By Steve Neavling
Attorney General Pam Bondi sparked backlash this week after saying the Trump administration would “target” hate speech, a comment critics called unconstitutional before she tried to clarify her position, NBC News reports.
“There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” Bondi said on The Katie Miller Podcast in an interview that aired Monday.
Asked if the Justice Department would crack down on such speech, she replied, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything — and that’s across the aisle.”
“You can’t have that hate speech in the world in which we live,” she said.
“There is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society,” she added, referring to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week.
Later that day on Fox News, Bondi said, “We all believe in the First Amendment,” but argued people who made “horrible things” about Kirk shouldn’t keep their jobs.
“It’s free speech, but you shouldn’t be employed anywhere if you’re going to say that,” she said.
President Donald Trump brushed off the controversy when asked about it Tuesday, telling an ABC News reporter, “We’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. Maybe they’ll come after ABC. Maybe they’ll have to go after you.”
Some of Trump’s allies distanced themselves from Bondi’s comments.
“We don’t need DOJ to prosecute ‘hate speech.’ Pam Bondi really isn’t ready for this moment,” far-right commentator Mike Cernovich posted on X.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said Americans have the right to “say crazy things.” Still, he added, “If I’m an employer or a government agency and I have someone online who is online celebrating the heinous murder of an innocent young husband and father, I can make the decision that they don’t deserve to work for me.”
Bondi sought to refine her remarks in a post on X on Tuesday, saying she was referring to violent threats.
“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime,” she wrote. “For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.”
