In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s Sept. 10, 2025 assassination, Mike Gallagher of Salem News discussed the legitimacy of Pam Bondi’s belief that “hate speech” needs to be criminalized. While she is a Republican, Gallagher says, most Republicans believe in Free Speech and do not agree with her. Charlie Kirk himself, he points out, would not have agreed with her.
The problem for me with Gallagher’s assessment of Bondi’s statement is that it fails to distinguish between Speech that is in fact rife with Hatred and implicitly if not overtly threatens Violence, and the Left’s abuse of this reality to denounce as Hate Speech pretty much any criticism of its agenda. Defend the integrity of America’s borders, and it’s because you Hate Foreigners. Suggest it is insane to allow Trans athletes into Women’s sports, and it’s not because you love Women but because you hate Transgenders. Examples of this truly degenerate ploy are a common feature of the contemporary political debate. Indeed they are precisely what motivates many conservatives to reject any restrictions on Free Speech whatsoever. What they fail to consider, however, is that there are murderous jerks out there whose vile statements need to be silenced with incarceration.
As reported by CBS Atlanta on May 8, a federal grand jury has just indicted a Georgia man for the threats he posted on X directed at former Trump administrators Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi. On April 3, Elliot Owen Schroer announced to Noem: “I will stab your eyes out with a dull knife.” After killing you, he said “we will put your head on a stake.” Similar threats of violence were directed at Bondi. Ought these two ladies to be forced to live their lives forever looking over their shoulders, or ought animals such as Schroer to be removed from the public domain? The answer seems self-evident to me. His postings were unequivocally expressions of sheer Hatred!
The Walt Disney Company has become increasingly “woke” in the last few years. In 2021 it fired actress Gina Carano from its TV series “The Mandalorian” for various posts she had published which were deemed to be Hateful. Disney’s action is a classic example of the duplicity of the contemporary Left. While stating she fully supported the right of every Trans individual to be happy and fulfilled, Carano nevertheless denounced the hostility and aggressiveness with which certain Trans Ideologues were asserting themselves even at the expense of adolescents far too young to understand the possibly devastating repercussions of what they were being encouraged to do! In the same way, she expressed her loathing for the constant charges of Racism levied at any White individual who might, for example, have criticized the BLM riots of 2020-21! Carano’s basic motive in her posts, in other words, was to rid the world of the Hatred which seems to have infected the contemporary political debate, a Hatred habitually exploited by the Left. Ironically and predictably, Woke Disney fired her in an example of the very ignorance she was seeking to expose!