Pam Bondi stated that the federal government will “go after” Americans “if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi, America’s highest-ranking law-enforcement official, declared in an interview posted to YouTube yesterday that federal law enforcement will “go after” Americans for hate speech. “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” she said. In fact, there is no hate-speech exception to the First Amendment.
In a post on X this morning, Bondi tried to qualify her comments. But the fact that the attorney general of the United States publicly misrepresented long-standing American speech law is ominous, especially in the context of threats made by other Trump-administration officials, their allies, and President Donald Trump himself to target “left-wing” organizations that the administration says promote violence. When ABC News’s Jonathan Karl asked the president this morning what he made of Bondi’s hate-speech comments, Trump responded, “She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart.” Let’s be clear about what’s happening: At a moment of polarization and political violence, the president and his attorney general are attacking a constitutional right that protects all Americans from abusive majorities.
Bondi issued her original warning on The Katie Miller Podcast, whose host is a former Trump-administration official and the wife of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. The episode focused on Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Several minutes into the conversation, Katie Miller claimed that universities are complicit in Kirk’s death because they allow conservatives to be harassed on campus. Bondi agreed, and added that anti-Semitism on college campuses is “disgusting.” She went on, “We’ve been fighting these universities left and right, and we’re not going to stop. 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.”
Miller then asked, “Do you see more law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people so we show them that some action is better than no action?” Bondi replied, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything.
