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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Pam Bondi’s ‘hate speech’ comments lead even some conservatives
to cry foul
Analysis by Aaron Blake, CNN
Updated:
6:23 PM EDT, Tue September 16, 2025
Source: CNN
Within hours of last week, signaled a rather curious crackdown.
“My administration will find each and every one of those who
contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence,
including the organizations that fund it and support it,” he said.
There was no evidence last week that the shooter was anything other
than a lone wolf actor, and there still isn’t. But Trump said his
response would broadly target lots of supposed culprits of political
violence.
It wasn’t difficult to see how such a thing could get out of hand.
And the administration has done little in the days since to disabuse
anybody of the notion that Trump – who has demonstrated , and –
would use Kirk’s killing as a pretext to punish his enemies.
Conservative activists are already who celebrated Kirk’s death
online, while some GOP lawmakers are pushing for employers to fire
workers who posted things such as their lack of sympathy for Kirk’s
murder. Even Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House deputy chief of
staff Stephen Miller have criticized employees who allegedly refused to
print posters honoring Kirk, with Bondi saying they could be
prosecuted.
Trump on Monday said he’d consider naming far-left anti-fascism
movement Antifa as and people familiar with the discussions said he
could begin rolling out actions targeting liberal organizations as soon
as this week. And in the same Monday Oval Office event, the president
responded to a conservative journalist who said that anti-war
protesters near the White House “still have their First Amendment
right,” by saying, “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure.”
Through it all, many on the right largely shrugged.
But Bondi on Monday made it so some of them could no longer shrug. They
quickly cried foul over her comments on a podcast that the Justice
Department would go after “hate speech.”
The National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke wagered that the Supreme
Court .
“,” Fox News analyst Brit Hume said about hate speech being
protected by the Constitution.
Conservative radio host Erick Erickson wagered that such a standard
could .
Even vehemently pro-Trump pundits flatly rejected it. “,” said
right-wing influencer Hans Mahncke. “Just unreal.”
The pushback was apparently enough that Bondi attempted to clarify her
remarks later Tuesday, that the Justice Department isn’t prosecuting
alleged hate speech and will only prosecute statements that incite
violence.
“Freedom of speech is sacred in our country, and we will never impede
upon that right,” she said in her statement to Axios.
“My intention was to speak about threats of violence that individuals
incite against others,” she added.
The statement — the authenticity of which a DOJ spokesperson
confirmed to CNN — followed a Tuesday morning X post in which she
seemed to draw a distinction between hate speech and speech that
incites violence.
But her Tuesday comments are a different tune from what she on the
former Trump administration aide’s on Monday.
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech – and
there’s no place, especially now, especially after what happened to
Charlie, in our society,” Bondi said at the time.
Miller asked whether Bondi wanted “more law enforcement going after
these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people.”
And Bondi signaled she did.
“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting
anyone with hate speech,” Bondi said. “Anything – and that’s
across the aisle,” she added, going on to refer to the arson attack
that targeted Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
But the problem with that was the Supreme Court has resoundingly said,
over and over again, that the government – unless it goes much
further than being hateful.
As recently as 2017, an opinion written by conservative Justice Samuel
Alito that “the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is
that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we
hate.’”
And not only did Bondi’s comments on the podcast run afoul of the
Constitution and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of it;
importantly, they ran afoul of Kirk’s own commentary.
Last year, the conservative activist posted on X: “Hate speech does
not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross
speech. There’s evil speech. ”
Back in 2017, after a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Kirk
forcefully argued against a legal crackdown on hate speech, saying,
“MORE SPEECH is the answer to Hate speech. , show up in numbers &
speak truth.”
Trump’s critics have been arguing for days that his response to
Kirk’s assassination violated the activist’s own expansive views on
free speech – and that Kirk’s death was being used for things he
would have opposed.
Bondi’s comments about hate speech gave them a case in point.
And her remarks on Fox News, also on Monday, that employees could be
prosecuted for not printing posters for Kirk gave conservatives more
reason for concern. Some noted that threat went against the Supreme
Court’s ruling in the case of a Colorado baker who declined to make a
wedding cake for a gay couple – a cause conservatives spent years
celebrating.
Rather than disown what Bondi said about targeting hate speech on
Monday, Trump has embraced an expansive view of his administration’s
power. Asked by an ABC News reporter on Tuesday about Bondi’s
comments, his team could target the reporter.
“We’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so
unfairly,” Trump said.
Treating a president unfairly is also not a crime or the purview of law
enforcement. And the fact that Trump floated it could throw fuel on the
fire.
After the nation’s chief law enforcement officer badly botched the
limits of Americans’ free speech rights, Trump was seeming to double
down.
Perhaps some Trump allies who are concerned by this rhetoric will
dismiss this as incompetence or a flub.
But conservatives have already been asked to confront how far is too
far in Trump’s retribution campaign. The president has done plenty of
things he once criticized the left for, including with investigations
and going after their tax-exempt status.
If nothing else, Bondi certainly crystallized a choice in front of the
right.
This story has been updated with an additional statement from Pam
Bondi.
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