The MAGA base and liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor don’t see eye to eye on much, but they agree that criminalizing “hate speech” is not constitutional.
Sotomayor joined right-wing commentators on Friday morning to criticize Attorney General Pam Bondi’s proposed crackdown on free speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
“Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school failed,” she told a panel at New York Law School on Tuesday, according to Politico and NBC News.
Sotomayor, a 71-year-old graduate of Yale Law School, did not mention Bondi by name. However, it was clear she was referring to the Stetson Law alumnus in her remarks.
Bondi, 59, told Katie Miller’s podcast on Monday that she was siccing Justice Department officials to enforce hate speech investigations. She suggested that it might include those reveling in the assassination of Kirk.
“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,” she said.
Bondi added, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
The remarks have many of President Donald Trump’s supporters in uproar. Kirk was strongly against the criminalization of “hate speech,” which he said is “subjective” and is open to abuse by the party in power. He said he was a “free speech absolutist.”
“Hate speech does not exist legally in America,” Kirk posted to X in 2023. “There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”
Matt Walsh is among those in MAGA who are harshly criticizing Bondi’s plans.
“This is really outrageous and infuriating,” he wrote, reacting to a video of Bondi on The Katie Miller Podcast. “We’re already having a lot of success fighting back against the leftists celebrating Charlie’s death. We don’t need Pam Bondi swooping in to throw the entire conversation off the rails by completely missing our point. And having a ‘hate speech’ crackdown in the name of Charlie Kirk—a man who absolutely rejected ‘hate speech’ laws—is especially grotesque.”
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