Alex Ooley (00:03.448)
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Forge of Freedom podcast. I'm your host, Alex Uli, and this is episode 192 of the Forge of Freedom. Today we are tackling a topic that strikes at the heart of our fundamental rights, the freedom of speech. Specifically, we're going to break down the recent controversy surrounding Attorney General Pam Bondi and her declaration of war.

on so-called hate speech.

Alex Ooley (00:37.762)
The context for this is tragic. Following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a lot of reprehensible and offensive comments celebrating his death appeared on social media. And in response, attorney general Pam Bondi appeared on the Katie Miller podcast and made some truly alarming statements. She said, and I'm quoting here, there's free speech and then there's hate speech.

And there is no place in our society for that. When the host Katie Miller gave her a chance to clarify asking if this meant law enforcement would be putting cuffs on people, Bondi doubled down. She said, we will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.

This is a government prosecutor, the top law enforcement officer in the country, pledging to go after people for their words. The problem is hate speech isn't a real legal category. It doesn't exist in any respectable legal sense. As the Mises Institute points out, the concept was invented by the left to justify state enforced censorship of speech they don't like.

For a sitting attorney general to adopt this left-wing talking point is deeply problematic and shows an immersion in a culture of coercion and despotism that permeates Washington. Any politician who promotes this concept should be considered an enemy of our fundamental rights. Bondi didn't just stop with the comments about Kirk. She connected her crusade to prosecuting alleged anti-Semites.

a term she appears to use for people critical of the state of Israel. This isn't a hypothetical threat. The administration has already targeted activists for the non-crime of criticizing the Israeli government. One prominent example is Rumeza Ozturk, who was arrested not for supporting violent protests, as no evidence was ever presented, but for writing an op-ed critical of Israel. Feeling emboldened,

Alex Ooley (02:57.708)
Bondi then pledged to go after people for saying mean things on the internet.

And the irony to add tragedy to an already tragic situation with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, this is a position that Charlie Kirk himself would have adamantly opposed. But let's get back to the basics for a moment. Where does our right to free speech come from? It's crucial to understand that it wasn't invented by the Constitution or by federal judges.

It's what philosophers call a natural right derived from natural law. Fundamentally, freedom of speech is a property right. This begins with the foundational principle of self-ownership. The idea that each person has a superior claim to their own body as related to everyone else.

The right to use your own body to express your opinions stems directly from this natural right of self-ownership. Now this doesn't mean you can say anything anywhere. Reasonable non-state limitations exist based on property rights. You can't, for instance, distribute political pamphlets in a grocery store if the owner of that grocery store, the property owner, says no.

You also can't speak or say whatever you want on that property if the property owner says no. Their right to control that property is superior to yours in that instance because it's their property.

Alex Ooley (04:47.214)
But on the flip side, if we respect property rights, a person is utterly free to express their opinions in a place or a forum where the owner allows it.

Pam Bondi may not like people cheering Charlie Kirk's death on a privately owned website, but the government has no legitimate role in regulating that speech. The only legitimate limitation on speech is when it involves a real, specific, and imminent threat against another person. This aligns with the standard set in the 1969 Supreme Court case.

Brandenburg versus Ohio, which concluded, speech can only be limited when it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action. Saying something like, I'm glad Charlie Kirk is dead, doesn't even come close to that standard.

nor does saying, hope members of the IDF get killed. These are vague attacks and that's a form of free speech, pure and simple, no matter how disgusting. The danger of embracing the concept of hate speech is that it's vague, undefinable, and wide open to abuse. What one person calls hate, another calls a sensible observation.

If you leave it to government prosecutors in courts, virtually anything can be defined as hate speech. In a 2004 lecture historian, Ralph Reiko gave a perfect example of this malleability. He argued that a proposal to end welfare in New York City could be legally defined as hate speech. Why? Because someone could claim that the implication is racist since a large portion of welfare recipients are minorities.

Alex Ooley (06:44.898)
All it takes is a sympathetic judge or a despotic attorney general like Pam Bondi. This isn't just a left-wing tactic anymore. We're seeing an assumption on both sides that once your side is in power, you can build up tools of censorship, forgetting that power will inevitably shift and those same tools will be turned against you. This is why we must always advocate for rolling back state power.

not just wielding it for our own ends.

Thankfully, Bondi's comments received substantial and almost universal backlash from the right, including for many in the MAGA movement. Activist Matt Walsh even called for her to be fired. In response, Bondi backtracked, claiming she was really only talking about speech that crosses the line into threats of violence. But this was clearly just damage control.

So what's the takeaway? First, the concept of hate speech is a Trojan horse for censorship. It has no place in a free society. Any politician who uses this term unironically is signaling their hostility to your most basic rights. Second, our right to free speech is a property right. And you always have to remember this framework or else you get

sucked in to these arguments being made by left and right alike to take away your rights. The government has no business telling private platforms or private platform owners what can or cannot be said, short of incitement to imminent lawless action. When we lose sight of the property rights foundation, we open the door to all sorts of government mischief.

Alex Ooley (08:47.532)
And finally, we must resist the temptation to use government power to silence our opponents. The tools of censorship you build today will be the chains that bind you tomorrow. As we see with Pam Bondi, the authoritarian impulse is not limited to one political party. It's a danger inherent in the state itself. Our goal must be to dismantle...

these tools not just change who wields them.

All right, I hope you got something out of that. I hope that provides some context or framework to a lot of the discussion you've heard about hate speech. This has been something that's been on my mind really since a lot of the hate speech talk around the protests, activism going on on college campuses that has been anti-Israel or at least anti-Israel insofar as they've...

their actions in Gaza, because there were many conservatives who advocated for anti-hate speech laws or measures in response to those actions. And I think people, like I said, they just lose sight of the foundation, the fundamentals of our rights, the natural law and the source of these rights. And I think it's important to keep that in perspective.

I want to say one other thing too. Next week, I'm going to have another guest. It's a guest that has been on twice previously. That is Dustin Houchin, former prosecutor and current judge. And it should be, I think you'll find the discussion interesting. We're going to talk about bail or what some people often refer to as bond. He wrote a series on his Substack Judex and we're going to discuss...

Alex Ooley (10:53.068)
his articles and the concept of bail. A lot of people sort of have a vague sense for what bail or bond is, but I think it remains largely a mystery to most people. And it's not just this bureaucratic tool that's used in the criminal justice system. It has an extensive history from the Babylonian

times, all the way up to today with the controversies surrounding cashless bail systems. So I'll sit down with Dustin Houchin, who has a lot of experience arguing for bail oftentimes, or arguing for no bail in some circumstances as a prosecutor to the person who sets and determines bail today as a judge in many cases. So I think you'll find that interesting, the history behind it.

how it came to be and really the important role that it plays in our society. Bail isn't just a bond, it's humanity's attempt to tame chaos without becoming tyrants. So we'll dive into things like the Magna Carta, Supreme Court decisions, and many of the attempts to fix what often appears to be and often is.

broken system. It's a difficult thing to balance. How do you balance safety or taming chaos with freedom? So I think you'll want to tune in for that one. I hope you will. That'll be released next week. Until then, as always, you can find us on YouTube, Facebook, RumbleX, and wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find us at Forgeofreedom.com. Until next time, remember...

You are the Forge of Freedom.