NH Supreme Court Hears Case On Whether ‘Keep New England White’ Banner Constitutes Free Speech

Source: Sanghwan Kim / Getty

In today’s episode of The Caucasian Persecution Complex Has Gotten Out Of Hand, attorneys for white supremacists in New England told a New Hampshire Supreme Court judge that their clients’ free speech was violated when they were hit with civil rights charges for hanging a banner that read “Keep New England White” on a highway overpass.

Before we get into why this entire case should actually be a case study on white grievance, white fragility and other assorted white nonsense, let’s get into the legal battle, which began in 2022.

From NHPR:

The group did not have a permit to hang the banner, and removed it shortly after law enforcement officers arrived. Months later, the Attorney General’s office filed civil rights charges against NSC-131 and Christopher Hood, the group’s purported leader, contending they trespassed onto public property and were motivated to do so by racial animus.

A lower court judge dismissed the case, ruling that the Attorney General’s office was using an overly broad interpretation of the trespassing law, and that the move was a chill on free speech. The state then appealed.

Before the state’s highest court on Thursday, William Gens, who is representing NSC-131, said the government is improperly targeting one specific message it happens to not like, while ignoring other banners, both real and hypothetical, that could be hung in similar places.

“If this banner was a blank banner, we wouldn’t be here,” said Gens. “If it said ‘Support Our Troops’ we probably wouldn’t be here. If it said ‘Black Lives Matter’ we wouldn’t be here, because this gives way to all sorts of selective enforcement.”

Yeah—this is just insufferable caucasity.

So, the argument here is that the government is unfairly targeting—*checks notes*—racists and that it’s unfair to discriminate against people who wish to discriminate against literally everyone who isn’t white. How dare the government prosecute and persecute the very fine people who wish to make America segregate again when it would never file civil rights charges against people who hung banners that don’t call for the eradication of every single racial group besides one?

It’s egregious that the government wouldn’t file the same charges against citizens who hung a “black banner” with no message on it at all that might offend, distract or cause motorists of certain ethnicities to feel threatened. It’s outrageous that these oppressive governing officials wouldn’t have the same energy for a banner that read “Support the Troops”—white conservatives’ sixth favorite slogan behind “Make America Great Again,” “Built that wall,” “Go woke, go broke,” and “Hello, 911, there’s an African American man standing out here minding his own business without a permit.”

And, of course, it is reprehensible that “Black Lives Matter” isn’t placed on the same level as “Keep New England White.” Sure, people who follow simple logic, consider context and generally understand how words work will argue that the former is a statement of affirmation for a demographic whose lives are historically and currently often treated like they don’t matter, whereas the latter statement insists that only white people should exist in a region of the country that is already more than 70% white—but now we’re just arguing semantics here, amirite?

Anyway, while state prosecutors argued that the defendants were trespassing on public property to hang a banner that was a clear threat to non-white motorists, Sean Locke, who oversees the Attorney General’s Civil Rights Unit, argued the case has nothing to do with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which, by the way, was crafted at a time when a white person could have hung a banner that read “Make America Thrive Over Anti-Black Oppression For The Next 400 Years” without law enforcement batting and eye.

“This case is not about freedom of speech,” Locke said. “Neither freedom of speech, nor any other principle of law, authorizes the defendants to intentionally affix these banners to government-owned property without some prior authorization.”

Here’s the thing: You have to imagine how Black spectators would view a case like this. Imagine us watching a bunch of white people trivialize the white supremacist message written on a banner while they haggle over whether or not it’s protected speech and whether or not the defendants were trespassing when they hung it. We just don’t want a precedent set that would allow for the return of “whites only” or “no coloreds allowed” signs placed over establishments while people who would be completely unaffected by these messages argue about what the Constitution says and whether the government is being racist against racists for charging them over blatantly racist acts.

Hell, even the ACLU of New Hampshire submitted a legal brief in the case, arguing that as “abhorrent” as the banner was, the state still might be stifling free speech by charging the defendants with civil rights violations.

The justices haven’t issued a verdict on the case yet, but the fact that this legal debate is even happening in 2024 is an indication that we haven’t progressed as a nation socially as much as those who insist America is not a racist country would have us believe.

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