It was a rough day online Wednesday for CNN host Chris Cuomo, who took a beating for a series of troubling "hate speech" tweets that even the far-left Salon is calling "boneheaded."

Wednesday morning, Cuomo, a Fordham law school grad and multiple News Emmy award winner, tweeted in response to a comment about hate speech that it is clearly "excluded from protection," adding condescendingly, "dont [sic] just say you love the constitution... read it." The result was Cuomo spending the rest of the day trying to beat back the flood of incredulous (and often entertaining) responses. 

Cuomo was quickly hammered by followers, including several of his peers, all of whom enthusiastically pointed out that there is of course no "hate speech" clause in the Constitution. 

Cuomo began to defend his position by citing the "Chaplinsky" or "fighting words" doctrine, based on a 1942 Supreme Court ruling which held that words “which, by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” are not protected by the First Amendment. As Allahpundit explains, that ruling has been "narrowed" by federal courts to simply apply to face-to-face insults that would spur an immediate violent reaction from a reasonable person.  In other words, as Ed Morissey and many others pointed out, not hate speech.

Cuomo's insistence on maintaining his original claim just buried him further and so the tweets piled up. A few examples:

One positive for Cuomo: His series of "boneheaded" tweets eventually earned him a spot in Twitchy's coveted "Douche Hall of Fame."

There is of course a seriously troubling aspect of Cuomo's rationale: it is the type of argument made more and more by the left. In his piece on the Cuomo's hate speech tweets, Allahpundit makes the point that "Cuomo is anticipating where the law might be going if progressive attitudes on harmful expression gain traction among Democrats":

Go look again at the poll I excerpted above. Already a clear majority of Democrats support criminalizing hateful statements about minorities. In Europe, where their left tends to be a few steps ahead of our own, hate speech is already a crime in many countries (including and especially the UK). Whether the national consensus that hate speech is protected speech remains intact depends on how hard progressives want to push the issue. If Democrats think there should be criminal penalties for hatred and the First Amendment makes those penalties impossible, then the courts’ understanding of the First Amendment will simply have to change.