The Left Ultimately Just Wants To Throw Conservatives In Prison

Did you know that in America you can be criminally charged for using a racial slur? The First Amendment is supposed to protect our freedom of speech (even the use of racial slurs!) and in theory it should prevent such a gross violation of our civil liberties.

But apparently it happens anyway — and it happens because the revolutionary left doesn’t care about free speech. What they care about is power, and if they have enough power they will throw their ideological opponents in prison for the crime of disagreeing with them. 

Consider the case of Lauren Noble, a Yale graduate and the founder and executive director of the Buckley Institute, named for conservative icon William F. Buckley, Jr. Two years ago, Noble was arrested in New Haven, Conn., for allegedly using a racial slur in an argument with a black parking attendant.

The parking attendant, 60-year-old Gerno Allen, claimed that Noble repeatedly called him the N-word during a dispute in July 2023. Allen didn’t file a complaint with the police until February 2024, and Noble was arrested that May and charged at first with disorderly conduct and then three counts of breach of the peace.

Noble maintained her innocence throughout, and the misdemeanor charges against her were dropped last month. The state prosecutor cited “insufficient evidence … inconsistencies in the witness’ statements,” and “video evidence clearly contradicting the complaining witness’ statements.” In other words, Allen made up the entire story.

It’s great that Noble is no longer facing criminal charges, but the fact that she was forced to go through two years of this appalling legal ordeal based on an accusation with no evidence to support it is outrageous.

Even more outrageous is that she was arrested and charged in the first place for allegedly uttering an offensive word. Even if Noble had called Allen the N-word, and there was video evidence of it, that’s not a crime. You’re free to use whatever racial slurs you like, even lazy ones like the N-word. Contrary to what many college students seem to think at places like Yale, there’s no such thing as “hate speech” in America. It might be offensive, but it’s not illegal — at least it’s not supposed to be. 

But this was a just-so narrative that was apparently too good for the left-leaning police and prosecutors in deep-blue New Haven to ignore: a conservative woman who runs an organization promoting intellectual diversity and freedom of speech at Yale, caught using the N-word against a working-class black man. Perfect.

As Noble herself wrote in a recent New York Post op-ed: “The interest in my case seemed to have more to do with what the Buckley Institute represents than anything I ever did, or was accused of doing. Headlines in local newspapers made much of both Buckley and conservatism generally, as left-leaning media outlets welcomed the opportunity to advance the dishonest narrative that everyone on the right is racist.”

That’s really what Noble’s case was about. Concocting a race-based “crime” out of thin air to tarnish the reputation of a conservative activist and ruin her good name.

For the left, conservatives aren’t just wrong or misguided, but evil. They should be silenced. If they can be silenced by jailing them on bogus charges stemming from a made-up story, so be it. Even better if the story exposes them as racist.

That’s why LGBT activists went after Colorado baker Jack Phillips five minutes after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. They tried to ruin his life, keeping him in court for more than a decade because his Christian faith prevented him from endorsing their lifestyle and accepting their definition of marriage. They had no tolerance for Phillips’ religious views and no patience for his First Amendment rights. They wanted him to bake the cake or be ruined.

In the Noble case, it’s disturbing enough that she had her name dragged through the mud on bogus charges brought against her because of obviously false accusations. But it’s downright terrifying that a police department and a prosecutor in the United States thought they could criminally charge someone just for using a racial slur. In the context of our constitutional system, that’s simply insane. It shows absolute contempt for the First Amendment, and an open hostility to those who would invoke it.

And it also tells you everything you need to know about the ideological left in America. In the end, if you disagree with them, they just want to throw you in prison. It hardly matters to them what the law and the Constitution say, or even what the facts are. Conservatives are the enemy, and in the end the left will not tolerate us or agree to live in a society where everyone has the right to speak their mind.

Simply put, you cannot share a republic with people like that.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.