Attorney General Pam Bondi is not what you would call “subtle.” While Donald Trump was preparing to head off to Britain for a state visit, Bondi was busy trying to import one of that country’s worst ideas: the notion that “hate speech” is a real category of crime. It’s part of the administration’s move in the days since Charlie Kirk’s senseless assassination to use tragedy as a pretext for tightening the screws on civil liberties.
Bondi made her big blunder on Katie Miller’s podcast on Monday. Talking about antisemitism, Bondi said: “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society. We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Hours later, Bondi went on Fox News to declare that the Department of Justice was investigating businesses accused of refusing to print Charlie Kirk’s picture for vigils. “We can prosecute you for that,” she warned.
Bondi tried to walk back her remarks by posting that “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.” That statement was technically correct but beside the point because her original claim suggested the Department of Justice might go after mere offensive speech. She also mixed what is legally free speech with real crimes like “doxxing a conservative family” and “swatting a Member of Congress.”
It is worth asking whether the nation’s top law enforcement officer understands the Constitution she swore to uphold. The problem, of course, is that in the United States “hate speech” does not exist as a legal category.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that offensive, hateful, and even deeply bigoted expression remains protected under the First Amendment unless it meets the high bar of incitement: speech directed to and likely to produce imminent lawless action. That principle is one of the defining features of American liberty — and “keep your hate speech off our campus” progressives, after years of trying, appear to have abandoned the effort to create that exception.
Trump himself, naturally, had no such qualms. Asked about Bondi’s remarks, he mused to an ABC reporter: “She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly. Maybe they will come after ABC. ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech, so maybe they will have to go after you.” If you’re wondering how the president defines “hate speech,” look no further. It’s whatever offends Donald J. Trump. And he has been busy trying to codify that definition into law with an absurd spree of defamation lawsuits: Trump has sued The New York Times for $15 billion over its endorsement of Kamala Harris, calling it “the single largest illegal Campaign contribution, EVER.” He has sued the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over a story about Jeffrey Epstein, and settled defamation claims against ABC and CBS for millions.
Newspapers are entitled to endorse candidates and to publish reporting critical of those in power. Citizens are entitled to express views, however offensive. These are the minimum guarantees of the First Amendment. Is a basic understanding of that too much to expect from the nation’s chief law enforcer? It shouldn’t be — which only indicates something more insidious.
The MAGA media is effectively throwing Bondi under the bus, hoping that if they call her stupid loudly enough, no one will notice that her words match the president’s instincts perfectly. But our president is far from a champion of constitutional boundaries, and he is unlikely to part ways with an attorney general whose contempt for the First Amendment mirrors his own. Bondi won’t retract her remarks — why should she, when they so neatly reflect the worldview at the top?
The organized witch hunt searching for reasons to hound perpetrators of “hate speech” out of their jobs feels a little bit too close to the “cancel culture” that the right quite rightly have always tried to resist; except, instead of being driven from the bottom up by the people and societal agreement, it’s a worse kind: driven from the top down. Case in point: ABC’s coerced decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel shows how far this administration is willing to go to punish its critics.
On Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr went on a far-right podcast and openly threatened ABC and its parent company, Disney, with retaliation. If the network fails to “take action on Kimmel” for spreading misinformation about Charlie Kirk’s killing, Carr warned, there would be “additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Let’s not forget that Kirk spent his career railing against this very culture of speech-policing, and yet now the ideals he espoused of free press and expression are now under great threat all in Trump’s image. The danger now is that Bondi’s comments become the trial balloon for a government-sanctioned “hate speech” exception. If the Trump administration succeeds in blurring that line, we will all be less free, regardless of what you thought of Charlie Kirk.
William Liang is a writer living in San Francisco.