She wasn’t done. “Businesses cannot discriminate,” she warned in another interview. “If you want to go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that.” For good measure, she advised America’s employers that they “have an obligation to get rid of people … who are saying horrible things.”
I feel like I’m insulting the intelligence of Dispatch subscribers in notifying you that none of that is correct.
You don’t have a legal “obligation” to fire someone for their terrible opinions. (Although you may have a moral one depending on what that opinion is.) And you probably can’t be compelled to print political material for a customer if you disagree with the content of that material. The famous Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling didn’t address that squarely—it was decided on grounds of religious freedom, not free speech—but the moral intuition behind it translates easily to Bondi’s example. Because Americans have freedom of conscience, they shouldn’t be forced by the state to promote messages they find unconscionable.
As for the supposed distinction between free speech and “hate speech,” this statement summarizes the law and morals of the issue accurately and succinctly: “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.” The author was Charlie Kirk, tweeting in May of last year.
We’re left with two explanations, then. One is that Pam Bondi truly is a moron, irresponsibly BS-ing her way through questions on what can and can’t legally be said in the United States like a 1L who hasn’t done the reading. The other is that Pam Bondi knows what time it is.
In a government distinguished by extreme malevolence and extreme incompetence, it’s hard to tell.
Backlash.
Apart from the possibility that our country’s most powerful lawyer might not know much about law, the most interesting thing about Bondi’s “hate speech” comment was the backlash it drew—from the right.
And not just the Reaganite remnant. Some well-known postliberals also piled on.
Bondi can’t afford more bad PR among Republicans, having already angered MAGA by failing to produce the smoking gun tying Jeffrey Epstein to the great cabal of Satanic left-wing pedophiles that secretly governs America. So, hoping to appease her critics, she posted a statement on Tuesday morning clarifying her position on “hate speech.”
And got a bunch of stuff wrong this time too.
“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment,” she wrote. “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.” That’s almost correct. Sincere threats certainly can be prosecuted—but “cheering on” political violence after the fact, as Kirk’s most disgusting critics have spent the last four days doing? Protected speech, last I checked.
“You cannot call for someone’s murder,” Bondi continued. “You cannot swat a Member of Congress. You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as ‘free speech.’” Swatting is illegal, yes, but the First Amendment grants Americans a wide berth when chattering irresponsibly about violent ends for their political enemies. And as malicious as doxxing is, punishing someone for re-posting information that’s already publicly available on people-finder websites is tricky business.
Enough about Bondi, though. What about the many right-wingers who are angry at her for her “hate speech” pensées? They’re supposed to be rallying around her and the president as he waves the bloody shirt and gears up to persecute left-wing groups. I don’t blame the AG for being caught off-guard by the heat she’s taking.
The most charitable explanation for their irritation is that liberalism isn’t fully cooked through yet on the American right, at least when it comes to values as sacred as freedom of speech. Yesterday I predicted that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller will soon ask Republicans to functionally choose between the First Amendment and the fascist imperative to delegitimize all political opposition as a threat to public safety. The president may be disappointed by how that shakes out for him.
Another possibility is that Bondi’s hypocrisy jolted some righties so sharply that it turned their stomachs. Populist Republicans may have gotten comfortable with left-wing approaches to policy, but asking them to flip on issues like “hate speech” and freedom of conscience for business owners is asking them to repudiate years of their own rhetoric. It’s the woke left, after all, that’s forever insisting that you “bake the cake” and conniving to criminalize positions it disdains as “hateful.” The grassroots right has—or had—defined itself in opposition to that, enough so that J.D. Vance used his appearance at a conference in Munich earlier this year to read European diplomats the riot act for suppressing right-wing speech in their countries.
“If the idea of free speech enrages you—the cornerstone of democratic self-government—[then] I regret to inform you that you are a fascist.” That was, er, Stephen Miller, ably summarizing the Republican view in 2022. It’s the same attitude Kirk held about speech in his own tweet last year. The right-wingers angry at Bondi today will need more than 30 seconds’ notice from her before reinventing themselves completely on this subject, it seems, especially in light of what was preoccupying them before Kirk’s murder.
Underneath all of this high-minded principled pushback on the attorney general, though, lies a current of self-interest. “We want the government to crack down on left-wing terrorism,” Scott Greer complained. “We don’t want the government to curb ‘hate speech.’ This would allow future administrations to arrest people who share Charlie Kirk’s opinions.” Indeed. The more aggressively Trump and Bondi persecute left-wing “hate,” the more aggressive President Gavin Newsom will feel entitled to be when responding in kind.
But that’s a strange concern to hear from the modern right. Respecting the minority’s rights in the expectation that they’ll respect yours when they’re back in charge is a hallmark of liberalism, not postliberalism. Postliberals don’t worry about what Democrats will do when they return to power because they have the ability right now, or so they believe, to make sure that Democrats never do.
That’s the alternate explanation for Pam Bondi’s “hate speech” comments. She’s not stupid. She just “knows what time it is” and is proceeding accordingly.
What time it is.
“The path forward is not to mimic the ACLU of the mid 90’s. It is to take all necessary and rational steps to save Western Civilization.”
That was Stephen Miller writing on Tuesday morning, seemingly in response to the grumbles about “hate speech” from the likes of Greer. Out of power in 2022, Miller yelped disingenuously about the glory of dissent; back in power in 2025, he’s spoiling to crush dissenters and to sound as much like a Bond villain as humanly possible in doing so. He’s a fascist’s fascist.
But he’s also serious about his postliberalism, in fairness to him. His point to Bondi’s critics in so many words is to remember “what time it is.” Having regained power last November, the authoritarian right is now in the process of consolidating it; the last thing it needs is its own supporters complicating that by getting squeamish about antiquated liberal values like free speech.
As the vice president put it not long before he was elected to the Senate, “We are in a late republican period…. If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” Miller is taking that reasoning to its logical conclusion. For now, “saving Western Civilization” requires right-wingers to overcome their discomfort about ditching traditional American speech norms. Next year it may require them to overcome their discomfort with the idea of the White House meddling aggressively in American elections.
What did y’all think postliberalism meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
It was especially odd on Monday watching populist Republicans scold Bondi by distinguishing “hate speech,” which they believe should remain protected, from “terrorism,” which shouldn’t be. The entire point of Trump’s politics is to erase that distinction. It isn’t terrorism that the president is worried about; it’s having his own power potentially constrained by a resurgent Democratic Party. He’s already begun using ruthless, albeit lawful, means to limit the chances of that happening next fall. Mobilizing the Justice Department to harass left-wing groups before the midterms on the pretext that he’s fighting “terrorism” is another.
And if all of that fails and Republicans end up staring at a blue wave next year anyway, some new pretext will be contrived to disrupt the elections. Once you’ve decided that “saving Western Civilization” depends on your party maintaining power, there’s nothing that can’t be justified toward that end.
So maybe that’s what Pam Bondi was up to in her “hate speech” comments. She didn’t flunk constitutional law in law school, she was just floating a trial balloon to see how the president’s fans would respond to the idea of a legal offensive against left-wing speech. Surprisingly, they didn’t take it well—which, I think, proves my point from a few weeks ago about the “transition phase” America is in right now. We’re a first-world country that’s rapidly, and I do mean rapidly, devolving into a third-world one. But that doesn’t happen overnight. Our Enlightenment software takes time to uninstall.
The free-speech programming hasn’t been entirely erased yet. Bondi found out the hard way.
Then again, maybe the problem in this case has less to do with the message than with the messenger. Bondi isn’t well-liked on the right despite her dogged efforts to ingratiate herself with populists by appearing on Fox News every 20 minutes. She disappointed MAGA influencers by misleading them about a potential Epstein bombshell and has never quite mastered the boorish élan that the movement craves from its “fighters.” She’s a bit of a poseur, frankly, and a poseur can’t get away with reversing a decade of populist orthodoxy about “hate speech” in a few soundbites.
The president might be able to, though.
On Monday night, around the time that grassroots Republicans were dogging Bondi for undermining free speech, Trump announced that he had filed one of the most embarrassing lawsuits in U.S. history. Read the complaint for yourself; it resembles an 85-page Truth Social screed. He wants $15 billion from the New York Times for covering him negatively during last year’s campaign, alleging that the coverage amounted to defamation. He won’t win, but winning isn’t the point. The point is to get news outlets that can’t afford an expensive court battle to stop covering him negatively, albeit truthfully—to undermine free speech, in other words.
This morning, ABC News reporter Jon Karl asked Trump what he thought his attorney general meant when she said she was ready to go after “hate speech.” Was the president bothered by Bondi’s comments? Why, no. To the contrary. “She’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate,” he told Karl. “You have a lot of hate in your heart…. ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech, right? Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech. So maybe they’ll have to go after you.”
Again: What did y’all think postliberalism meant?
Pam Bondi won’t convince the right that the First Amendment should have an exception for speech that Republicans dislike, but the president should have more luck. I expect him to try.
The courts.
He’s going to try, I should say, but he’s almost certainly going to lose in court.
“The proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’” That was Justice Samuel Alito writing in 2017. If the Supreme Court’s right-est right wing isn’t ready to dump a century of libertarian free-speech jurisprudence, Trump has little hope of making the crackdown he’s planning stick.
Seeding postliberalism across the judiciary is a project that will take decades, not months or years. Judge Emil Bove might be prepared to rule that celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death is punishable by law, but Justice Alito is unlikely to. The groundwork for an ideological shift like that will need to be laid and cultivated by right-wing politicians. Authoritarianism may run out of gas politically before “saving Western Civilization” becomes the interpretive counterweight to constitutional rights for Republican judges.
But if the president and his cronies are up for the challenge, there’s much mischief to be made potentially from the “fighting words” exception to the First Amendment.
You can be prosecuted for calling someone “a damned fascist,” the Supreme Court ruled in 1942, because such words “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” That logic has always seemed ripe for abuse by progressives, obsessed as they are with safe spaces and the pernicious idea that hurtful speech is a form of violence. What else is “hate speech” if not words which, by their very utterance, “inflict injury”?
Perhaps, though, it’ll turn out to be the postliberal right rather than the postliberal left that resurrects the “fighting words” doctrine. The logic behind it is authoritarian, unsurprisingly for a ruling issued during wartime: You, the speaker, may be silenced in the name of public safety lest I, the enraged listener, feel an uncontrollable urge to punch you in the face. That reasoning would have put a lot of people in jail who rhetorically danced on Charlie Kirk’s grave last week.
And it’s in the spirit of Trumpism in how it incentivizes political pyromania. In theory, the more social discord there is, the more aggressive the government will need to be about prosecuting “fighting words” to keep them from setting off the tinderbox. That’s a sweet deal for a president who enjoys sowing discord almost as much as he enjoys using state power to dominate his enemies.
“You offended me and now I’m entitled to destroy things” was the attitude of Charlie Kirk’s assassin, but it’s also been the civic ethos of populism since 2015. The “fighting words” exception demonstrates similar thinking: To prevent me from responding like a lunatic, you must be punished for your very unkind words. I can’t believe Trump hasn’t embraced it already.
But if it’s true that his attorney general is a moron, I suppose that would explain why. Someone should give him and her a tutorial on “fighting words.” There’s real fascist potential here.
