Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday appeared to walk back comments promising to target broadly defined “hate speech” following the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, after facing significant backlash from both conservative and liberal circles over her threat to curb free speech.
In a statement posted to X, the attorney general clarified remarks she made Monday suggesting that hate speech was distinct from free speech protected under the First Amendment.
“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over,” Bondi wrote, adding that “free speech protects ideas, debate, even dissent but it does NOT and will NEVER protect violence.”
President Donald Trump[the Felon] didn’t appear to take issue with Bondi’s comments.Asked by reporters about the attorney general’s remarks Tuesday, Trump returned to a suggestion he has previously floated — that members of the media should be targeted for their coverage of his administration — which he claimed was “hate.”
“We’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly, it’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart,” Trump said, responding to a question from ABC’s Jonathan Karl.
Stephen Miller promised to crack down on “radical left lunatics” and vowed to unleash the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security on unspecified liberal networks they claimed were stoking political violence.
Bondi’s statement, which adds the notable caveat of violent threats, comes after she faced blowback for her comments on free speech the day prior — as well as a vow she made to throw the weight of the Justice Department against people who engaged in what she described as “hate speech” against Kirk.
But many conservative commentators drew a distinction between the public “name and shame” campaign and the attorney general’s threats to prosecute, saying that Bondi’s claims were a misinterpretation of the First Amendment, which does not distinguish between forms of speech.
“Our Attorney General is apparently a moron. ‘There’s free speech and then there is hate speech,’” conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X, quoting Bondi. “No ma’am. That is not the law.”
Other conservative voices argued that while free speech was legally protected under the First Amendment, people could still face “social consequences” for making certain statements.
This week’s free speech debacle isn’t the first time Bondi has been the target of ire from within MAGA circles. The embattled attorney general faced significant backlash from conservative voices this summer over the DOJ’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, with many calling for more transparency from the department.
Some Democrats — who have warned that the Trump administration will use Kirk’s assassination as a pretense to launch a crackdown on their political opponents — also sharply criticized Bondi’s comments to Miller.
“So now @JDVance your Administration is prosecuting hate speech even though you ran on standing for the First Amendment & lectured Europe about not censoring hate speech?” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Cali.) wrote on X.
The irony, of course, is that Kirk used his First Amendment rights to free speech to make all kinds of statements against blacks, gays, the transgender and anyone who disagreed with his white "Christian" nationalist views. Applying Bondi's standard, arguably Kirk should have been prosecuted. The reality is that the far right wants unfettered rights to malign and call for outright harm to political opponents while censoring the speech of everyone else. It's a pattern that has long been visible among Christofascists who want rights not afforded to others. A Piece in The Atlantic looks at the hypocrisy and dangerousness of what the Felon, Bondi and other would be censors are pushing:
A strange thing happens when a notable public figure is killed: Their rough edges are sanded down, and a multidimensional person is flattened into the simplicity of a myth.
This has happened with jarring speed to Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer murdered last week in Utah. . . . In the rush to canonize Kirk, people are transforming him into someone he might not recognize—and highlighting an extreme tension within the MAGA movement.
Kirk’s commitment to debate was inextricable from his political views; he wasn’t a value-neutral advocate for free speech. Kirk arose as a countercultural figure and deployed the First Amendment as a crucial tool for spreading his ideas: In an environment where they were not welcome, he pointed out that they were protected. Now that Kirk’s political allies hold power, however, many appear eager to suppress ideas they dislike. The Trump administration is vowing to use Kirk’s death as an excuse to crack down on dissent even as it lionizes him for defending it.
Kirk began his career planting Turning Point USA chapters on college campuses. As many conservatives were writing off academia, Kirk was evangelizing, creating a beachhead for right-wing views in traditionally liberal environments. Free speech was an important shield for him, because some of his ideas were bigoted, or articulated abrasively.
Some people now praising Kirk are conflating a commitment to argument with a devotion to civility. Kirk succeeded, in part, by eschewing civility in favor of conflict. He said, for example, that “Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled—Alzheimer’s—corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”
Kirk railed against transgender and gay rights. He called George Floyd a “scumbag,” declared the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “mistake,” and claimed that many influential Black figures were in their roles only because of affirmative action.
Free speech protects an airing of these ideas, some of which have since come to dominate the Republican Party and help carry it to electoral success. But free speech is always a danger to power, and now that the GOP has control of the White House and both houses of Congress, and has a friendly Supreme Court—as well as a growing number of cultural and corporate institutions—Kirk’s allies are rattled by it.
In some cases, they have called for the punishment of speech about Kirk’s death. . . . . Yet Kirk himself criticized this kind of use of government power in 2020, when he was locked out of Twitter. “We are seeing right now that Big Tech has become the enforcement and the communication arm of the Biden campaign and the Democrat Party,” Kirk said. “It is undemocratic, it is anti-American, and every single person that believes in a free society should be outraged and quite honestly compelled to action against what these tech companies have been able to do to our country.”
The limited calls for social-media bans have quickly transformed—as free-speech hard-liners warn that it does—into a broader call for censorship. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said on the former Trump aide Katie Miller’s podcast yesterday.
The Trump administration is reportedly now planning a sweeping crackdown on the Democratic Party and on progressive politics as a whole. Yesterday, the president filed a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, several of its reporters, and a major publisher for writing things he didn’t like. . . . Trump’s son has suggested going beyond lodging defamation claims, bluntly advocating the abridgment of the First Amendment.
Rejecting the horrors of political violence is indeed essential to a functional democratic society, but that is why free speech is so important. A Kirk quote has been circulated widely in the past few days: “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.” The MAGA embrace of censorship is not a bid to win a battle of ideas. It’s to force people to shut up. Kirk warned why this was dangerous.
No comments:
Post a Comment