Trump using Charlie Kirk to advance his longstanding war on free speech

In another example of his open and obvious plan to destroy our Constitutionally protected, God-given rights whenever they interfere with his dictatorial ambitions, Donald Trump is using the death of Charlie Kirk to advance his longstanding war on free speech by promising to prosecute people who use so-called hate speech or who say anything negative about Kirk.

The announcement of Trump’s intention to use the current situation to destroy free speech was made by Attorney General Pam Bondi during an appearance on the Katie Miller Podcast. Here’s an excerpt:

“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.” (Emphasis mine)

Actually, there’s no such thing as hate speech. There’s only free speech, something that Charlie Kirk himself once said in response to an attempt by Joe Biden to label people opposed to his policies as domestic terrorists guilty of using hate speech.

By the way, it should be noted that Katie Miller is the wife of Trump advisor Stephen Miller. As you may recall, it was Mr. Miller who promised to use the full force of government to “take away [the] freedom” of those on the left for their “hateful” rhetoric in response to Charlie Kirk’s murder:

The power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power and if you have broken the law, take away your freedom. (Emphasis mine)

In another interview on Hannity (I know, right?), Bondi took her threats a step further when she promised to prosecute employers, telling them that they shouldn’t have employees who refuse to embrace the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk after an Office Depot refused to print advertising for his vigil.

I think yesterday or today, Sean, a school board member right here in Virginia had to resign because she said horrible things about Charlie Kirk and that he deserved to die. That’s horrific. It’s free speech, but you shouldn’t be employed anywhere if you’re gonna say that.

And employers, you, have to have an obligation to get rid of people. You need to look at people who are saying horrible things. And they shouldn’t be working with you. Businesses cannot discriminate. If you wanna 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. We’re looking it up.

I guess that puts Donald Trump and Pam Bondi in with the “bake the damn cake” crowd now.

Bondi wasn’t a lone wolf when she said these things; she clearly got her marching order from Donald Trump himself. In a brief question and answer with reporters as he was leaving for a trip to the UK, Trump threw his full support behind Bondi’s hate speech threats while issuing a threat of his own to go after the folks he likes to refer to as the “Fake News” media for their hate speech (H/T Joseph Goebbels):

Reporter: What do you make of Bondi saying she is going after hate speech? A lot of allies say hate speech is free speech.

Trump: Probably go after people like you, you treat me unfairly, you have hate in your heart. ABC paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, your company paid me 16 million for a form of hate speech, maybe they’ll go after you. (Emphasis mine)

Trumpist Republican cowards like Florida Rep. Randy Fine are marching in lockstep with Trump and Bondi’s use of the murder of Charlie Kirk as an excuse to expand their war on free speech — including one so-called defender of the Constitution: Sen. Rand Paul. As he is repeatedly prone to do whenever he’s faced with taking a firm stand in defense of our God-given rights, Paul is siding with Trump and Bondi on the hate speech issue:

People say, ‘Oh, people have a right to say things.’ Well, actually they don’t necessarily have a right to say things. Many people have in their contract what we call a morals clause … I think it is time for this to be a crackdown on people.

Of course, what would Trump’s war against liberty and the Constitution be without the undying fealty of the talking heads that make up the faux-conservative media? On the subject of prosecuting hate speech, Steve Deace (he refers to it as “political sadism” that must be purged from civilized society) expressed his belief that “we” need to punish them before “they” punish us.

I don’t want to hear, ‘Well, they (leftist) might do it to us when they have power.’ They’ve already done it all. They’re going to do it all over again. 2005 called and it wants its talking points back. That’s not where we (conservatives) are right now. We HAVE to punish evil. (Emphasis mine)

Donald Trump is serious about using the death of Charlie Kirk to expand his war on free speech. But as Judge Andrew Napolitano once pointed out, the First Amendment makes no exceptions for so-called hate speech:

The speech we love needs no protection. The speech we hate does. The government has no authority to evaluate speech. As the framers understood, all people have a natural right to think as we wish and to say and publish whatever we think. Even hateful, hurtful and harmful speech is protected speech.

Yet, in perilous times, such as the present, we have seen efforts to use the courts to block the publication of unflattering books. We have seen state governors use the police to protect gatherings of protestors with whose message they agreed and to disburse critical protestors. We have seen mobs silence speakers while the police did nothing.

Punishing speech is the most dangerous business because there will be no end. The remedy for hateful or threatening speech is not silence or punishments; it is more speech — speech that challenges the speaker.

How about we all say whatever we want, and the government leaves us alone? (Emphasis mine)

For those of you who may have missed it, I wrote an article earlier this week documenting extensively how Donald Trump and MAGA want to turn Charlie Kirk into a martyr to launch an authoritarian takeover of America, so it should come as no surprise to those paying attention to see Bondi say the things she’s said.

Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, and a host of Republicans are preparing to use the death of Charlie Kirk to expand their war on free speech by going after so-called hate speech. So now would be a good time to gird up your loins and prepare to, as Ron Paul said in his endorsement of my book, defend liberty “against the multitude of threats that seek to extinguish it.”

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.

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