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Photo: Samuel Corum/Bloomberg/Getty Images

It was quite alarming last week when President Donald Trump addressed the nation from the Oval Office and tried to indict “the radical left” — his usual term for the Democratic Party and all his other opponents — for his friend Charlie Kirk’s assassination. This was well before any information about the identity or motives of the suspected killer was publicly available. But even if the assassin had gone on television wearing a T-shirt that read, “I’m the radical left!” the attribution of widespread collective responsibility for an individual act of violence is rather obviously illegal and incendiary.

Then again, this was Donald Trump talking. He is incapable of (or uninterested in) editing himself in moments of great emotion, and he often treats the law as simply an impediment to whatever he wants.

In some respects, it’s more alarming that Attorney General Pam Bondi, the country’s top law-enforcement officer and someone who should be offering the president sound legal advice rather than inflaming his prejudices, has doubled down on the idea that the government should prosecute anyone who said mean things about Kirk or perhaps even the causes he cherished. On Monday, Bondi went on the latest hot MAGA communications channel, Katie Miller’s podcast, and expressed a take on the First Amendment that would have earned her a failing grade in a first-year constitutional-law class:

Attorney General Pam Bondi: “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…We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” pic.twitter.com/Bqj6TQOGwP

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) September 16, 2025

Bondi was also interviewed by Sean Hannity yesterday, and after expressing enthusiasm for employers firing anyone who disparaged Kirk in the wake of his death, she suggested her department’s civil-rights division was looking into prosecuting businesses that didn’t cooperate in mourning Kirk, as The Independent reported:

“Businesses cannot discriminate,” Bondi said, referring to the Office Depot incident. “If you wanna 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.”

“I have Harmeet Dhillon right now in our civil rights unit looking at that immediately, that Office Depot had done that,” Bondi added. “We’re looking it up.”

This threat immediately raised eyebrows since the right of private businesses to refuse to participate in commemorations they do not approve of has been a cause célèbre of Christian conservatives in recent years.

More generally, Bondi’s mangling of the First Amendment in order to reinforce her boss’s threats of vengeance attracted embarrassed and even angry rebukes from conservatives. National Review’s Charles Cooke was scathing about her vow to “target hate speech”:

Actually, she won’t. She won’t “target” or “go after” anyone for “hate speech,” because, legally, there is no such thing as “hate speech” in the United States, and because, as a government employee, she is bound by the First Amendment. And if she tries it anyway? The Supreme Court will side against her, 9-0.

Other conservatives were even harsher, per The Hill:

“Our Attorney General is apparently a moron. ‘There’s free speech and then there is hate speech,’” Christian broadcaster Erick Ericksonwrote in a Monday post.

“No ma’am. That is not the law.”

Rod Dreher, a conservative Substack author, said Bondi should “retract or resign” in lieu of the statements made during Miller’s podcast, while political commentator Mike Cernovich said the attorney general “isn’t ready for this moment.”

Multiple commenters observed that Kirk himself was a fierce advocate of edgy political expression, which the courts have long recognized as the most protected category of free speech.

The day after her performative extension of Trump’s threats of a clampdown on “radical left” talk, Bondi defensively tried to walk it all back a bit, suggesting in an X post that she was really only talking about actual incitements to violence, not the imaginary category of “hate speech”:

Unfortunately for Bondi, she said what she said, and her walk back doesn’t address the problem that she is loosely and irresponsibly attributing incitement to violence to an unspecified “radical left” — which again, in MAGA-land, means the Democratic Party, not the random kooks who exist on the margins of discourse in every country. She needs to name names and cite examples very specifically or stop talking about it. No free country can have a chief prosecutor who publicly endorses witch hunts, which is exactly what she is doing instead of her actual job.

Pam Bondi Is Clueless About the First Amendment

Pam Bondi Is Clueless About the First Amendment