When you lack historical context, refuse to read the Constitution for yourself, and instead listen to right-wing provocateurs, this is how you end up disappointed—and how you end up damaging the Constitution in the process.

I am not telling anyone to ignore the real problems of illegal immigration or the failure of assimilation. I am not telling you to ignore that many of the people involved in these situations are absolute scumbags who should be in prison or should never have been here in the first place. That is not the argument I am making. Some are trying to smother that reality into this case in order to avoid the larger point.

I have tried to be measured on the Shiloh Hendrix situation.

Her behavior is not something to defend. It is not the hill to die on.

I don’t defend low-class, trashy Black behavior. I will not defend low-class, trashy White behavior either. I have been consistent on this for years.

What disturbs me is watching some so-called conservatives display the same tribalism and intellectual laziness I walked away from in the Democratic Party. Rather than address the argument I am actually making, they invent arguments I never made, attack straw men, and ignore the actual legal principles at issue.

Even more troubling, they have tried to reduce this to race. It is not about race. It is about constitutional principles, moral standards, and basic decency. Those standards do not change because they become politically inconvenient.

Some now claim “the court went left.” Read the actual court filings. The court applied Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942)—the fighting words doctrine that has been part of American law for more than eighty years. The court noted that the First Amendment does not protect all speech. It excludes “fighting words”—those which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” The complaint alleged that Hendrix directed an extreme racial epithet at both adults and a child, chased a child in a confrontational manner, and engaged in face-to-face verbal abuse coupled with aggressive physical conduct. The court held that this is not abstract expression. It is targeted, personally directed, inherently abusive language likely to provoke an immediate breach of the peace—especially when directed at a vulnerable minor and accompanied by pursuit.

That is the actual legal analysis. You are free to disagree with it. But at least engage what the court wrote instead of pretending the reasoning does not exist.

This is not new. American courts have long upheld convictions for certain forms of abusive, face-to-face speech likely to provoke violence or breach the peace. These are not recent progressive creations. Selective history is not constitutional argument. It is intellectual dishonesty.

And let’s be honest about the deeper hypocrisy. Some of the same people defending this as absolute free speech are the first to lament the breakdown of order in this country—until the breakdown benefits their side. They are outraged by boys believing they are girls. They are outraged by drag queens. They are outraged by rainbow flags flying over American embassies. They correctly recognize that those things are corrosive. Yet when it comes to a racial slur directed at a child in public, suddenly words have no real value, no real harm, and no real limits. Absolute free speech. No consequences.

That is not principle. That is selective moral vision.

Conservatives embraced absolute viewpoint neutrality on speech to defend against campus repression. They treated the defense of the innocent and the celebration of immoral, vulgar, repressive, and disordered acts as equals under the law, hoping formal neutrality would protect them. It did not. The repression grew worse. By removing the moral foundations, they trapped themselves in a vortex they cannot escape—exactly the position they entered. Without the ground of right and wrong, there is no winning.

The Constitution was written for a moral and religious people. It was not written as a license for every form of public indecency simply because someone can claim “free speech.” Words like this have no constructive value to a healthy society. Decent people know it. Most of the people currently defending this know it too. They just refuse to admit it because it is politically inconvenient.

If the N-word is truly harmless and protected without limit, then go use it freely—on every Black person you meet, in every social media post, without exception. You won’t. Because you know the context matters. You know the word carries weight. You know you are being dishonest.

I don’t use the C-word either. I don’t find it endearing or funny. Most decent people don’t. The same standard applies here.

We have lost the plot when we start defending conduct our Founders would never have defended. The hypocrisy is rank.

I wrote about this nearly a decade ago in my first book, Outcast. Long before this case, I argued that racial slurs directed at any group are morally wrong and should not be defended.

If anyone thinks I will abandon principle to satisfy political tribalism, they have the wrong man.

From Outcast: “We will say and do mean and hateful things to others. But because speech does not fit the context of what popular narratives consider hate speech, we believe we get a free pass to attack with venom people who look like yourself—even Hitler could not dream. For instance, how is calling another black man ‘Uncle Tom’ any different from a white man calling a black man ‘the N-word’? The spirit that drives a black man to call another black man ‘Uncle Tom’ is the same spirit operating when a white man uses the term to insult a black man, and that spirit is evil. Understandably, using racial slurs to describe any group is insensitive and downright hateful and should not be condoned.”

Principles don’t switch teams.

Neither do I.