“Libertarian” Rand Paul Calls for National Crackdown Over Charlie Kirk

The GOP has turned so hard on free speech that now even “libertarian” Rand Paul is calling for a “crackdown” on those using their First Amendment rights.

“I was assaulted six, seven years ago, attacked from behind, had six ribs broken and part of my lung removed, and still online, on a daily basis people say they wish that it would happen to me all over again,” Paul said Tuesday on Fox Business. “And by sort of making light of what I suffered, they are encouraging other people to do it. That oughta be taken down, and social media oughta be able to take that down.

“People say, ‘Oh people have a right to say things.’ Well, actually, they don’t necessarily have a right to say things; many people have in their contract what we call a morals clause … or a conduct clause,” Paul continued, as he compared the First Amendment to a military conduct code. “I think it is time for this to be a crackdown on people.”

While it’s ironic to hear a libertarian talk about attacking free speech and civil liberties, that has been all too common in the days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination. People who were haranguing liberals and leftists for policing speech are now going full Big Brother. Vice President JD Vance (who chided all of Europe over free speech in February) said on Monday, “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out, and, hell, call their employer.” Other right-wing ghouls like Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok and Laura Loomer have also been on an intense, often inaccurate doxing campaign of anyone they think is saying bad stuff about a man who made a career off of his own hateful speech. And The Washington Post fired opinion columnist Karen Attiah for expressing very measured opinions about Kirk’s politics.

Republicans are banking on the electorate being too obtuse to notice their obvious hypocrisy. But people like Zeteo’s Medhi Hasan are already noticing, and using Charlie Kirk’s own words to call them out.

“Hate speech does not legally exist in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech,” Kirk said last year on X, as Hasan pointed out. “And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

A New York state court on Tuesday dismissed all terrorism charges against Luigi Mangione, the 27-year-old accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, with Judge Gregory Carro ruling they were “legally insufficient.”

To meet the definition of terrorism, Carro noted, an action must have the intent to “intimidate and coerce a civilian population.”

But while the prosecution put “great emphasis on [Mangione’s] ‘ideological’ motive,” Carro wrote, ideological belief does not necessarily meet that criteria, despite the prosecution falsely conflating the two.

“There is no indication in the statute that a murder committed for ideological reasons (in this case, the defendant’s apparent desire to draw attention to what he perceived as inequities or greed within the American health care system), fits within the definition of terrorism, without establishing the necessary element of an intent to intimidate or coerce,” Carro ruled.

“While the defendant was clearly expressing an animus toward UHC, and the health care industry generally, it does not follow that his goal was to ‘intimidate and coerce a civilian population,’” and there was “no evidence presented” that he had such a goal, the judge said.

Mangione still faces second-degree murder charges in New York, as well as federal charges and Pennsylvania state charges.

This story has been updated.

Attorney General Pam Bondi accidentally revealed that she doesn’t have a clue how First Amendment law works in the United States—that, or she just doesn’t care.

Speaking on The Katie Miller Podcast Monday, Bondi, who regularly pushes the legal limits to support President Donald Trump, said she planned to crack down on “hate speech” following the death of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

“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,” she said, adding: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything, and that’s across the aisle.”

But Bondi may have a hard time “targeting” anyone, as there is no legal definition for hate speech in the United States, and it is generally protected by the First Amendment—no matter how heinous.

It also seems clear that, despite her words, Bondi has her own narrow definition of hate speech—specifically, that it was only rhetoric about right-wing figures. For example, she seems entirely unbothered by her boss calling his political enemies “vermin,” promising to imprison his opponents, and joking about Nancy Pelosi and her husband being attacked or putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad.

Later, speaking on Fox News, Bondi claimed that employers had an “obligation” to fire workers who spoke ill of conservatives.

“You need to look at people who are saying horrible things. And they shouldn’t be working with you,” she said. “Businesses cannot discriminate. If you wanna go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that.”

Crucially, there is no legal obligation to get rid of employees for their speech. Businesses are barred from discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex, or national origin—not political affiliation. They can discriminate based on speech, but only if it targets one of those protected characteristics.

Bondi’s remarks quickly summoned a torrent of criticism from figures across the political spectrum with any knowledge of how the First Amendment works. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh wrote on X that there “obviously shouldn’t be any legal repercussions for ‘hate speech,’” and conservative talk show host Erick Erickson noted, “Our attorney general is apparently a moron.”

The attorney general tried desperately to defend herself Tuesday.

“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment,” she wrote on X. “It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.”

Bondi cited a federal law stating it was illegal to transmit “any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another” across state borders. She also cited a federal law that bars using the U.S. Postal Service to send threats, and another law against threatening to assault the family members of public officials.

“You cannot call for someone’s murder. You cannot swat a Member of Congress. You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as ‘free speech.’ These acts are punishable crimes, and every single threat will be met with the full force of the law,” she wrote. “Free speech protects ideas, debate, even dissent but it does NOT and will NEVER protect violence.”

In fact, it’s the far right that has undertaken a massive doxing campaign in the wake of Kirk’s death.

Bondi even noted that she didn’t think hate speech cut both ways. “It is clear this violent rhetoric is designed to silence others from voicing conservative ideals,” she added.

Donald Trump has once again turned to the court system to do his dirty work.

The commander in chief announced a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times Monday night, claiming that the paper had deliberately lied about MAGA conservatives and the “nation as a whole.”

“Today, I have the Great Honor of bringing a $15 Billion Dollar [sic] Defamation and Libel Lawsuit against The New York Times, one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “I view it as the single largest illegal Campaign contribution, EVER.”

He also took particular issue with the Times’ 2024 endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris—a tradition that practically every newspaper editorial board partakes in.

“Their Endorsement of Kamala Harris was actually put dead center on the front page of The New York Times, something heretofore UNHEARD OF!” he wrote.

Trump made it very clear where he pulled his inspiration and precedent for the behemoth lawsuit: his prior “successful litigation against George Slopadopoulos/ABC/Disney, and 60 Minutes/CBS/Paramount,” which he claimed had smeared him via routine editing decisions made regarding a sit-down interview with Harris last year.

Trump insisted that the network had selectively edited Harris’s answers to a question regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a detail made all the more confusing since CBS’s 60 Minutes and Face the Nation cut and aired different portions of her 21-second response on different days. An independent review by the Federal Communications Commission showed that the two answers were in fact cut from the same longer response, and media law experts believed that Trump’s legal offensive would be an easy win for CBS.

But in July, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, settled the apparently cut-and-dry lawsuit with Trump—much to the dismay of network staff—so that Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, could close a multibillion-dollar merger that required the Trump administration’s sign-off.

The fallout of the interview—and Trump’s response to it—have been cataclysmic. The longtime head of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, quit after Paramount executives attempted to interfere with the show’s content, reportedly pressuring him to change how the show reports on the president. The former president of CBS, Wendy McMahon, resigned under similar circumstances shortly afterward.

Trump had promised to rope the Times into the lawsuit for months, arguing that the paper’s decision to report on the lawsuit was tantamount to tortious interference.

A spokesperson for the Times roundly rejected Trump’s suit.

“This lawsuit has no merit,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting. The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics. We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people.”

This story has been updated.

A New York Times exposé published Monday tells the tale of two back-to-back deals that enriched three powerful families: the Trumps, the Witkoffs (as in Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff), and the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates.

In one deal, announced in May, a firm of Emirati royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan invested $2 billion in World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company owned by the Trump and Witkoff families—which consequently became among the most prominent crypto firms overnight.

In the other, negotiated “at the same time and by some of the same people,” the White House two weeks later agreed to sell the UAE hundreds of thousands of the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence chips, despite national security concerns.

The Times revealed that some officials in the Trump administration were wary about the chip deal due to UAE-China ties. But a key dissenter at the National Security Council, David Feith, was taken out of the equation when MAGA provocateur Laura Loomer questioned his (and five other NSC members’) loyalty, leading to their removal by the president. Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto czar, then took a leading role in the negotiations—and received a White House ethics waiver in order to do so.

While the Times reports that there is no evidence that the two deals constituted an explicit quid pro quo—and the White House, and those involved, maintains they were not linked—they do “violate longstanding norms in the United States for political, diplomatic and private deal-making among senior officials and their children,” according to ethics lawyers cited in the report.

On Bluesky, economist Ryan Cummings, who served on President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote that the deals, if linked, would represent, by far, “the largest public corruption scandal in the history of the United States”—amounting to a $2 billion bribe, whereas the most comparable incident, the Harding administration’s Teapot Dome scandal, involved bribes amounting to about $10 million in today’s dollars, he said.

Dan Nexon, a political scientist at Georgetown University, observed that the report reveals how “U.S. foreign policy is much easier to understand once you accept that the main ‘grand strategy’ of the Trump administration is straight-up kleptocracy.”

“The Trump Administration is cashing in on foreign crypto deals—and weakening guardrails that protect our advanced technology,” wrote Senator Elizabeth Warren on X. “We should not pass any crypto legislation without shutting this down.”

President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi want to “Make Memphis Great Again.”

On Monday, the president signed a presidential memorandum to establish the “Memphis Safe Task Force,” delivering on weeks of threats to send federally controlled law enforcement into the Blackest city in America. The National Guard, FBI, ATF, DEA, ICE, Homeland Security Investigations, and the U.S. Marshals will all be present.

Trump used a perceived crime wave as justification for the memorandum, a move similar to his federal takeover of D.C. last month.

“A person is four times more likely to be murdered in Memphis, Tennessee, today than in Mexico City. And you know Mexico City is not a cakewalk,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “It’s been overrun with carjackings, robberies, shootings, and killings … so we’re not gonna allow this kind of savagery to destroy our society anymore. We’re stopping it.”

Trump also reaffirmed that he was still planning the same operation in Chicago, although he noted that the administration would wait a bit, perhaps to prepare legal defenses to the lawsuit that would surely come from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.

Trump’s attack on Memphis—along with his threats to Chicago and Baltimore—reaffirms his aggressiveness toward Democratic, majority-Black cities with Black leaders.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young has already made his disapproval of the president’s decision clear.

“It’s not something that I believe is going to reduce crime in our city. I think that the way to reduce crime is to invest in the things that are going to intervene and prevent crime in the first place,” Young told the Reverend Al Sharpton Sunday on MSNBC.

This story has been updated.

The White House’s account of Israel’s attack on Qatar is no longer adding up.

Israeli officials revealed that Donald Trump was informed as early as Tuesday morning that Israel intended to attack senior Hamas leaders in Qatar, reported Axios.

The new intel, reported Monday, contradicts the Trump administration’s narrative. Last week, the White House said that it had only been made aware of the impending bombing after missiles were already in the air. But at least seven Israeli officials rejected that, stating that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had relayed the details to the U.S. president before Israel conducted the air strike.

But the White House stuck to its guns when confronted, denying that it was aware of the situation prior to Israel’s assault.

“As President Trump stated, the U.S. Military informed him of Israel’s attack on Hamas leaders in Doha, and he immediately directed his Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to inform Qatar,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios.

Qatar and the United States are strategic allies: The Biden administration deemed Qatar to be a major non-NATO ally in 2022. But the Gulf nation’s attempts to sidle up to Washington became more brazen after Trump returned to office.

Just months ago, Qatar solidified a deal with the Trump Organization to build a Trump-branded golf course and a beachside project as part of a $5.5 billion development project. The tiny nation also bestowed a wildly controversial super-luxury jumbo jet to Trump, all in an apparent attempt to shore up its relationship with America’s notoriously flighty leader.

But America’s failure to take action to stop Israel’s attack has left those in the Qatari capital with a sense of shock and betrayal, according to CNN. Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani had agreed to act as a mediator to end the war between Israel and Gaza. How Qatar intends to move forward navigating the enormous tension between the two regions—without the promise of protection by the U.S.—is unclear.

In an interview with CNN last week, the Qatari prime minister referred to Israel’s attack as “state terror.” He condemned Netanyahu and his actions, arguing that the Israeli leader had broken “every international law” and must be “brought to justice.”

He further stated that Netanyahu had “killed any hope” for the hostages and undermined “any chance of peace.”

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how much damage has been done to America’s other alliances in the Middle East. Allied nations that witnessed the attack may well determine the need to pivot away from their U.S. connections.

“I think those nations will be wondering what they can do in order to deter future attacks,” HA Hellyer, senior fellow in Middle East studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, told CNN. “But also, what sort of security architecture they need to now invest in instead of relying on a partner that hasn’t been able to protect them even from one of its own allies.”

President Donald Trump announced Monday that he’d made yet another deadly (and potentially extrajudicial) military strike against a vessel of suspected drug traffickers.

“This morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a SECOND Kinetic Strike against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday afternoon.

“The Strike occurred while these confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela were in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics (A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!) headed to the U.S,” Trump wrote. These extremely violent drug trafficking cartels POSE A THREAT to U.S. National Security, Foreign Policy, and vital U.S. Interests.”

“BE WARNED—IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!” Trump warned. “The illicit activities by these cartels have wrought DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES ON AMERICAN COMMUNITIES FOR DECADES, killing millions of American Citizens. NO LONGER.”

Trump claimed that the three “narcoterrorists” killed in the strike had been Venezuelan, but did not say what criminal cartel they were allegedly affiliated with. The president also included a strangely edited “unclassified” video of the vessel being struck and exploding into fire and smoke.

It’s unclear how many missiles were fired, or whether anything else was struck.

While speaking to reporters Sunday, Trump wouldn’t say whether he had plans to strike mainland Venezuela, after promising a broadening campaign against Venezuelan cartels in the aftermath of an initial deadly strike earlier this month. The Trump administration has been widely criticized for violating domestic and international law by carrying out a military strike without proper legal authority.

Trump apparently misses his hunting license, and has once again used the U.S. military to serve as judge, jury, and executioner for those accused of trafficking drugs.

Crucially, Trump has been less than forthcoming about details of the previous strike. Trump officials switched up details about where the boat was headed, and while the president claims that the strike was an act of “self defense,” the boat had reportedly turned around by the time it was fired upon and struck multiple times.

Senator Rand Paul also revealed last week that the previous strike was carried out by drone, a blatant violation of the rules of engagement. It is possible that may have been the case again, as Trump noted that no U.S. forces were harmed during the latest operation.

Vice President JD Vance on Monday claimed it’s a “statistical fact” that the left commits more political violence.

“And while our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics on American politics today are proud members of the far left,” Vance said, while signing off on Charlie Kirk’s memorial podcast, which he hosted from the White House.

Vance’s statement is one of many incendiary assertions from the right that frame Kirk’s assassination as a sign of general left-wing extremism that ought to be destroyed, even as the suspect’s motives and politics remain unclear.

Moreover, Vance’s statement is not a “statistical fact.”

One study published by the libertarian Cato Institute found that since 2020, right-wingers have accounted for over half of terror-related deaths in the United States, with left-wingers at 22 percent. Another study from the Public Religion Research Institute found that those who were more opposed to Trump were more likely to oppose political violence as well.

“​​It is not a statistical fact at all,” podcaster Jon Favreau wrote on X. “I wouldn’t make an assertion like that about the right without evidence, and I’m just a podcaster not the Vice President of the United States. Incredibly irresponsible.”

There are countless examples of right-wing political violence that Vance, Trump, and many others on the right are simply gaslighting the public about at this point. From January 6 to the assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, to the school shooting that happened in Colorado the same day Charlie Kirk was killed, the right seems fully committed to pushing this lie.

Vice President JD Vance on Monday urged his supporters to snitch on workers who make offensive remarks about the late MAGA provocateur and podcaster Charlie Kirk.

In recent days, an error-ridden doxing campaign, led by right-wing figures like Trump ally Laura Loomer and Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok, began targeting people accused of publishing unsavory posts online about Kirk following his fatal shooting last week.

The vice president endorsed this censorial campaign as the guest host of Monday’s episode of The Charlie Kirk Show.

“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out, and, hell, call their employer,” the vice president urged his listeners. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility. And there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”

The campaign Vance effectively co-signed has already caused innumerable people to be doxed, threatened, and professionally punished or fired for their speech—including many who were simply critical of Kirk’s often extreme views and some who were accused of glorifying his death despite having never commented on the matter at all.

Earlier in the broadcast, Vance had on White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who condemned “organized doxing campaigns” against conservatives, which he claimed were part of a supposed “organized campaign that led to [Kirk’s] assassination.”