U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is "gaslighting" Americans, according to an ex-prosecutor.
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance late Tuesday weighed in on Bondi's recent comments regarding hate speech.
"There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech," Bondi told Stephen Miller’s wife Katie during an episode of her podcast. "We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
According to Vance, "It has been a day where things are so not normal that you might feel a little bit gaslit."
"Among other things, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Attorney General Pam Bondi has been saying the Justice Department will 'absolutely target' hate speech. Presumably, she would be the one who gets to define what qualifies," Vance wrote. "But that’s most definitely not what the law permits."
Vance goes on to say what the First Amendment protects and doesn't protect.
"The First Amendment protects hateful speech. That’s the reason Nazis have been able to march on the streets in Skokie, Illinois, where many Holocaust survivors lived out their lives after the war," the ex-prosecutor wrote. "The First Amendment matters the most when it comes to the speech we like the least, protecting people’s right to air their views, no matter how extreme, because in this country, we make decisions in a free marketplace of ideas, and not one where the morality police get to decide what is and isn’t acceptable. We tolerate speech we disagree with, even speech that we find horrific, in order to protect our own right to speak."
Then, Vance talked about the "good news."
"Here’s the good news: Bondi’s comments provoked outrage. And not just from people like me. Texas Senator Ted Cruz said, 'The First Amendment absolutely protects speech. It absolutely protects hate speech. It protects vile speech. It protects horrible speech. What does that mean? It means you cannot be prosecuted for speech, even if it is evil and bigoted and wrong.' That’s a correct statement of the law, and it doesn’t matter whether it comes from the political left, the political right, or anywhere else in our society," according to Vance.