent was obvious given the regime’s open hatred of civil rights.
Whether those acts to persecute and oppress Harvey Milk and others like him occurred in 1955 or 70 years later in 2025 or any other year, the motives are the same. The persecutors were and are people who lack the courage to cope.
In 1955, it was inability to accept that a gay man was in the US Navy. In 1978, it was inability to accept that a gay man was in the San Francisco city government. In 2025, it was inability to accept that a gay man had a ship named after him. Some people lacked the courage to accept that other people were different, and their fearful reactions were to oppress others.
The Cruelty Isn’t the Point, It’s a Means to Other Ends
I am an admirer of Jon Stewart, but I disagree with his recent assessment on his YouTube show that, for right-wingers, “the dickishness is the point.” Stewart was, in June 2025, referring to actions taken by the Project 2025-Trump regime, including the renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk.
Stewart’s statement was a version of “the cruelty is the point” coined by Adam Serwer in a 2018 article for The Atlantic. Serwer’s statement, the title and conclusion of his article, was referring to actions taken by the first Trump regime.
Serwer made a profound case for his conclusion, taking examples from the history of whites lynching Black people in the US. These were, Serwer writes, “people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death.” Serwer reached the conclusion that for these right-wingers, the cruelty was the point of their violence.
As understandable as the conclusion of Stewart and Serwer are, it only touches the surface. Why would someone take pleasure in cruelty? The persecutors aren’t all sadists or psychopaths.
Serwer was correct that these murderers were otherwise normal people. Each one was someone’s brother, son, husband, father. Serwer was also correct that “their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy.” But Serwer seems to stop there, thinking that the cruelty is an end in itself.
He — and all of us — needs to dig deeper. Why did the Ku Klux Klan and their allies lynch Black people? Why did such cruelties make them feel good?
Hatred? Yes, but dig deeper. Racism? Yes, but dig deeper.
What then? Cowardice.
The cruelty makes them feel good, but they actually are masking their own fear. The motive is more “I deprived you of your rights and maybe even your life to make myself feel less cowardly.” The cruelty isn’t the point; the cruelty is a massively perverse effort to deaden one’s fear. Cruelty and all other forms and expressions of hate are fearful reactions.
What’s the Point of This Distinction?
When we realize that hate comes from fear, it removes the mask of the persecutors. They aren’t strong; they are weak people desperate to make themselves feel strong. This is what is meant by the adage that bullies are cowards. One desires to bully others because one can’t cope with fear of others. In the case of hate — prejudices like racism and sexism — it is a fearful reaction of a coward who can’t cope with difference.
This realization doesn’t disarm the persecutors — they are still dangerous — but it is a step toward disarming them. It is easier to stand strong against discrimination and persecution when we realize that the persecutors are more afraid of us and our power. Our power? That we are capable of standing strong, yes, but simply because we exist — people who think and act differently than they do. That’s why the persecutors persecute, why the haters hate — they can’t cope.
I’m not calling for sympathy for the persecutors. I’m calling out their BS and their BS stories that justify their fearful reactions to difference. They are cowards swimming in their tank of obfuscation, desperately trying to rid their ever shrinking world of people who are different. The right-wingers love to talk about personal responsibility. Well, they need to take responsibility for their personal fears, suck it up, and accept the reality of human diversity.
People ask me how I can remain so calm when right-wingers lash out at me online. It’s because years ago I realized this truth about the precursor to hate. The realization also helped me realize why they hate me.
I deserve no credit for not being a coward, but it is why I am the target of hate online even though I am a white man. I just refuse to be bothered by the presence in the world of people who look and act differently than I do.
That doesn’t mean I tolerate intolerance. As philosopher Karl Popper wrote, if we tolerate intolerance, then eventually the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945, page 118)
The haters are cowards. They need to learn to deal with that. We need to learn to take the mask off of hate to expose the precursor to hate and intolerance.