By Sandy . . . This was sent on December 8 to Mr. Dan Bongino.

Mr. Dan Bongino

info@bongino.com

Dear Mr. Bongino,

Mr. Bongino, we agree with you. Calling for the wholesale destruction of any group of people is an abomination and should not be supported, not even under the guise of free speech. It should be condemned, as you have said.

For those who need a little background, a little context, the New York Times ran a story about how three college presidents, when asked during a congressional hearing if students calling for the genocide of Jews violated their school’s code of conduct, would or could not give a simple “Yes” or No” answer. “[M]onstrous and antithetical to everything we represent”; “Unacceptable”; “[H]ate speech.” These were comments from various legislators and White House representatives in response to the issue and in their condemnation of the attempts of the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT to allow some wiggle- room for freedom of speech and the importance of context. Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and current popular conservative radio host, responded to the situation in his usual manner on his talk-show December 6. At times becoming verbally abusive– in verbiage, tone, and volume level—he made his opinion crystal clear: The testimony of the presidents was “stupid,” “ignorant,” and “full of shit,” exemplifying the “cancer” that has “metastasized” on college campuses.

Mr. Bongino, calling for the destruction of any group of people is indeed harassment, criminal, and must be condemned. That is your clear, firm opinion, and NARSOL is in total agreement.

Our organization, the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws, and the people whose civil liberties we defend are all too familiar with various forms of speech calling for the eradication of them as a group. Almost any online article about persons required to register on a sex offender registry—close to a million individuals with past convictions ranging from innocent but wrongly convicted to public exposure to rape—garners comments calling for exactly that: the wholesale killing of all registrants. Some who post these comments offer up themselves as willing perpetrators of such massacres. They offer the highest praise for the criminals who have sought out strangers and murdered them based solely on their listing on a state registry.

Our members, as well as their wives and husbands, children, and parents, have seen these comments and worse. They have seen the references to registrants being “easy targets” as they can’t have weapons with which to defend themselves. They see the bumper stickers and window decals and tee-shirts reading, “Save a deer; shoot a sex offender.” One threat level down from group annihilation, a message on Tik-Tok says, as a backdrop to music and dancing, “For extra cash consider robbing sex offenders, they’re [sic] address is easy to find and they don’t own guns.”

Mr. Bongino, we appreciate your indignation at verbiage that targets a definable group of human beings for wholesale destruction. We ask you to join us in public condemnation of language that targets persons with past convictions for sexually-based crimes—some convictions thirty or forty years old—and targets them based on those convictions alone.

May we count on your support? Will you invite a member of our executive board to be a guest on a broadcast? Will you publicly denounce these attacks on registered persons as hate speech, as stupid and ignorant, and as a cancer that has grown out of our nation’s sex offender registries?

Thanking you in advance,

The NARSOL Board of Directors

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