The Florida International University students who were part of a private chat filled with racist, antisemitic and violent messages want a federal judge to believe it was all in jest.

They are fighting FIU’s decision to punish them, claiming that the university took their provocative jokes — including talking about beheading Black people — too seriously. They argue their speech is protected by the First Amendment. FIU claims the WhatsApp messages — obtained by the Herald earlier this year — constituted threats and caused fear on campus.

Hateful speech is, indeed, free speech for the most part, and it will be up to Chief U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga to decide, after a brief trial in Miami this week, whether the school violated four students’ constitutional rights or whether their messages constituted genuine threats.

Free speech protections in this country are broad for good reason — and we would rather err on the side of more speech rather than less. Outside the courtroom, however, the students’ arguments ring false — and if this is their sense of humor, it is morally disturbing.

Dariel Gonzalez, expelled from FIU in July, testified that the chat was created for people who enjoy offensive, internet-based humor, the Herald reported. When asked whether it was funny to talk about beheading someone because of their race, he answered: “In this context, yes.”

It’s hard to muster a laugh, in any context. We’re sure Black students at FIU feel the same.

Among the group’s chats shown in court was a message copied from the internet that contained racial slurs and descriptions of violence against Black people. Gonzalez’s answer to the post at the time: “How edgy.”

Another suspended student, Abel Carvajal, testified that a message calling for the killing of communists was “political hyperbole to the max.”

Maybe the messages weren’t meant to be a call to arms against minorities or political opponents. Calling them a joke might be enough to help the former students’ legal case, but we’ve seen this before: People who, when they think no one else is listening, feel comfortable spewing their darkest, most hateful thoughts. Those who call them out are “too sensitive,” too PC, and can’t take a joke.

The students involved in the chat, which at one point was renamed “Nazi heaven,” used to be involved with high-profile conservative organizations, including Turning Point USA and Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party. It would be a mistake to dismiss the chat as the work of rogue students. These were young people with political aspirations who could have ended up in elected office (or still might).

As the Herald reported in March, the participants in the chat used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.

“Ew you had colored professors?!” Gonzalez, the College Republicans’ recruitment chairman at the time, wrote. “I reguse (sic) to be indoctrinated by the coloreds.”

The First Amendment may protect racist speech, but it shouldn’t allow people to evade responsibility for what they say and write. It doesn’t erase the much-needed discussion about how extremism has infiltrated into the Republican Party, aided by an attitude of anything-goes online. (The local GOP condemned the WhatsApp chat and Carvajal resigned from his post as party secretary in March).

Perhaps the participants thought these were funny messages when they were confined to their phones. Now exposed to the world, those words cannot be dismissed as a mere joke.

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