Illiberalism as Performance Art

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

 

Charlie performed a fine and richly deserved flaying of Attorney General Pam Bondi this morning over her embrace the same persecutorial logic that the left has been torturing Masterpiece Cakeshop proprietor Jack Phillips with for over a decade.

 

The AG has since revised her pledge to “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech” – a directive so unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny that it could only result in the harassment, not the conviction, of the Justice Department’s targets. Now, Bondi insists that she only ever intended to “target” the speech that results in threats, which is a different category of conduct altogether and, therefore, an obvious backtrack.

 

There was a time in recent memory, however, when Bondi did not feel obliged to prove her illiberal bona fides. “We were in a movie about anti-bullying and practicing peace and love and tolerance and accepting of people for their differences,” Bondi told reporters in 2018 when she was heckled outside a showing of the Mr. Rogers biopic Won’t You Be My Neighbor. She affirmed her belief in “free speech” then as well as during confirmation hearings to lead the DOJ. “I believe in the freedom of speech,” she said when asked by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) about her intention to “prosecute journalists for what they write.” The Constitution is clear, she added. Only “if anyone commits a crime” should they face prosecution.

 

That’s not just the right answer; it’s the only answer. Why, then, did Bondi default to an illiberal, censorial posture in this moment? We can deduce that she is responding to at least two incentives: first, to cater to the aggrieved zeal overcoming the very-online right; and, second, to appeal to what she must have assumed were Donald Trump’s instincts toward illiberalism and censoriousness.

 

Bondi wouldn’t be the first in this administration to attempt to impress the boss by sacrificing the fundamental suppositions about the rule of law in the United States.

 

The same incentives likely contributed to acting Social Security Administration Commissioner Lee Dudek’s decision to alter the process for issuing Social Security cards to newborns in Maine, forcing new parents to register with the state and not the hospital, one conspicuous day after Governor Janet Mills got into a verbal sparring match with the president at the White House. Dudek had to backtrack, too. “In retrospect, I realize that ending these contracts created an undue burden on the people of Maine, which was not the intent,” he said in a statement. “I apologize.”

 

We might conclude that similar inducements toward illiberality convinced Federal Communications Commission chief Brendan Carr to target broadcast networks and the shows they put on explicitly because of the content they promulgate. “The View is now in the crosshairs of this administration,” the head of the FCC said, casting all civic propriety to the wind. He probably felt he had little choice but to back up the president’s warning that ABC personality Joy Behar could be “next to be pulled off the air” – a missive that accompanied his call for the prosecution of celebrities like Beyoncé Knowles and Oprah Winfrey. As the regulatory agency head told Fox News, “once President Trump has exposed these media gatekeepers and smashed this façade, there’s a lot of consequences.”

 

These administration bureaucrats and functionaries may be performing for an audience of one, but that’s no excuse. The performance they’re turning in redounds neither to their benefit nor to the administration’s. But mimicking the president’s reactionary impulses seems to be part of the job description.