Back when the likely future mayor of New York was a humble assemblyman, Zohran Mamdani in 2023 joined a chorus of other local Democrat politicians to cajole Motif Studios to cancel an event it had agreed to host, put on by Turning Point USA and Blexit, the movement for a “black exit” from the Democrat Party plantation.
Via the 2023 press release (emphasis added):
Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris, State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, Assembly Members Zohran Mamdani and Jessica González-Rojas, and City Council Members Julie Won and Tiffany Cabán issued the following statement in response to Motif Studios agreeing to host a far-right extremist event on June 17th at Tammany House in Long Island City.
“As elected officials representing western Queens, we are deeply disappointed by the decision by Motif Studios to host an event by the far-right extremist groups Blexit and Turning Point USA at their Triplex LIC/Tammany House venue in Long Island City. Providing a platform for the kind of transphobic, bigoted views held by invited speakers Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, and others goes directly against the diversity and inclusivity that we hold dear as New Yorkers, and is an insult to every member of our community.
“We call on Motif Studios to follow the lead of the Music Hall of Williamsburg, the original host of this event, who canceled their booking after the community spoke out in opposition to the bigotry of the organizers. Hate has no home in Queens, New York City, or anywhere else, and certainly not here in Long Island City.
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“Hate has no home” in America — I seem to recall that wildly un-American sentiment echoed nearly verbatim by some unlikely figure recently….
Ah, that’s right — it was Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Republican and the highest-ranking lawyer for the state, during a podcast in the wake of, ironically, the death of one of the most prominent free speech advocates in the country:
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… We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything, and that’s across the aisle.
Nope. Liberty First!pic.twitter.com/tB32n44Eyh
— James Lindsay, anti-Communist (@ConceptualJames) September 16, 2025
Mamdani’s and Bondi’s convergence strikes me as odd for members of adversarial political parties, ostensibly with different ideologies.
Related: MAGA Influencer Accuses AG Pam Bondi of First Amendment Violation on X
Of course, “hate speech” and “hate crime” being entirely subjective terms, the key point at which Bondi and Mamdani would diverge is what each would respectively define as “hate speech.”
That’s the beauty of “hate speech;” its definition is entirely dependent on the accuser’s whim.
Mamdani’s prohibition against “hate speech,” for example, definitely includes Charlie Kirk because he’s white and male and Deplorable, but doesn’t apply to his political allies who like to chant “globalize the intifada.”
Via NBC News (emphasis added):
Zohran Mamdani, the presumptive Democratic nominee in New York City's mayoral race, on Sunday again sidestepped an opportunity to condemn the phrase "globalize the intifada," saying that mayors shouldn't "police speech."
"That's not language that I use," Mamdani said when asked if he condemns the phrase, which is widely viewed by Jewish groups as offensive and antisemitic, on NBC News' "Meet the Press." "The language that I use and the language that I will continue to use to lead the city is that which speaks clearly to my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights."
“Universal human rights” — not for his political opponents, though, which would perhaps suggest that he doesn’t understand or care what “universal” means.
In related news, after it was discovered recently that the Anti-Defamation League, a favorite censorship tool of a large swathe of the governing class, had included Turning Point USA as an “extremist group” in its “Glossary of Extremism and Hate,” the organization purged the entire archive under political duress.
Via Fox News (emphasis added):
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) removed its entire "Glossary of Extremism and Hate" on Tuesday after receiving backlash, including from Elon Musk and Republican lawmakers, for listing Turning Point USA (TPUSA) as an extremist group.
The outrage comes nearly three weeks after TPUSA co-founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University while speaking with a crowd on campus.
TPUSA's backgrounder page on the ADL website falls under the "Center of Extremism" tag and describes the conservative group as having ties to "a range of right-wing extremists and has generated support from anti-Muslim bigots, alt-lite activists and some corners of the white supremacist alt-right."
With over 1,000 entries written over many years, the ADL Glossary of Extremism has served as a source of high-level information on a wide range of topics for years. At the same time, an increasing number of entries in the Glossary were outdated. We also saw a number of entries… pic.twitter.com/1Wj7hy6sLV
— ADL (@ADL) September 30, 2025
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The lesson here, I think, is that the temptation to censor inconvenient political speech is not exclusive to any ideology or party; it’s a human impulse. Humans and institutions, being comprised of humans, nearly always gravitate to censorship as a strategy to promote their own agendas.
The Founders rightly made the First Amendment the first for a variety of reasons, not least of which out of recognition of that human impulse to censor and the downstream negative effects on a free society if the government weren’t restrained from its practice.
