President Donald Trump promised to protect free speech as president. His record is very mixed on that count. Still, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, apparently doesn’t even understand basic facts about the First Amendment. Indeed, Bondi signaled her intent to violate it.
During a podcast interview this week, Bondi spoke about the aftermath of the horrific assassination of MAGA star influencer Charlie Kirk. She lamented the disturbing fact that some left-wing voices are celebrating this brazen act of political terrorism. But Bondi then bizarrely claimed that “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” for hate speech. She reiterated that, pledging that the federal government “will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
This screed shocked the conservative commentariat because it sounded, almost word-for-word, like the anti-free speech arguments that social justice warriors and woke progressives have pushed for years. It also tramples on everything Kirk stood for, as he famously posted on social media that “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.”
Kirk was exactly right.
“Hate speech” is not a coherent concept. All controversial speech is hated by someone. In fact, it’s exactly the speech that is hated that needs the First Amendment’s protection — popular speech isn’t targeted for censorship in the first place. This isn’t up for debate. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that even “hate speech” is protected free speech. For example, in the 2017 case Matal v Tam, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court that, “the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”
It’s humiliating and bizarre that someone as high-ranking as Bondi could make this kind of mistake. And it unequivocally calls into question her ability to uphold people’s constitutional rights when she clearly doesn’t even understand what those rights actually are.
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Bondi and other officials are now in damage control mode, claiming that she meant a crackdown on true threats, not just “nasty speech.” But that is not what she said. And even if the attorney general has seen the error of her ways and reversed course, the ignorance she’s displayed is disqualifying.
This level of constitutionally illiteracy is simply intolerable for the nation’s highest law enforcement official. If Trump actually believes in free speech, he has to fire Bondi. Otherwise, he’s sending the message that it’s fine and dandy, even at the highest levels of his administration, to trample on the Constitution and demonstrate contempt for the First Amendment.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.