Trump's Speech Police
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s word salad attempted to smuggle in a censorship regime under the cover of mourning Charlie Kirk.
The bad-faith stampede to turn Charlie Kirk’s murder into a speech-policing crusade and a permission slip for the government to crush political opposition is well underway.
Because that’s what this is: Not grief, not justice; it’s just an opportunistic power grab wrapped in piety and political theater.
Start with Attorney General Pam Bondi, who decided the week of a national trauma was the perfect time to audition for Censor-in-Chief. “Hate speech,” she bleated, is something her Justice Department would “target.”
There’s just one tiny problem: In America, there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. That’s not me talking — as you know, I’m no lawyer, but I’ve been on the First Amendment front lines — it’s ConLaw 101, which Bondi appears to have slept her way through.
After immediate blowback from, well, everyone with a passing acquaintance with the Bill of Rights, including (to their credit) a number of MAGA-world influencers, she retreated to the fig leaf of “only threats of violence,” but the damage was done; she said the quiet authoritarian part out loud.