The Friday Brief, August 19, 2025

The Speech Police

The Big Picture

The Speech Police

The bad-faith stampede to turn Charlie Kirk’s murder into a speech-policing crusade and a permission slip for the government to crush political opposition is well underway.

Because that’s what this is: not grief, not justice; it’s just an opportunistic power grab wrapped in piety and political theater.

Start with Attorney General Pam Bondi, who decided the week of a national trauma was the perfect time to audition for Censor-in-Chief. “Hate speech,” she bleated, is something her Justice Department would “target.”

There’s just one tiny problem: in America, there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. That’s not me talking - as you know, I’m no lawyer, but I’ve been on the First Amendment front lines - it’s ConLaw 101, which Bondi appears to have slept her way through.

After immediate blowback from, well, everyone with a passing acquaintance with the Bill of Rights, including (to their credit) a number of MAGA-world influencers, she retreated to the fig leaf of “only threats of violence,” but the damage was done; she said the quiet authoritarian part out loud.

Even conservative outlets and legal commentators told her to stand down, because they understand the obvious: once you let the government decide what’s “hate,” the government will inevitably abuse that power, and will never, ever give it up.

Bondi’s word salad attempted to smuggle in a censorship regime under the cover of mourning Charlie Kirk. When you announce a federal crackdown on a category of speech that doesn’t legally exist, you’re not mourning; you’re gutting the First Amendment. While Bondi was busy trying to nationalize your HR department, the Trump White House went hunting for phantom “left-wing terror networks.”

Stephen Miller (R-Children of the Night) promised to “dismantle” them, plural, as if there were IRL command-and-control cells behind every college adjunct with a regrettable tweet. Evidence? None offered. But who needs proof when you’ve got a cable chyron and a vendetta? Miller’s pledge to use “the full force” of federal power to chase an entirely speculative conspiracy is the textbook definition of politicized law enforcement.

Trump, never one to miss a chance to point a flamethrower at the Constitution and call it “law and order,” upped the ante, talking about the “radical left” in sweeping, collective-punishment terms and floating racketeering charges against political nonprofits he dislikes.

And then there’s Kash Patel, the FBI director who treats oversight hearings like episodes of professional wrestling. Patel leaned hard into the “left-wing ideology” narrative around the suspect and basked in applause lines about cracking down (while carefully skating past the legal and evidentiary minefields that come with turning grief into dragnet policing), and did his darndest to maintain the fraying Epstein cover-up while simultaneously trying to transform a lone killer into the spear tip of a mythical national conspiracy.

If you’re hearing an echo of 1960s COINTELPRO vibes with less competence and more Twitter, you’re not wrong.

In America, the test is clear: direct incitement to imminent lawless action is not protected. Ugly, vile, cruel speech - even celebrations of a political enemy’s death - is protected. That’s the price of a free society.

What we’re seeing isn’t principle; it’s a pretext, a top-down attempt to define disfavored politics as “terrorism” and disfavored speech as “incitement.” The White House comms team and its satellite ecosystem are pushing that line in lockstep: leftists are the “domestic-extremist organization,” dissent is “terror,” and any boss who doesn’t fire an errant barista for a rude Insta post becomes a collaborator. They’re building a Rosetta Stone of repression where “don’t like it” translates directly to “criminal enterprise.”

Third, and most grotesque, is the moral blackmail. You are told that if you defend the First Amendment here, for instance, if you say “the government cannot arrest people for ugly speech,” you are somehow endorsing the killing itself.

Let’s be clear about what the MAGA power bloc is doing in the fog of tragedy:

They’re collapsing categories on purpose. “Hate speech,” “incitement,” “terrorism” are all being mashed into one amorphous blob so the government’s hammer can find more nails.

If you tweet something crass? Terrorist. If you donate to a progressive nonprofit? RICO. If you protest Trump at a steakhouse? “Organized intimidation,” says DOJ’s No. 2, hinting at investigations of “funded” protesters. This is how you chill a nation.

They’re demanding corporate purges as a proxy for state censorship. MAGA isn’t content with platform bans; they want people fired, licenses yanked, blacklists circulated. And they’re bragging about using congressional muscle to make it happen. The irony is radioactive: the same crew that howled about “Big Tech censorship” now wants a national speech police because their delicate snowflake feelings were hurt.

They’re asserting a premise without proof: that a vast web of “left-wing organizations” funded, coordinated, and directed an assassination. Law enforcement officials have stated that the suspect acted alone. Miller and friends provided no evidence…but the point isn’t evidence. It’s narrative. It’s building a permanent justification for a domestic crackdown.

Here’s the ugly secret: once you normalize government punishment for speech labeled “hate,” the label metastasizes. Ask history how this movie ends.

So yes, grieve for Kirk. Condemn political violence without equivocation. But do not let opportunists with badges and titles turn that grief into an American version of the Ministry of Speech. The path they’re carving is un-American: Bondi’s unconstitutional bluster, Trump’s collective guilt, Miller’s RICO fantasies, and Brendan Carr’s media extortion lead straight to a place where the government decides which opinions are legal, what jokes comedians can tell, and who gets the protection of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment protects the speech you hate, so the government can’t weaponize tragedy against its enemies. Pam Bondi’s and the rest of the Trump mob’s job isn’t to police adjectives; it’s to prosecute crimes. The second you start redefining “speech I don’t like” as “terrorism,” you’ve stopped defending America and started dismantling it.