Attorney General Pam Bondi sparked backlash this week after warning on a podcast that the Department of Justice “will absolutely target” anyone using “hate speech” and celebrating the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. But, for “The View” moderator Whoopi Goldberg, Bondi is “blurring the lines” on what hate speech actually is.
Appearing on “The Katie Miller Podcast,” Bondi stipulated that “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” for the latter. “We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” she added.
Bondi later clarified in a social media post this week that she specifically meant any hate speech that leads to political violence. But multiple people, including former Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah, have said they’ve lost their jobs simply for quoting Kirk directly.
“Now there’s no one that I know who thinks political violence is any kind of acceptable way to do anything, but Bondi is blurring the lines when it comes to what constitutes hate speech, I think,” Whoopi retorted on Tuesday. “And I just want to say, you know, I always thought that this administration campaigned on ending the weaponization of free speech.”
“So I know there’s a lot of stuff people say that I don’t like,” she continued. “I don’t like it, but as an American, I have the right to say I don’t like it, and they have the right to say it. I will fight for their right to say stuff I don’t like, because I will say stuff they don’t like, and I don’t want them up my behind about it either. So I don’t understand.”
Host Alyssa Farah Griffin agreed that it was smart of Bondi to clarify what she meant, “because that was a complete misstating of the First Amendment.”
Before his death, Kirk asserted that hate speech wasn’t real as he posted vitriol about marginalized groups himself. In a 2024 social media post, he wrote that “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.”
You can watch the full discussion from “The View” in the video above.
