Pam Bondi vs. Charlie Kirk: Is ‘hate speech’ free speech?
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has pledged to come down hard on purveyors of nasty, left-wing rhetoric in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. But by appealing to the hateful category of “hate speech,” many conservatives feared Bondi’s pledged crackdown would be far too hard for the U.S. Constitution — not to mention offensive — to the legacy of Charlie Kirk.
“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” Bondi promised in a Monday appearance on the Katie Miller Podcast (hosted by the wife of Trump advisor Stephen Miller). “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech. And there’s no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie.” Monday evening, she doubled down, telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity that employers “have an obligation to get rid of people … who are saying horrible things.”
The first person to critique these suggestions — if he were still alive — would be Kirk himself. “Hate speech does not exist legally in America,” he wrote on May 2, 2024. “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 believed that speech should be free so that people can settle their differences through persuasion. And he put that belief into practice, visiting college campuses, inviting hostile crowds to frank conversations, and bearing their abuse with poise.
The principle of free speech finds theological footing in the Christian teaching that every person’s conscience is ultimately accountable to God alone. Freedom of speech protects the conscience by not compelling people to speak things that are contrary to what they believe. “Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind,” recommends the Holy Spirit-inspired Paul (Romans 14:5). Free speech also has the benefit of enabling a variety of ideas to interact, sharpen, and seek to influence one another — which in particular, allows the gospel of Jesus Christ to go forth into every corner of the globe.
Of course, the constitutional right to free speech is not absolute. In Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), the U.S. Supreme Court described “well defined and narrowly limited classes of speech” subject to proscription, including “the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or ‘fighting’ words — those which, by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the court reaffirmed that the State could even not “forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force … except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
Notably, “hate speech” was not one of the unprotected categories comprehended in these cases.
“My position is that even hate speech should be completely and totally allowed in our country. The most disgusting speech should absolutely be protected,” urged Kirk. “As soon as you use the word ‘hate,’ that is a very subjective term. Then, all of a sudden it is in the eyes, or it is in the implementation, of whomever has the power.”
The ominous implications of this logic are on full display in the U.K., where police have repeatedly arrested a woman for silently praying outside an abortion business, a comedian who tweeted insensitive transgender jokes, and others who observed accurate (but politically incorrect) demographic trends in crime data.
Indeed, conservatives and Christians need only think back to the Biden administration to recall the weaponization of government against American speech. The Biden administration investigated parents as domestic terrorists based on their speech objecting to the policies of local school boards. It colluded with social media companies to censor disfavored political viewpoints as “misinformation,” despite the fact that some of these viewpoints were later vindicated as truth. And it persecuted a doctor who blew the whistle on a hospital’s illegal provision of gender transition procedures to minors.
It has happened here, it is happening in other Western nations, and it can happen again. The Trump administration would be wise to review any prospective policy in light of this general principle: if the Trump administration merely cracks any door to tyranny, the next left-wing administration will burst it wide open.
Along these lines, the National Review editors argued, “To claim that anyone — a business owner, a commentator, anyone — must be forced to consent to participate in speech they disapprove of is little better than a mirror-image variation on forcing beleaguered Colorado businessman Jack Phillips to ‘bake the cake’ celebrating a gender transition.”
Fortunately, in less time than it takes to say “free speech,” Bondi faced a bipartisan tidal wave of public blowback with commentators pointing out the discrepancy between her comments and the many comments made by Kirk, as well as the plain text of the U.S. Constitution. Clearly, with such a mess of spilled credibility, the Department of Justice (DOJ) needed to do some “clean-up on Amendment One.”
On Tuesday, Bondi responded on X with a backtrack, of sorts. “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime,” she wrote. “Under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), it is a federal crime to transmit ‘any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another.’ Likewise, 18 U.S.C. § 876 and 18 U.S.C. § 115 make it a felony to threaten public officials, members of Congress, or their families.” Bondi concluded with an appeal to Kirk’s legacy.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy was unconvinced by “Bondi’s lame attempt to revise what she said into something less objectionable.” It was “a worthy impulse,” he said, “though it would be better if she were capable of saying she’d made a mistake, rather than suggesting that we heard her wrong.”
It’s healthy for public officials to face constructive criticism over their greatest blunders. In politics as in life, pain serves the indispensable role of alerting the one who experiences it to urgent danger. Hopefully, like a child who touches a hot stove, an attorney general who casually ignores the First Amendment to the Constitution will learn from the mistake and not repeat it again.
To this end, Christians should always pray for “all who are in high positions,” writes Paul, “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Timothy 2:2). Here, the connection between prayer and peace is direct; let us pray that the Trump administration does not set a precedent of interfering with protected speech, which future administrations may abuse.
Originally published at The Washington Stand.
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview.
