Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday started trying to walk back her embrace of a “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, as well as an equally foolish “businesses cannot discriminate” stance against private rights of conscience.
This plays right into lefty charges that the right is rushing to suppress legal dissent in the wake of the horrific Charlie Kirk assassination.
Discussing far-left glee over the killing, Bondi claimed on a podcast that “there’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” and promised that the Justice Department would “absolutely target” those who use “hate speech.”
Here’s Charlie Kirk, posting in May 2024: “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.”
That nicely sums up the American position going back at least to Thomas Jefferson (though Constitution-haters like Woodrow Wilson saw things differently): We have no “free speech” right if the government pushing words it deems “hateful.”
Hence Bondi’s reversal to arguing only that “speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment” and free speech “does NOT and will NEVER protect violence.” Right, and irrelevant.
Note that censoring speech is entirely different from free individuals and institutions applying consequences for speech they find objectionable.
It’s absolutely right for private players to penalize, for example, the misinformation-spreaders who (per a YouGov pol) have conned a quarter of Americans into believing Kirk’s killer was a Republican.
And the sickos who cheered Kirk’s death, such as the New Jersey doctor who resigned after a nurse alleged he said Kirk deserved to be shot.
MSNBC seems wise in firing Matthew Dowd for practically justifying the assassination, and any teacher who praises the killer in class surely should be shown the door.
This is not the right rushing to copy the left’s “cancel culture” injustices — at least, not yet: Our sympathies are entirely with the guy fired over his wife’s Kirk-hating posts.
Free speech is intrinsically messy: People argue back and forth, citing “facts” true and false, on the assumption that by and large most of us can figure out the right and true well enough to keep muddling along — without government censors to stomp out what they decide is “hate” or “disinformation.”
It’s served the nation just fine for over two centuries; let’s all keep it up.
