In a special Sept. 16 broadcast titled “America After Charlie Kirk,” talk show host Tucker Carlson made very critical comments about the motions to further restrict free speech in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk last week—including from within the Trump Administration. Carlson particularly took aim at Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said on Sept. 15, “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.”
“There’s no sentence that Charlie Kirk would have objected to more than that,” Carlson said in reference to Bondi. “You hope that Charlie Kirk’s death won’t be used by a group we now call bad actors to create a society that was the opposite of the one he worked to build…. You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we’re seeing in the aftermath of his murder won’t be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country.”
Carlson continued: “And by the way, that thinking … is exactly what got us to a place where some huge and horrifying percentage of young people think it’s okay to shoot people you disagree with.” Today’s youth have “been told for their entire lives in schools exactly what Pam Bondi just told them: ‘Well, there’s free speech, but then there’s also hate speech. And woe to those who engage in it because it’s a crime.’ That’s a lie. And it’s a lie that denies the humanity of the people you’re telling it about.”
