The sort-of, kind-of fallout has begun to settle from AG Pam Bondi’s remarks about prosecuting hate speech. It’s been a few days, an interminable amount of internet time, and other mausements are bound to distract. No one’s talking about the war in Ukraine, for example, so if Bondi can manage not to attract attention, the mad dogs might find another bone to chew.
Maybe.
From Instapundit.
The linked content is a Politico post in which the Wise Latina is quoted as saying,
“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,” Sotomayor said while speaking on a panel Tuesday morning at New York Law School.
She doesn’t mention Bondi by name, but goes on to express concern about what schools (Law Schools) are teaching. Given the number of lawyers who pursue lifetime gigs as lawmakers, either as state legislators or members of Congress, it’s a fair question worthy of the ages.
To Sotomayor’s credit, she managed to arrive at her appointment to SCOTUS with a liberal bent but a proper understanding of the First Amendment.
Bondi, by the way, has walked back her earlier mishandling, but not to my satisfaction. While she has clarified that she means when speech leads to violence, that’s not good enough. That was already a thing before anyone invented the insidious idea of hate speech. [Related: MACDONALD: The Hate Speech Problem.]
Just look at the UK.
Hate speech isn’t even something that has to offend someone specifically. It simply needs to appear to someone who complains that it could be offensive to someone else.
I can’t say it enough. The Trump Administration, the DOJ, the FBI, and Republican majorities in Congress need to do whatever is required to scrub these ideas out of every lexicon of law and procedure. And I have to think that Justice Sotomayor would land on the right side of whatever lawsuits emerge to prevent it.
She has so far.
