In less than 24 hours, the Trump administration went from announcing an all-of-government crackdown on everything from protests to threatening online rhetoric, to being confronted with what it actually means to criminalize “hate speech.”
“I think you can draw a pretty clear line, and the Supreme Court has done this for decades, that our First Amendment, our free speech tradition, protects almost all speech,” Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, told Politico at a summit Tuesday.
That’s a very different message than the one actively being pushed by the man who put Carr in his job.
“A woman just stood up and she starts screaming,” President Donald Trump told reporters Monday in the Oval Office, recounting the scene when he went to a Washington steakhouse on Sept. 10. “The woman was just a mouthpiece; she was a paid agitator. And you have a lot of them. I’ve asked Pam [Bondi] to look into that in terms of RICO, bringing RICO cases against them. Criminal RICO. Because they should be put in jail. What they’re doing to this country is really subversive.”
The shocking and horrifying assassination of Charlie Kirk unleashed fury in right-wing political circles. Now, what was hastily agreed to in the immediate aftermath — a call to dox anyone who celebrated the death or spoke critically of Kirk — is quickly becoming the latest test of MAGA politics and of Americans’ First Amendment rights.
Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Attorney General Pam Bondi want to push conservatives to embrace the crackdown. “For years, radical leftists have slandered their political opponents as Nazis and Fascists, inspiring left-wing violence like the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told NOTUS. “Left-wing organizations have fueled violent riots, organized attacks against law enforcement officers, coordinated illegal doxing campaigns, arranged drop points for weapons and riot materials, and more.”
“The Trump Administration will get to the bottom of this vast network inciting violence in American communities,” she added.
Yet, conservatives, who have been eager to use government power to push back on a perceived silencing of conservatives, do not seem eager to echo the rhetoric they have long mocked.
“The First Amendment absolutely protects speech,” Sen. Ted Cruz said Tuesday at the same Politico event Carr spoke at. “It absolutely protects hate speech. It protects vile speech. It protects horrible speech. What does that mean? It means you cannot be prosecuted for speech, even if it is evil and bigoted and wrong.”
The Trump administration seems adamant about moving ahead, despite the warnings from conservatives. Bondi on Tuesday posted to X a promise to prosecute.
“You cannot call for someone’s murder. You cannot swat a Member of Congress. You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as ‘free speech,’” read the post. “These acts are punishable crimes, and every single threat will be met with the full force of the law.”
Bondi added that “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.”
Government leaders can and should call out hateful and divisive rhetoric, Daniel Cochrane, a researcher at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person, said. But, he added, a diversion into litigating “hate speech” may end up a distraction when it comes to determining what government action should be taken.
“Hate speech is an inherently vague term. It’s in the eye of the beholder, what hate speech means,” he told NOTUS. “So I think we shouldn’t use that as the metric.”
Cochrane, instead encouraged veering the MAGA movement’s ire back toward familiar territory for Republicans: social media companies.
He called out what he sees as inconsistent enforcement of existing bans on violent imagery in the wake of the Kirk assassination — the stomach-turning video of which is still widely available online — and pushed long-standing complaints around Section 230 telecommunications rules.
Consumer protection laws should be used to enforce inconsistent moderation rules that violate terms of service that users agree to, Cochrane said. It was a litany of long-standing right-wing complaints about social media that may have died down after Trump’s embrace of Big Tech (and vice versa), but Cochrane suggested it could be rejuvenated after Kirk’s death.
Trump 2.0 has often struggled to be consistent on the speech question. Prominent supporters like Elon Musk rallied a movement online around free speech absolutism, leading huge tech companies to champion the weakening of content moderation programs following Trump’s reelection.
At the same time, online posts were some of the many things cited by Trump officials who pushed to deport students over pro-Palestinian rhetoric the administration called antisemitic.
Targeting news organizations, eliminating public broadcasting funding and new patriotism litmus tests for immigrants are all cast as a pushback on left-wing rhetoric the administration says is out of control and threatening conservatives’ free speech rights.
The White House says this new crackdown is a continuation of those efforts. Guest-hosting Kirk’s podcast on Monday, Vance drew a line between the doxing effort and the promised federal investigations into left-wing groups he indirectly blamed for Kirk’s death. He had support from top Trump officials.
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people,” Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, said.
By Monday night, Bondi was sketching out what the crackdown might look like. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” she said on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller, a former Trump White House aide and spouse to Stephen. “We will absolutely go after you, target you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. And that’s across the aisle.”
Bondi tried to connect this new crackdown with the ongoing (and broadly popular on the right) administration efforts to silence pro-Palestine voices, mentioning the arson attack on the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion in the spring that forced Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family to flee to safety on the first night of Passover. The suspect in the case told police he was angry over Gaza. “You are going to face the most severe consequences if you come after someone, and you target someone, for their political views,” Bondi said.
Trump connected the new crackdown to his successful efforts at extracting millions of dollars in apology money from news organizations cast as biased against him.
“She’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,” he told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl on the White House lawn Tuesday. “Maybe they’ll come after ABC. Well, ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech, right? Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech.”
“Look, we want everything to be fair. It hasn’t been fair, and the radical left has done tremendous damage to the country,” Trump went on.
Other allies of the new crackdown have tied it into long-standing right-wing beefs with organizations known to be supportive of Democratic politics. Rep. Chip Roy listed several of those groups in his call for a House select committee “to Investigate the Left’s Assault on America and the Rule of Law.”
But conservatives who built a movement on casting Democratic-leaning voices as anti-freedom bristled at a new debate over the term.