In July, I wrote a column titled “Bondi’s Road to Redemption: Deliver on Immigration Enforcement Promises.” Three months ago, Bondi was on the hot seat for how she bungled the Epstein files release. Bondi’s mismanagement was so severe that even conservative commentators and unwavering President Donald Trump supporters like Megyn Kelly predicted that Bondi’s days as Attorney General “are numbered.” Kelly stated: “So she’s either lazy and incompetent, or she willingly humiliated some of the president’s most loyal supporters. Neither one of those is good. And that’s why—I’m sorry—but I’m going to predict her days are numbered as a member of the Trump administration.”
My column recommended that Bondi could redeem herself, at least in MAGA’s eyes, if she made good on some of her tough immigration enforcement promises. Her hard-hitting words about arresting, prosecuting, and deporting the thousands of criminal aliens whose violent felonies previous attorneys general—Republican and Democrat alike—had ignored were music to the faithful’s ears. Merrick Garland, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, and Janet Reno had all turned a blind eye to these crimes.
Now Bondi finds herself in the eye of the storm again, this time over her ill-advised comment about hate speech. “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…,” Bondi said in an episode of “The Katie Miller Podcast” published Monday. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” Bondi added. Miller is the wife of Stephen Miller, who serves as White House deputy chief of staff.
Critics and legal scholars immediately jumped in to correct Bondi. Kelly pounced on her again on X: “Hate speech is not prosecutable in America (which is good). Pam Bondi knows this.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression vehemently rejected Bondi’s assessment: “There is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. The attorney general would be wise to read the words of the Supreme Court, which has repeatedly held that the ‘proudest boast’ of America’s free speech tradition is ‘freedom for the thought that we hate.'”
Bondi should review President Trump’s Executive Order “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” signed on January 20. From Section 1, this crystal-clear sentence: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.” The White House’s executive order reflects Charlie Kirk’s position 100%. Kirk himself affirmed the protections of hate speech, stating on X in May 2024: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And all of it is protected by the First Amendment.” In other words, hate speech is free speech. As Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II said in Cohen v. California (1971), “One man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.”
If the Epstein files represented strike one for Bondi, then the free speech blunder is strike two. Meanwhile, the rogue mayors who are aiding and abetting criminal aliens continue harboring, at taxpayer expense, the worst of the worst. Boston’s Michelle Wu, Los Angeles’s Karen Bass, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, Denver’s Mike Johnston, Nashville’s Freddie O’Connell, and Baltimore’s Brandon Scott continue to criminally aid, abet, and provide safe harbor to illegal aliens. The mayors, trying to defend their lawless policies that protect illegal aliens and put citizens at risk, often refer to President Trump, ICE, and DHS agents as fascists, Nazis, and masked Third Reich police. President Trump is a democracy-killer, they proclaim. All that distasteful rhetoric is protected free speech.
Longstanding Supreme Court precedent recognizes Congress as having plenary power over immigration, giving it almost complete authority to decide whether foreign nationals—”aliens” under governing statutes and case law—may enter or remain in the United States. Neither state nor municipal governments have authority over immigration. The mayors’ immigration violations, however, break established law and deserve immediate and vigorous prosecution. Attention AG Bondi!
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