Analysis by Aaron Blake, CNN

(CNN) — Within hours of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week, President Donald Trump signaled a rather curious crackdown.

“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” he said.

There was no evidence last week that the shooter was anything other than a lone wolf actor, and there still isn’t. But Trump said his response would broadly target lots of supposed culprits of political violence.

It wasn’t difficult to see how such a thing could get out of hand. And the administration has done little in the days since to disabuse anybody of the notion that Trump – who has demonstrated highly selective views on free speech, government “weaponization” and political violence – would use Kirk’s killing as a pretext to punish his enemies.

Conservative activists are already drawing attention to random people who celebrated Kirk’s death online, while some GOP lawmakers are pushing for employers to fire workers who posted things such as their lack of sympathy for Kirk’s murder. Even Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller have criticized employees who allegedly refused to print posters honoring Kirk, with Bondi saying they could be prosecuted.

Trump on Monday said he’d consider naming far-left anti-fascism movement Antifa as “domestic terrorists,” and people familiar with the discussions said he could begin rolling out actions targeting liberal organizations as soon as this week. And in the same Monday Oval Office event, the president responded to a conservative journalist who said that anti-war protesters near the White House “still have their First Amendment right,” by saying, “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure.”

Through it all, many on the right largely shrugged.

But Bondi on Monday made it so some of them could no longer shrug. They quickly cried foul over her comments on a podcast that the Justice Department would go after “hate speech.”

The National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke wagered that the Supreme Court would reject Bondi’s view 9-0.

“She should know this,” Fox News analyst Brit Hume said about hate speech being protected by the Constitution.

Conservative radio host Erick Erickson wagered that such a standard could lead to prosecutions of preachers for opposing gay marriage.

Even vehemently pro-Trump pundits flatly rejected it. “Charlie Kirk literally died defending the principle that Pam Bondi is trashing,” said right-wing influencer Hans Mahncke. “Just unreal.”

The pushback was apparently enough that Bondi attempted to clarify her remarks later Tuesday, telling Axios that the Justice Department isn’t prosecuting alleged hate speech and will only prosecute statements that incite violence.

“Freedom of speech is sacred in our country, and we will never impede upon that right,” she said in her statement to Axios.

“My intention was to speak about threats of violence that individuals incite against others,” she added.

The statement — the authenticity of which a DOJ spokesperson confirmed to CNN — followed a Tuesday morning X post in which she seemed to draw a distinction between hate speech and speech that incites violence.

But her Tuesday comments are a different tune from what she told Katie Miller on the former Trump administration aide’s podcast on Monday.

“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech – and there’s no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society,” Bondi said at the time.

Miller asked whether Bondi wanted “more law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people.” And Bondi signaled she did.

“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” Bondi said. “Anything – and that’s across the aisle,” she added, going on to refer to the arson attack that targeted Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

But the problem with that was the Supreme Court has resoundingly said, over and over again, that the government cannot punish hate speech – unless it goes much further than being hateful.

As recently as 2017, an opinion written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito stated that “the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”

And not only did Bondi’s comments on the podcast run afoul of the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of it; importantly, they ran afoul of Kirk’s own commentary.

Last year, the conservative activist posted on X: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

Back in 2017, after a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Kirk forcefully argued against a legal crackdown on hate speech, saying, “MORE SPEECH is the answer to Hate speech. Don’t arrest the people spewing hatred, show up in numbers & speak truth.”

Trump’s critics have been arguing for days that his response to Kirk’s assassination violated the activist’s own expansive views on free speech – and that Kirk’s death was being used for things he would have opposed.

Bondi’s comments about hate speech gave them a case in point.

And her remarks on Fox News, also on Monday, that employees could be prosecuted for not printing posters for Kirk gave conservatives more reason for concern. Some noted that threat went against the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of a Colorado baker who declined to make a wedding cake for a gay couple – a cause conservatives spent years celebrating.

Rather than disown what Bondi said about targeting hate speech on Monday, Trump has embraced an expansive view of his administration’s power. Asked by an ABC News reporter on Tuesday about Bondi’s comments, he suggested his team could target the reporter.

“We’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly,” Trump said.

Treating a president unfairly is also not a crime or the purview of law enforcement. And the fact that Trump floated it could throw fuel on the fire.

After the nation’s chief law enforcement officer badly botched the limits of Americans’ free speech rights, Trump was seeming to double down.

Perhaps some Trump allies who are concerned by this rhetoric will dismiss this as incompetence or a flub.

But conservatives have already been asked to confront how far is too far in Trump’s retribution campaign. The president has done plenty of things he once criticized the left for, including targeting his perceived enemies with investigations and going after their tax-exempt status.

If nothing else, Bondi certainly crystallized a choice in front of the right.

This story has been updated with an additional statement from Pam Bondi.

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