'We will absolutely target you': the Attorney General's hate-speech threat, and its retreat

No prosecutions or investigations opened under the 'hate speech' framing; Bondi walked back the claim within a day, her revised sentence ('Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment') is narrowly correct, but the rest of her post stretched the true-threats exception to abstract advocacy of violence and 'cheering on' violence, which is protected speech

Days after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, AG Bondi said on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller, wife of a senior White House aide: '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, anything, and that's across the aisle.' There is no 'hate speech' exception to the First Amendment; in Matal v. Tam the Supreme Court unanimously held that the government could not deny a trademark because it found the name disparaging.

The remarks drew immediate, unusually bipartisan criticism: prominent conservative commentators including Erick Erickson ('moron'), Fox's Brit Hume, and Megyn Kelly publicly rejected Bondi's framing as contrary to core First Amendment principles and to Kirk's own stated views on free speech. The next morning, Bondi posted a clarification on X narrowing her claim to 'hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence', walking back the sweeping version but not fully correcting the underlying legal error, since threats of violence were already unprotected under existing incitement and true-threats doctrine without any need for a 'hate speech' category at all.

Asked about the episode, Trump backed Bondi and, separately, told an ABC News reporter, 'We will probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly, it's hate', a real-time illustration, from the president himself, of the exact dynamic critics warned the 'hate speech' framing would enable: treating unfavorable coverage as itself a target for government action.

Documented

No formal enforcement action followed; Bondi publicly retracted the broader claim within 24 hours

2025-09-15 (podcast remarks); 2025-09-16 (clarification/retraction on X)