Report Details How State Hotline Operates
Nothing screams "land of the free" quite like a government hotline where citizens can snitch on their neighbors for telling an offensive joke. That’s right—Oregon, in its never-ending quest to out-woke California, has a taxpayer-funded “Bias Response Hotline,” where residents can report each other for non-criminal speech deemed offensive. The crime? Hurting someone’s feelings. The punishment? A state-run database entry, counseling referrals, and, in some cases, a call from the authorities.
And it’s not just Oregon. This kind of Orwellian surveillance is spreading like a virus. Connecticut encourages people to report hate speech they “heard about but did not see”—because hearsay is apparently a new legal standard. Vermont wants people to report "biased but protected speech" directly to the police. Philadelphia even collects the exact addresses of “bias incidents” and, in some cases, follows up with the accused to “encourage” sensitivity training.
If this all sounds like something out of East Germany’s Stasi playbook, that’s because it is.
The Oregon hotline—staffed by "trauma-informed operators"—doesn’t just track legitimate hate crimes (which, of course, should be reported to law enforcement). No, they take it a step further by collecting reports on “bias incidents,” meaning completely legal speech that someone, somewhere, found offensive. The categories include everything from “mocking someone with a disability” to “creating racist images” to “sharing offensive jokes about someone’s identity.” And my personal favorite: "imitating someone’s cultural norm."
In the name of collecting "data" on so-called "bias incidents," at least a dozen Democratic jurisdictions, including eight states, have set up hotlines and portals that let people report their fellow citizens for protected speech. https://t.co/okDfzPclUg
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) January 22, 2025
Let’s break this down: If you think your neighbor’s behavior is prejudiced, even if they haven't actually broken the law, the state wants to hear from you. The hotline doesn’t require proof or context—just the perception of bias. And guess what? Those reports are logged into a state database and shared with the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, a group responsible for shaping the state’s “public safety” policies.
It’s not hard to see where this is going. A hotline that encourages people to turn each other in for saying the wrong thing—based entirely on feelings—isn’t just dystopian. It’s a mechanism of social control.
In an undercover test of the system, a journalist from the Washington Free Beacon called in to report that he—posing as a Muslim concerned about the war in Gaza—felt “targeted” by his neighbor’s Israeli flag. Within twenty minutes, a hotline operator had logged the complaint in the state database, described the flag as a “warning sign,” and even suggested installing security cameras in case the situation escalated.
Did the journalist provide evidence that the flag was a direct threat? Nope. Did he claim his neighbor said or did anything hostile? Nope. All he had to do was say he felt unsafe, and the state put his neighbor in a database.
And if you think this kind of nonsense is only used against conservatives, think again. When the same journalist reported a “From the River to the Sea” sign—an anti-Israel slogan used by Hamas supporters—the hotline logged that as a bias incident, too. In other words, both sides of the Israel-Palestine debate can be reported for bias speech. The only requirement? Someone’s feelings were hurt.
As one civil liberties advocate put it, this proves that "open-ended definitions of bias can encompass even common forms of political expression." And once the government builds a system like this, it can be used to police any viewpoint.
This is what happens when you take campus “bias response teams” and bring them into state government. For years, universities have been training young activists to report their classmates for perceived offenses—whether it’s a conservative speaker, a politically incorrect joke, or even the wrong Halloween costume. The result? An entire generation conditioned to believe that speech they disagree with should be reported, not debated.
Now, those same activists are bringing their ideology into government, and it’s creating a culture where snitching is the norm. In Vermont, people have been reported for opposing diversity programs. In Maryland, simply using the “wrong” pronouns online is enough to get logged into a hate speech report. In Philadelphia, people accused of offensive speech are being contacted by the government and “encouraged” to attend sensitivity training.
And let’s be clear: This isn’t just about data collection. Many of these programs are openly designed to discourage speech. Illinois’s hotline says that "reporting hate" is valuable because it "sends a message" to offenders that hate “will not be tolerated.” Connecticut’s Hate Crimes Advisory Council even likens its program to an anti-terrorism campaign. Yes, you read that correctly—bias speech is now being lumped in with terrorism.