Charlie Kirk was right when he tweeted last May: “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.” Attorney General Pam Bondi somehow didn’t know that, saying last Monday that the Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” She then backpedaled under bipartisan pressure.
As Kirk’s statement suggests, there’s a distinction between what is legal and what is moral. The right to say something doesn’t mean that saying it is the right thing to do. Anyone can tell you that what you said is false, or dangerous, or something no decent person would say. But no one has the right to prevent you from saying it.
The alternative is to give government the power to muzzle you. The optimists’ case for free speech rests on the belief that what is right or true will ultimately win out in the marketplace of ideas. The realists’ case rests on the proposition that letting government decide what people are allowed to say puts us on the road to autocracy. Government officials will try to suppress speech that challenges their policies, embarrasses them or angers them. Unless dissenters enjoy the strongest possible legal protections, the sphere of permitted speech contracts, and the power of government to do whatever it wishes expands.
President Trump’s recent comments about critical news coverage of him underscore this risk. When “97% of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday. “They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal personally.”