'A complete about-face' US right ties itself in knots over free speech

In the emotionally and politically charged days since the killing of Charlie Kirk, the conservative youth activist who was a close ally of Donald Trump, one statement has loomed large.

- J Oliver Conroy

On Monday, the US attorney general - the official in charge of the rule of law in America - said that the Trump administration would “absolutely target” those who espouse “hate speech” about Kirk.

Unlike in much of the rest of the world, hate speech is protected under US law unless it incites imminent violence or constitutes a true threat. But that did not deter the nation’s top law enforcement officer, who also suggested that a print shop employee who refused to print flyers memorialising Kirk could be “prosecuted”.

Since Kirk was shot dead earlier this month, the US has been gripped by a bitter debate about the relation between political speech and violence. Bondi later walked back some of her remarks, in part because of criticism from other conservatives worried about the reframing of “free speech” as “hate speech”. But Trump, vice-president JD Vance, White House adviser Stephen Miller, and other top Republicans have framed Kirk’s death as the consequence of what they claim is unchecked and violent rhetoric, which they blame on the left wing alone.

It is a remarkable turn from prominent American conservatives, who until Trump's return to power in January had long complained of a censorious leftwing "cancel culture" but now seem happy to reframe that, too, as "consequence culture" - when they are doing the cancelling.

Nancy Mace, a Republican House representative, sounded a lot like the progressives she often decries for their political correctness when she declared last week in an effort to censure one of her opponents in Congress that "free speech isn't free from consequences".