Pam Bondi Threatens To Prosecute Hate Speech, Which Charlie Kirk Himself (Rightly) Said Was Protected Speech
Attorney General Pam Bondi just provided a masterclass in how to completely misunderstand the First Amendment while threatening to abuse government power to silence critics. In response to online criticism of Charlie Kirk following his assassination, Bondi declared: 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."
Attorney General Pam Bondi: "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."
This is constitutional nonsense of the highest order, and it's particularly galling given the source.
The Supreme Court has been crystal clear on this issue for decades, over and over again, that there is no hate speech" exception to the First Amendment. In Matal v. Tam in 2017, the majority opinion written by Justice Alito reminded us that:
And, as we have explained, that idea strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express the thought that we hate."
A few years earlier, in 2010, in Snyder vs. Phelps (the case about the Westboro Baptist Church picketing funerals with extremely hateful signs) the court again made it clear that hate speech is protected speech, with Chief Justice John Roberts stating:
Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and-as it did here-inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course-to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.
These rulings follow a long line of precedent stretching back to Brandenburg v. Ohio, which established that the government cannot punish speech unless it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." Offensive, hateful, or even vile speech that doesn't meet this extremely narrow standard remains protected.
But here's the kicker that makes Bondi's threat even more hypocritical: Charlie Kirk himself understood this basic constitutional principle better than the current Attorney General. Kirk once tweeted out exactly this point:
That's Charlie Kirk tweeting out just last year:
Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech.
And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.
Keep America free.
So we have an Attorney General threatening to prosecute people for speech that the very person she's supposedly defending explicitly said (correctly) was constitutionally protected.
It's also worth noting the broader political context here. For years, it was primarily those on the political left who would incorrectly claim that hate speech is not free speech" when trying to shut down speakers they disagreed with. Conservatives, including Kirk himself, would rightfully push back against these claims and defend robust First Amendment protections. Now we have the MAGA right adopting the exact same constitutionally illiterate position when it serves their political purposes.
It sure seems like their prior defenses of hate speech weren't so much about free speech principles, but about their own ability to spew hate speech without consequence.
The whiplash here is instructive. This isn't just hypocrisy-it's a preview of how authoritarians operate. They'll champion free speech principles when they benefit them, then abandon those same principles the moment they become inconvenient. Bondi's threat reveals the MAGA movement's willingness to weaponize Kirk's assassination as an excuse to suppress criticism and dissent.
It's been almost exactly a decade since we warned that hate speech laws were just another way for governments to punish people they don't like, and here is Pam Bondi putting an exclamation point on that argument for us.
When government officials claim the power to define and prosecute hate speech," they're essentially claiming the power to criminalize dissent. History shows us exactly how this plays out: those in power inevitably define hate speech" as speech that challenges or criticizes us."
This is precisely what we're seeing here. Kirk was a polarizing political figure who said plenty of controversial things during his lifetime. Some people are now saying unflattering things about his legacy online. Rather than accepting this as part of the rough-and-tumble of democratic discourse, Bondi wants to use the power of the federal government to silence these critics by threatening them with prosecution.
It's got nothing to do with actual hate speech-which, again, isn't even a legal category in the US. It's clearly the excuse the MAGA crowd has been waiting for to suppress and silence anyone they deem insufficiently loyal and supportive.
The limited exceptions to First Amendment protection are well-established and narrow: true threats, incitement to imminent lawless action, defamation, and a handful of other carefully circumscribed categories. Notably absent from this list is saying mean things about dead podcasters" or hate speech" more generally.
The First Amendment doesn't protect speech because it's nice, polite, or inoffensive. It protects speech precisely because allowing the government to decide which ideas are acceptable inevitably leads to the suppression of dissent. Bondi's threat to prosecute undefined hate speech" is exactly the kind of government overreach the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
But let's be real about what's happening here. Kirk's assassination is just providing convenient cover for what the MAGA movement has wanted to do all along: weaponize government power to silence critics and dissent. The fact that they're doing it while abandoning the very constitutional principles their supposed martyr championed? That's not irony-that's the point. Authoritarians don't care about principles; they care about power. And right now, they think they have enough of it to drop the mask.