“Hate speech” is a term of art perfected by campus bureaucrats to shut down views that progressives dislike, and President Donald Trump was elected and reelected in no small part because of the left’s censorial excesses.
It was striking, then, to see a Trump official who should know better making the same mistake. “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said on a podcast this week. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Will the FBI’s hate speech unit be recruiting newly unemployed diversity, equity and inclusion administrators?
Bondi’s statement was constitutionally illiterate, but she at first resisted correcting the mistake, posting on X: “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.” No one would disagree, but the nation’s chief law enforcement officer didn’t promise to “go after” Americans who threatened violence. She promised to go after them for hate speech, a subjective political label.
Bondi’s office eventually issued a statement acknowledging that the First Amendment is sacrosanct. “If you want to be a hateful person and simply say hateful things, that is your right to do so,” she wrote, according to Axios. “If you want to be a violent person, I will stop you.”
The Bondi flap is unusual because Republicans in the Trump era have usually rejected the kind of nonsense that the attorney general had to clean up. During last year’s presidential campaign, it was Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz who was rightly roasted after proclaiming, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”
But now parts of the right are demanding a government clampdown after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. They’d be wise to remember Kirk’s own words. “Hate speech does not exist legally in America,” he wrote in 2024. “There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.” Kirk’s legacy is honored through political debate, not government censorship that he deplored.