U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi faced a torrent of criticism online Tuesday after she suggested in two separate interviews that the Justice Department would ‘absolutely target’ hate speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s shooting death — sparking intense backlash from Republicans and other conservatives and prompting her to further clarify her remarks.
Bondi attempted to bridge the divide between her remarks and what she called hate speech that leads to threats in a lengthy social media post Tuesday.
‘Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment,’ Bondi said, citing three U.S. laws that criminalize threats of direct violence, such as threats of kidnapping or injury. ‘It’s a crime.’
‘For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over,’ she said, adding that ‘free speech protects ideas, debate, even dissent but it does NOT and will NEVER protect violence.’
Bondi’s remarks, made during a ‘The Katie Miller Podcast’ interview and in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity during conversations about the fatal shooting of Kirk, prompted backlash across the aisle, though it was conservative voices who were the loudest. Many noted that Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder and subject of the interviews, was himself a vociferous defender of free speech protections under the First Amendment, which protects most forms of speech in the U.S., including offensive and hateful speech.
Many also appeared to view the new statement as insufficient cover for Bondi’s previous remarks.
‘This isn’t a correction or a retraction or a retreat; it’s a post hoc attempt to bend the term ‘hate speech’ to mean something that it never has,’ Charles C.W. Cooke, a senior editor at the National Review, said on social media.
Nearly 24 hours after Bondi’s remarks, the criticism has continued — nearly all of it from Republicans and other notable conservative voices.
Bondi came under fire for the two interviews Monday, neither of which distinguished the type of speech that threatened imminent violence from hate speech.
‘There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,’ Bondi said Monday in an interview with former Trump administration aide and podcast host Katie Miller.
.’We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,’ Bondi said.
In a separate interview on Fox News, Bondi reiterated a similar sentiment, suggesting that the government could prosecute Office Depot after an employee reportedly refused to print posters with Kirk’s face on them.
She said further that the department was ‘looking at’ the Office Depot case in question.
‘Businesses cannot discriminate,’ Bondi said on Fox News. ‘If you want to 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,’ she said of the Office Depot employee in question. ‘We’re looking it up,’ she said.
Most of the criticism that poured in Tuesday was from Republicans, who noted that Bondi’s remarks are a flagrant violation of free speech protections guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.
They are also, some noted, directly at odds with the views famously espoused by Kirk.
‘Hate speech’ is a hopelessly subjective term, and even if it weren’t, there is no hate-speech exception to the First Amendment,’ said Ed Whelan, a conservative legal expert who formerly clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
‘I’m sorry, but this is the sort of leftwing progressivism that conservatives, including Charlie Kirk, abhorred,’ Erick Erickson said on X. ‘We stand with Jack Philips, not against him.’
Asked by ABC News’s Jon Karl to respond to Bondi’s remarks on Tuesday, Trump declined to clarify, and instead floated the idea of going after Karl’s outlet, albeit in a joking tone.
‘We’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly,’ Trump said.
