Deport Tucker Carlson

Bondi’s Blunder and the New Thought Police

It began last Thursday — the day after Charlie Kirk was gunned down.

“I’m going to use congressional authority and every influence with Big Tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” tweeted Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana).

“I’m going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that Big Tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER.

“I'm also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked.”

It continued on Monday — when Attorney General Pam Bondi piped up.

“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 told podcaster Katie Miller, the wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

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

In additional remarks to Fox News on Monday, she suggested the feds might prosecute an Office Depot employee in Michigan for unlawful discrimination — because the individual refused to print posters for a Kirk memorial.

“Businesses cannot discriminate,” said Bondi. “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.”

Voters swept Donald Trump back into the White House last fall — in part on a wave of revulsion against Democrats’ relentless attacks on free speech.

Everyday Americans were routinely muzzled or banished from social media — often with the enthusiastic cooperation of Big Tech platforms.

And it wasn’t just the censorship. It was the financial cancellation — YouTube demonetizing accounts of people allegedly engaged in “hate speech” or “misinformation.” Or PayPal and Venmo closing the accounts of such people altogether.

They were cancelled for “wrong” opinions about COVID. About Ukraine. Even about whether the economy was tipping into a recession.

Starting in 2018, we regularly chronicled the rise of what’s now known as the “censorship industrial complex” — including the annual publication of a single-topic edition of these 5 Bullets devoted to censorship.

But that’s supposed to be all over now, right?

As Trump said to a joint session of Congress in March, ”I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.”

Hardly.

And with that, welcome to the 2025 censorship issue of 5 Bullets — appropriate seeing as today is Constitution Day.

Contrary to his boasts, the reality is that Trump’s performance on speech “is way worse than anything Biden did,” says the courageous civil liberties litigator Jenin Younes. “This is completely insane,” she tells The Washington Post.

She would know. She fought Biden’s censorship regime at the Supreme Court.

And she said that last week before Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Before it’s all over… U.S. citizens might find themselves stripped of their passports simply for speaking up about foreign aid. Maybe even leading conservative figures like Tucker Carlson.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

In Charlie Kirk’s Own Words…

“People who oppose freedom of speech will always claim we need to act to prevent ‘hate’ or stop ‘violence’,” tweeted Charlie Kirk himself last May.

“We must always oppose that. Just because an idea is provocative or even offensive does not make it violent.”

Added the civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald on his nightly webcast last month: “The whole idea of the free speech guarantee in the First Amendment is that it protects not the views that most people are comfortable with or like… but the views that you most hate, the views that anger you and disgust you most.”

Yes, that includes people celebrating Charlie Kirk’s violent end at age 31.

Their employers can fire them if they wish; that’s between them and their employers. But the government has no business getting involved.

➢ To be clear, the Office Depot employee was not authorized by any boss to refuse the poster order; the employee has since been fired.

When it comes to “violent” speech… the Supreme Court drew bright, clear sensible lines in a 1969 decision called Brandenburg v. Ohio.

Clarence Brandenburg was a Ku Klux Klan leader who gave a speech threatening violence against certain government officials. That earned him a conviction under Ohio’s “criminal syndicalism” law.

The justices overturned it unanimously.

Explained Greenwald in a 2011 Salon article: “The Court ruled that ‘except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action’ — meaning conduct such as standing outside someone’s house with an angry mob and urging them to burn the house down that moment — ‘the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a state to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force’ [Greenwald’s emphasis added].”

Bottom line on this Constitution Day: “We’re either a free society governed by the Constitution, or we’re not. We need to challenge hate with reason, not censorship,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) last spring.

But it’s going to be an uphill battle. Read on…

First They Came for the Foreign Student…

The biggest test case for free speech so far in the Trump 47 years is a case brought against a foreign national. But don’t get the idea that U.S. citizens are safe.

On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish grad student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk is her name; she was working on her doctorate at Tufts.

Her arrest came at a time the Trump administration was cracking down on pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses. From there, she disappeared into the federal prison system.

Surely she must have done something heinous to deserve such treatment, right? Firebombing the Tufts library? Occupying the student union? Blocking her fellow students as they were just trying to get to class?

Or at least she was overstaying her visa? Something?

No, she did none of that. She co-authored an Op-Ed in the student newspaper calling on the University to pull its investments out of Israel.

There was nothing incendiary in the article. It accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza, but there was nothing celebrating Hamas or its attack inside Israeli territory on Oct. 7, 2023.

The veteran journalist James Bovard was gobsmacked. “What I wonder is was this a screwup by the Trump people or were they trying to send a message?” he said in an interview. “That even though you haven’t done anything wrong, if you’ve simply co-signed one little news college newspaper Op-Ed, that’s enough to grab you off the street and act like you’re a top-10 terrorist.”

It was no screwup. A State Department memo uncovered by The Washington Post conceded that no federal agency had found evidence that Ozturk “engaged in anti-Semitic activity or made public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization.”

But that didn’t stop Secretary of State Marco Rubio from smearing her as being adjacent to “movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos.”

(Rubio will make an appearance toward the end of today’s edition as well…)

Ozturk spent six weeks in custody before a federal judge ordered her release. She still faces deportation.

Her case has outraged free speech advocates both left and right — including independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who reported on the “Twitter Files” revealing how the Biden administration strong-armed social media firms into censoring their users.

“A government that will detain a legal resident for a tepid editorial like Ozturk’s,” he says, “probably isn’t bothered by the idea of arrests for speech in general.”

Exactly. Warns John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, “If history is any guide, the next targets will not just be immigrants or foreign-born activists. They will be American citizens who dare to speak out.”

Which is exactly how it’s shaping up now…

Deport Tucker Carlson?!

“We can deport them, we can put them in jail, we can make their lives miserable, we can cut off their funding,” said the former U.S. government official.

The “them” he had in mind were conservative pundits Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

The former official who said this was David Friedman, who was U.S. ambassador to Israel during Donald Trump’s first term.

He spoke during an event on March 27 in Jerusalem called the International Conference on Combating Anti-semitism.

So that you don’t think I’m cherry-picking or taking Friedman out of context, I want to share the entire passage here.

Friedman: When we talk about, um, the importance of a bipartisan fight against anti-Semitism — which of course I endorse, and as my predecessor said, I condemn anti-Semitism on the right and on the left, I’m an equal-opportunity condemner of anti-Semitism…

Interviewer: You’re alluding to Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson?

Friedman: Yeah, none of them are any good on the right or on the left. I don’t like any of these anti-Semites and I’m not shy about it. But the government, a government, the United States government or the government of France or the government of any other country has the power to rein in anti-Semitism in a much more effective way. And you know, people say, “Well, you know, the governments are not in the business of changing the way people think.” That’s true. But you know, to my thinking, most people who are, you know, anti-Semites, most of these people running around — we’re not going to win their hearts and minds because they don’t have hearts and they don’t have minds. So you know, how are we going to — there’s no reason to think we’re ever going to convince them. But we can deport them, we can put them in jail. We can make their lives miserable. We can cut off their funding, and that’s what the Trump administration is doing for the first time.

And in case you’re wondering if there’s a facial expression or gesture that the transcript doesn’t capture, here’s a link to the video. Oh, and here’s a link to the entirety of the conference.

I don’t follow either Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens closely enough to say whether they’ve ever uttered anything anti-Semitic — that is, hatred of all Jews everywhere just for being Jewish.

But I do know they’ve emerged as passionate critics of U.S. aid to Israel — which seems to be what Friedman’s really upset about.

Earlier this year, I devoted an edition of 5 Bullets to Donald Trump’s harebrained scheme to take over Gaza, how it does not align with an “America first” agenda and how it runs the risk of spurring an attack on U.S. territory worse than 9/11.

Does that put me in Amb. Friedman’s crosshairs? Or Marco Rubio’s?

Obviously the government cannot deport a U.S. citizen born to other U.S. citizens…

… but maybe it can yank my passport?

Marco Rubio, Passport Nazi?

Stripping Americans of their passports for wrongthink is the idea behind legislation that was on the agenda of the House Foreign Affairs Committee today.

The measure authorizes the secretary of state to revoke the passports of American citizens if they offer “material support” to terrorist groups.

The decision would be strictly on Marco Rubio’s say-so. You’d get a 60-day appeal period, but the only person you could appeal to is… Marco Rubio.

The legislation is sponsored by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Florida) — a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces who’s worn his IDF uniform while conducting House business on Capitol Hill.

You can see the problem here: “It’s already illegal to give material support to terrorist organizations,” tweets the conservative commentator Melissa Witte.

Clearly in light of Rubio’s case against Ozturk, the aim is to stifle free speech — only now among Americans.

“Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” says Seth Stern at the Freedom of the Press Foundation — “even if what they say doesn’t include a word about a terrorist organization or terrorism.”

“They were never going to stop at visas and green cards,” adds Witte.

As I wind down this edition on a Wednesday afternoon, the control freaks and power trippers are dialing back their ambitions. But only for the moment.

• Yesterday Attorney General Bondi attempted to “walk back” her most outrageous remarks with a post on X that still exposed a fundamental ignorance of this country’s founding principles, to say nothing of the Brandenburg decision: “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment”

• The Justice Department says it will not pursue a case connected with the Kirk poster order in Michigan

• Mast quietly pulled his proposal to strip Americans of their passports if the secretary of state decides they’ve given “material support” to terrorists. He offered no explanation.

But this is no time for freedom lovers to let their guard down.

The new thought police are merely biding their time.

Whenever the next outrageous and tragic act of political violence occurs — and you know it’s coming, right? — they’ll be back with their ready-made proposals that angry and frightened Americans will welcome at a vulnerable moment.

We conclude today with the words of the late Charlie Kirk — who would be deeply disturbed to see and hear what’s being said and done in his name…

Happy Constitution Day,

Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets

P.S. The big market stories today are Nvidia and the Federal Reserve.

The Chinese government has banned the nation’s biggest tech companies from buying Nvidia’s AI chips.

Aside from the fact Nvidia shares are down 2.8% today, the impact could spread far and wide — throttling U.S.-China trade talks or even blowing up the sale of TikTok that’s due to be finalized on Friday.

Meanwhile, to no one’s surprise the Federal Reserve just cut the fed funds rate a quarter percentage point. Any surprises will come from chair Jerome Powell’s press conference, underway as we write. We’ll follow up tomorrow with analysis from Jim Rickards, as usual, as well as any market fallout.