The assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk has unloosed all sorts of emotions and apparently has made Attorney General Pam Bondi go off the rails. On September 15, she appeared on the Katie Miller Podcast (Miller is the wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller). There she declared, in reaction to public and vulgar expressions of contempt for Kirk’s legacy from random citizens and media commentators alike, that she would seek revenge: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech. And there’s no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie.”
This gets it precisely wrong, and in so alarming a way that it suggests Pam Bondi fails to understand the basics of the U.S. Constitution. There are two separate issues to address. To begin with, “hate speech” is not even a judicially cognizable concept: There are certain categories of unprotected speech under the First Amendment (threats, defamation, and the like), but saying disparaging things about Charlie Kirk, no matter how tasteless, is not one of them. It is an expression of political opinion, and as such is one of the most securely protected rights Americans have.
We can wish people did not feel the need to express crude and unworthy sentiments. We can even choose not to patronize companies that tolerate it, if so inclined. But Bondi went far beyond that and raised the ugly specter of compulsion. Later that day, appearing on Fox News with Sean Hannity, the attorney general doubled down, stating that “businesses cannot discriminate. If you want to go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that.”
To claim that anyone — a business owner, a commentator, anyone — must be forced to consent to participate in speech they disapprove of is little better than a mirror-image variation on forcing beleaguered Colorado businessman Jack Phillips to “bake the cake” celebrating a gender transition. To argue this (as Bondi has done twice now) is to carelessly reject the commitment to freedom of speech and — not least of all — religion that the conservative movement has fought tenaciously for over the last half-century. It is hard enough to believe that this sort of rhetoric could be heard from any attorney general, much less a Republican one.
On Tuesday morning, Attorney General Bondi “clarified” her remarks, saying that she only claimed that “hate speech” accompanied by “calls to violence” would be prosecuted. It is an attempt at rhetorical clean-up that inspires little confidence. (There still remains no legal category of hate speech, after all.)
Charlie Kirk was vulnerable to an assassin’s bullet at Utah Valley University as a function of his willingness to engage in debate and speak his mind, freely and fearlessly. Pam Bondi would be well-served to heed that legacy — and the U.S. Constitution she has taken an oath to protect.