‘Moron’: Right and Left Unite to Slam Pam Bondi For Promising Crackdown on Charlie Kirk ‘Hate Speech’
Attorney General Pam Bondi united commentators across the political spectrum on Monday and again on Tuesday after asserting that “hate speech” was not “free speech” under the First Amendment and would be a focus of her office – alarming her critics.
In an interview with former White House official Katie Miller, reflecting on fury over reactions by some cheering the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Bondi said Monday: “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.”
She added: “We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything, and that’s across the aisle.”
Immediate reaction to Bondi’s remarks was strikingly bipartisan, with critics on both the left and right warning that her comments reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of U.S. free speech protections and raised concerns about government overreach.
On the right, conservatives ripped Bondi’s take:
GOP operative Matt Wolking slammed the remarks as “sickening” and directed Bondi to Kirk’s own stance on free speech:
National Review’s Charles C W Cooke also picked the comments apart in a scathing column published Tuesday.
On the left, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) called out Bondi’s comments, citing how Vice President JD Vance “lectured Europe about not censoring hate speech”:
Others joined in:
Bondi followed up on Tuesday with a post on X, in a seeming attempt to reframe her comments as meaning threatening language, a different legal definition, which she pointed out is “not protected by the First Amendment”:
But even that was met with a renewed pile on and panned from both left and right:
Journalist Glenn Greenwald unloaded on Bondi’s tweet, jibing: “She has too little integrity to just admit she erred.”
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