Activist Prosecutors Keep Criminally Charging Children For "Hate Speech"

Earlier this week, Hampden County, Massachusetts District Attorney Anthony Gulluni held a dramatic press conference announcing that he was charging six white Southwick middle school students for witness intimidation and violating the civil rights of blacks after they allegedly made racist jokes in a Snapchat chatroom. If found guilty of these crimes, the students could be sentenced to juvenile incarceration.

Courts have begun eroding the rights of children in recent years. In Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. (2021), the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 to overturn the First Amendment protections provided to left-wing students during the Vietnam war in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), with Jewish Justice Stephen Breyer writing in his majority opinion that Tinker did not give school administrators sufficient power to punish off-campus speech.

Though a setback for the cause of student’s rights, the Supreme Court has not yet done away with the First Amendment more broadly, which is universally understood to protect “hate speech.” Legally speaking, a group of 13-year-olds sharing images with racial slurs about their peers, in the absence of a connected crime, does not fall within the purview of law enforcement.

In the example of DA Gulluni, who throughout his career has eagerly volunteered to help lead statewide “hate crime” task forces spearheaded by powerful entities like the Anti-Defamation League and his local Jewish Federation, the decision to prosecute these children was only made after a full month of ceaseless lobbying from various media outlets and racial agitation NGOs. That is not how criminal law is supposed to work.

Following the announcement of criminal charges, NAACP president Bishop Talbert W. Swan praised Gulluni’s “courageous decision” to send cops after the white kids, even as the NAACP campaigns to remove police and School Resource Officers from violent minority schools in other parts of Massachusetts. As Gulluni exhausted police resources looking for novel ways to weaponize the criminal justice system against white 7th graders for impolite comments, a gun battle broke out during a gang melee inside a 90%+ non-white high school in a different part of his county.

Allyson Lopez, the aggrieved mother of one of Southwick Regional School’s alleged black victims, has also praised the police’s involvement on her behalf. Lopez has been vocal in accusing the white parents, students, and administrators of the school of being racists, but regardless of the merit to her accusations or lack thereof (the students in question had already suffered severe 45-day suspensions), these are circumstances she has actively sought out. Despite residing in the overwhelmingly black and Puerto Rican city of Springfield, Lopez used Massachusetts’ school choice system to avoid the majority-minority school — where her daughter would presumably be safe from white “hate speech” — and opted instead for the supposedly racist 90% white school 45 minutes away.

On social media, many of Gulluni’s constituents are decrying the DA’s behavior and priorities. One commentator on Facebook wrote, “Hate speech isn't a thing. Has anyone read the constitution? These kids getting charged are gonna get some nice settlements from this corrupt govt and school.” On Twitter, similar sentiments are being expressed. Gulluni, who typically runs unopposed as a Democrat, has casually ignored these concerns. So far, no civil liberties group has expressed interest in defending these students.

Prosecutors in these cases are emboldened by the closed nature of juvenile courts, which prevents the general public from accessing evidence and proceedings and thus grants crusading anti-white officials the power to characterize these incidents however they want. If one were to go by either the media or Gulluni’s version of events, we would come away with the conclusion that these white kids were conspiring to sell their black classmates at a slave auction.

The idea of subjecting a 13-year-old to a criminal trial for saying something on the internet would be met with laughter or horror by most of the world, but in America this is becoming the norm. Since the 2020 George Floyd race riots, cases similar to the Southwick one have occurred in Connecticut, Louisiana, and elsewhere. In most of these incidents, the racial comments or slurs are shared privately among friends or in jest.

With so many videos circulating of white students being beaten and killed by blacks at school, as well as the alarming rise in racial attacks on white teachers, the contrast in America’s two-tiered, racialized criminal justice system could not be more stark.

Blacks who engage in interracial homicides have already become increasingly difficult to convict in the United States, but this is even more true for offenders under 18. In the land of the free, a barely pubescent white child blurting out a racial slur on social media is, to some of the sick people in power, the graver offense.