Skaruts

Well, someone that finds speech offensive/upsetting/etc can pretty much call it hate speech. So in the end, hate speech can be anything that upsets someone.

I mean, you can reasonably define hate speech as something any reasonable person could agree is actually potentially harmful (like promoting some kind of prejudice in some dangerous ways), and I presume that's how it's defined under legal terms, but colloquially people most likely won't be doing that.

Well, then maybe people ought to disregard it when someone is wearing a MAGA hat, or bringing politics up in any other way. Because not doing so will only lead some people to do it more often just to spite them.

If it has no effect, people stop doing it (same applies for overt racism, actually). If you want politics out of IT, then just ignore it. That's what they should've done, instead of calling it into everyone's attention like they did.

Hate speech is the only speech that needs to be protected. If speech doesn't offend or upset anyone, then there's nothing that it needs to be protected from. Your reasoning is upside down.

If you find someone's opinion disagreeable, you don't shut it down, you refute it. Shutting it down just tells me you have no counter arguments, so maybe they have a point and I should listen to it.

Understand the Streisand Effect.