Is having a personal blog that addresses controversial political topics possibly damaging to an academic career? I am a Ph.D student, and I've been considering for some time starting my own blog as a hobby, to write mostly on philosophical/political topics that interest me; these are definitely not related to my field of research (at least, not most of them). As it happens, some of the topics I want to address are controversial, and much of what I would write could be interpreted as being offensive to one group or another.

Let's assume I want to look for a tenure-track position, and later on get tenure. Ideally, I hope everyone would agree that such a personal blog should not alter in any way my case for obtaining the position. In practice, I am concerned that the existence of such a blog could be used to attack my case for the position (and later on, my case for tenure) on the grounds that the opinions therein found are "offensive" or even "hate speech" (as might be interpreted by some very sensitive people in these modern times). More subtly, one imagines it could cause some decision-making persons to develop an effective bias against me, which would probably have a negative effect.

Thus my question in the title. I am looking both for personal experiences that people have had, and for some statistical data that may answer the question or a closely-related one (such as, does non-trivial political participation affect academic career? etc.)
Let's start with this: as a professor you will be in a position of power over quite a few people. Part of the job of being a professor is to responsibly manage a number of employees and respectfully interact with students. If you really did (recently) practice hate speech, then that does legitimately disqualify you. 

However, when this becomes an issue you will probably never hear about it. Think about that from the position of the hiring committee: They have a number of applicants, most will be somewhat suitable for the job, but one will be stronger on one point and another stronger on another. So there are so many ways in which you can justify any decision. So when you do write down the justification, you will choose the one that will give the least problems.