Charlie Kirk might not have believed hate speech was real if he were still alive, President Donald Trump said in an interview.
“He might not be saying that now,” Trump told Fox News after the interviewer said Kirk believed there “was no such thing” as hate speech. Kirk did not say hate speech did not exist, but that it did not have legal status in the United States.
“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. Keep America free,” he wrote in a May 2024 social media post.
He made the post as pro-Palestinian protesters were being arrested during the encampments in the spring of that year.
A gunman shot and killed the conservative commentator while he was speaking to students on a Utah campus last week.
In other past social media posts, Kirk maligned hate speech as a weapon that liberals used to punish conservatives for their free speech. “Hate speech has become speech that the left doesn’t like listening to,” he said in a 2017 post.
He insisted in a 2023 post that he doesn’t “want to ban anyone’s speech.”
“I believe in the First Amendment and free speech as a principle regardless of what the law says. I don’t want to ban anyone’s speech,” he said in a post about the Anti-Defamation League.
The Trump administration has punished those who have spoken out about Kirk and his past words or actions. The Pentagon is sifting through service members’ social media posts, and several military members have been temporarily suspended.
Attorney General Pam Bondi briefly floated prosecuting hate speech before a swift blowback caused her to backtrack.
TRUMP TO TARGET ‘RADICAL-LEFT’ GROUPS FUNDING VIOLENCE THAT LED TO CHARLIE KIRK’S DEATH
Trump has blamed the “radical Left” for Kirk’s death at the hands of alleged shooter Tyler Robinson.
“The radical Left causes tremendous violence,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office this week, adding, “The radical Left really has caused a lot of problems for this country. I really think they hate our country.”
