Holding a principled commitment to the First Amendment is a challenge. Even so, it’s been bemusing to watch the Republican Party — which has spent years demanding legal cover for sending spam emails, sabotaging public health, and avoiding social media moderation — launch a full-scale broadside against it over the past week.
Authorities are just beginning to parse what motivated a Utah man to charged with the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk — an act, obviously, of unjustifiable violence. But the aftermath has been an extraordinary political crackdown. Within days, Donald Trump had laid the blame at the feet of people who had criticized Kirk’s brand of inflammatory far-right politics and said he would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.” Republican legislators immediately proposed a committee to investigate “the money, influence, and power behind the radical left’s assault on America and the rule of law.”
The fever pitch is still building, reaching levels of outright absurdity. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who bragged on X in 2019 that he had “signed a law protecting free speech on college campuses,” used the platform Sunday to celebrate the arrest and expulsion of a Texas Tech student who was recorded celebrating Kirk’s death in the campus “free speech area.”
Kirk very famously positioned himself as a First Amendment absolutist, emphasizing in a 2024 X post that “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.” He made light of attacks on and denigrated other victims of violence, including George Floyd and Paul Pelosi, demonstrating his legal right to do so.
This morning, Attorney General Pam Bondi honored Kirk’s memory by appearing to completely contradict him. “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,” Bondi said on the Katie Miller Podcast. Asked if law enforcement would take action, she seemed to agree: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
Bondi has since posted on X that she will go after “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence” and violates laws against tangible threats. Her clarification was somewhat undercut by Trump’s flippant response to a reporter who asked about the statement. “She’d probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly, it’s hate,” he told an ABC News correspondent, continuing that maybe she would “come after ABC.”
Others have toed the line that they’re targeting violence, not speech. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told The Verge that Trump’s statement simply meant “the perpetrator or perpetrators of this horrific act will pay for what they did.” Vice President JD Vance took over Kirk’s podcast alongside deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to declare that “we’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence,” but mocked “crazies on the far left” for fearing they would target constitutionally protected speech. Miller specified they would attack the “organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that’s designed to trigger, incite violence in the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence.”
But given the context, it’s naive to think these statements mean anything except going after media outlets, nonprofit groups, and political organizations for their speech and fundraising — particularly because the administration was already doing precisely that before Kirk. We’ve seen no indication alleged killer Tyler Robinson was tied to an organized political group, let alone one that actionably planned a violent attack. (There’s not even currently any indication he was radicalized by legal speech from a particular person or outlet, the way racist mass shooter Dylann Roof described finding a white supremacist website and would-be right-wing bomber Cesar Sayoc said he was inspired by Trump.)
Anyone who’s been following US politics will have seen this coming. Trump has stocked his administration with people who have blatant disregard for America’s speech tradition, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Federal Communications Chair Brendan Carr — though apparently the latter thinks this latest turn is too far, even for him. Trump has filed numerous frivolous suits against news outlets that covered him unflatteringly or covered his opponents in ways he thought was too positive — including a fresh lawsuit against The New York Times this week — strong-arming them into settlements.
Kirk was correct that hate speech in the US, outside narrow exceptions including true threats and incitement, is in fact legal. As we’ve watched misogynist, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist rhetoric spread online and in the real world in recent years, that’s sometimes been a painful principle for anyone who opposes actual hate speech to hold. It’s felt sometimes academic to keep warning that outlawing vile, violence-encouraging rhetoric might cause more damage than it would solve.
But America is closer than it’s been in decades to outright abandoning the First Amendment, and it’s not happening to fight groups directly tied to acts of violence or online communities that largely exist to foment hatred of vulnerable people or pundits with an unabashed and damaging disregard for the truth. It’s being done to prevent Americans from speaking ill of a single public political figure, one of the clearest examples of what a robust speech law is supposed to protect.
The inevitable claim is that “the left” abandoned the First Amendment first, and that this justifies retaliation. Leaving aside that even the arguably borderline examples of Democratic governmental speech policing — like the Biden administration yelling at social media platforms — are flimsy compared to Trump’s anti-speech lawsuits or disappearing people for writing an op-ed, that’s not how principles work.
Is ugly speech so tangibly dangerous that the law should treat it like action? Or will banning it stop people from expressing themselves in productive ways? If it’s the former, can any reasonable person honestly believe somebody making a crass Charlie Kirk joke is more dangerous than Libs of TikTok’s persistent singling-out of schools and hospitals that inevitably receive bomb threats, or than Trump’s encouragement of the attempted January 6th attack on the US Capitol?
And for people who do have reasoned, long-standing criticisms of the First Amendment — I haven’t seen any of them cheering these bad-faith attacks on, so kudos to them on that. But we’re getting a crash course in all the risks of opening the door to speech restrictions. Will there be a future where anyone can apply those lessons? I’m not sure.
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