Among President Donald Trump’s first executive orders of his second term was one headlined “Restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship”.
The order said Joe Biden’s administration had “trampled” on Americans’ rights to say, or refuse to say, what they wanted. Vice-president JD Vance and supporters such as Elon Musk hailed Trump’s return to the White House as a moment of freedom.
But after the killing of Charlie Kirk, some people — on both sides of the political divide — fear an assault on free speech may be under way.
“Businesses cannot discriminate,” attorney-general Pam Bondi said this week after an Office Depot employee reportedly refused to print flyers for a vigil for Kirk. “You have to let [the customer] do that,” adding “we can prosecute you” for refusing to do so.
Other top officials have made clear that, after last week’s shooting of Kirk, 31, they believe there are limits to free speech.
The president set the tone, vowing in a speech just hours after Kirk’s death to pursue the “radical left” people he said were responsible for the attack. Utah authorities charged Tyler Robinson with aggravated murder on Tuesday.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio said the US could revoke the visas of foreigners seen to be supporting Kirk’s killing. Vance urged people to report on those cheering the murder.
“Call them out, and hell, call their employer,” the vice-president said as he hosted The Charlie Kirk Show podcast, a few days after its host’s death.
Disney’s ABC network on Wednesday evening pulled late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel’s show, days after he was roundly criticised by Kirk’s supporters for suggesting the killer was a Maga supporter.
The White House on X said the network was “doing their viewers a favour”, calling Kimmel “a sick freak”. Trump late on Wednesday posted on Truth Social: “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED.”
Bondi has also said the federal government would investigate some speech. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” Bondi said. There was “no place, especially now” for the latter, she added, and the government would “go after” people for it.
“The old term is cancel culture,” said Eugene Volokh, an emeritus professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles. He said he was using the term in the context of people losing their jobs over comments they had made.
While arguments for firing people were often complicated, he said, “there are real dangers with cancel culture from the left, real dangers with cancel culture from the right”.
It “ends up spiralling in [a] way that is bad for American democracy”, he said.
The comments from Trump officials come as Stephen Miller, the president’s top policy adviser, has threatened a sweeping crackdown in Kirk’s name against the administration’s ideological opponents.
“It is a vast domestic terror movement,” Miller said this week on Kirk’s podcast.
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” he added. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Trump’s aides are working on an executive order on political violence and hate speech, the New York Times reported. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The president on Wednesday said in a different Truth Social post that he would designate “Antifa” as a terrorist group.
Trump described Antifa — a decentralised activist movement which takes its name from a shorthand of “Anti Fascist” — as “A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER”.
“I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices,” he added.
Officials’ threats to speech have been levelled mainly at Trump’s opponents on the left.
But the tonal shift from a government so intent months ago on protecting free expression — however unsavoury — has drawn a backlash on the right.
It has also begged a question: how far will an administration that has repeatedly challenged established legal precedent and judicial authority go when it comes to the constitution’s free speech protections in the First Amendment?
Floyd Abrams, senior counsel at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, said: “It’s one thing to denounce hate speech . . . but it’s quite something else to ban it or to jail people for engaging in it.”
“Certain sorts of speech deserve to be criticised but that doesn’t mean there’s a role for the government in limiting or punishing the speech.”
The EU and UK have rules against hate speech, though these have proven controversial at times. In the UK, the head of the police inspectorate Sir Andy Cooke this month said officers risked becoming “thought police” unless there was more clarity about what constitutes criminal content.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has likened the UK to North Korea and criticised the recent arrest of Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan in London over his social media posts about transgender people.
Vance also took aim at European countries during a speech in Munich earlier this year, in which he said EU officials were too quick to threaten to shut down social media at moments of unrest. “In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” he said.
By contrast, US laws do far less to define or restrict speech that expresses or incites hatred.
Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said at a Politico conference this week: “I think you can draw a pretty clear line, and the Supreme Court has done this for decades, that our First Amendment, our free speech tradition, protects almost all speech.”
But Carr also later threatened Disney about Kimmel’s Kirk remarks, suggesting the FCC could act against the channel.
Conservative commentators from the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages to the National Review have noted there is no US law distinguishing hate speech from free speech.
Some also pointed to comments Kirk made last year, saying hate speech, “ugly speech”, “gross speech”, and “evil speech” were all protected by the First Amendment.
But Bondi posted on X that while the First Amendment “protects ideas, debate, even dissent”, it does not protect “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence”.
As Trump left the White House for a state visit to the UK this week, a reporter asked him about Bondi’s comments on hate speech.
“We will probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly,” he replied.
Additional reporting by Lauren Fedor in Washington
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