Founded by Puritans in 1638 as a safe harbor against religious persecution, New Haven, Connecticut, is, ironically, now no safe haven from the dark religion of wokeness’ speech suppression. A shocking example is a conservative woman who was put through the city’s criminal-justice crucible for an entire year. Her trespass?
She allegedly used a racial slur.
Videos would ultimately exonerate her, but not before she incurred heavy legal fees and suffered intense, life-rending stress. An added irony is that the woman, First Amendment advocate Lauren Noble, is the founder of the Buckley Institute. This is an entity that exists to promote “freedom of speech at Yale University,” which is located in New Haven.
More troubling still is that the state’s actions amount to effecting, in a de facto sense, European-style “hate speech” laws. How? The prosecutor ignobly charged Noble with disorderly conduct and breaching the peace. It was an apparent attempt to pound a square peg of free speech into a round hole of criminality. What’s more, Noble’s case isn’t the first such example.
New Haven, CT — or Newhaven, U.K.?
Noble was arrested approximately a year ago now, accused of hurling a racial slur at a parking attendant. As CT Insider reported in 2024, providing background:
The charges stem from incidents that occurred on July 6, July 13 and July 27 in 2023.
The parking attendant, Gerno Allen, who is a Black man, told police Noble called him a racist slur when he encountered her alone on July 6 and July 13, 2023 at the 58 Wall St. parking lot….
He claimed Noble called him the same racist slur again on July 27, 2023 after his manager spoke to her about him, the warrant said.
“We would not be at this point, right here in time, if I would have got the proper apology right out the gate,” Allen said in an interview.
…“If somebody does something wrong, they should be held accountable,” Allen added, when asked what he would want people to take from his case.
“Accountable,” governmentally, for what? Speech? Not everything “wrong” is the state’s domain. For example, saying “please” and “thank you” when appropriate and generally being polite are moral imperatives. But should the government enforce this? A parent may punish a small child for rudeness. But is it the state’s role to play nanny and treat us all like little babes, spanking us for impertinence?
The Tale of the Tape
Of course, we can understand a parking attendant’s lack of conversance with the Constitution. Yet we’d hope (often in vain) that public officials would know better — especially in the “Constitution State.” But forget that, Connecticut officials couldn’t even get the facts of Noble’s case straight. As she wrote Tuesday about the accusation against her:
I denied it. I asked the cops to check the parking lot’s surveillance video.
They didn’t — and the state charged me first with disorderly conduct, then with three counts of breach of peace in the second degree.
…The case was a farce from the start: There were no threats, no violence — just a made-up accusation, rubber-stamped by a system that didn’t bother to check basic facts before putting someone’s life through a meat grinder.
When the state finally obtained the video footage I had asked the police to view before arresting me — footage that had been accessible all along — it showed me, on multiple dates, calmly parking, getting out of my car and walking away.
No confrontation, not even any interaction, with the accuser.
In fact, it appears that at issue might’ve been a case of mistaken identity. As the New Haven Register informed May 6:
The prosecution [in asking to have the case dismissed] said video showed Noble had no interaction with Allen on two of the dates he claimed Noble made the comments to him — July 6 and July 13, 2023.
The video from July 6, 2023, showed Gerno had an interaction with another woman who, like Noble, is white, but driving a different car.
(Hat tip: commentator Olivia Murray.)
Not-so-noble Motivations
Of course, though, Noble has a quality that other woman, whomever she is, likely doesn’t have. She’s an avowed conservative heading up a “rightist” organization. And, in fact, Noble suspects that this is precisely why she was targeted. She points out that local media had a field day using the story to epitomize conservatives as “racist.”
In reality, this prosecution was ridiculous from the get-go. New Haven, where I’ve been many a time, is a dump. A haven now for criminals and drugs, it’s currently Connecticut’s second-most-dangerous city. So you’d think its leaders would have bigger fish to fry than worrying over words. But, no. Why, in 2020, the Woke Havenites also took down a Columbus statue in racial justice’s name.
Speaking of justice, however, or rather injustice, Noble’s case isn’t a one-off. Other examples of people arrested in the U.S. for uttering racial slurs are here and here.
Selective Virtue
Now, it goes without saying that hurling racial slurs isn’t nice. But neither is telling someone to f*** off or calling him an a******. For that matter, vulgarity today has been mainstreamed, flowing from lips like air. (Thank you, Hollyweird.) And though George Washington did inveigh against it powerfully in 1776 — in a must-read passage — few bat an eye. Yet when it comes to some racial slurs, and only some racial slurs (anti-white ones get a pass), the same people suddenly become Mother Cabrini.
It’s reminiscent of how anything and everything today goes sexually — almost. Grown men can march virtually naked in the street and it’s applauded as “Pride.” Despite this, a Wisconsin jurisdiction still jailed a 17-year-old for a year for having consensual relations with his 15-year-old girlfriend. Talk about moral blindness, selective virtue, and surgically targeted righteous indignation.
And so it was that during the O.J. Simpson homicide case in 1995, media often behaved as if then-LA police detective Mark Fuhrman’s use of the n-word was worse than the brutal murder of two people. Moreover, as I warned in “How We Will Lose Our Freedom of Speech” in 2006, this “hate speech” obsession could murder our First Amendment.
This is why, too, Lauren Noble should sue Connecticut authorities for civil-rights violations — for all they’re worth. Allow de facto application of “hate-speech law” for long enough, and soon you may end up with the real thing.
