Lynch spoke against rhetoric that “edges towards violence,” but the law obviously prohibits violent actions — she’s speaking in terms alien to the First Amendment. True threats are unlawful, and true “incitement” isn’t protected by the Constitution, but these are extraordinarily narrow legal categories. Is it not enough to declare that the Department of Justice will enforce the law and uphold the Constitution?

The First Amendment protects an enormous range of speech — even speech that’s anathema to the Obama administration. Americans are perfectly within their rights to not just condemn jihad but also to make sweeping and angry statements about Islam. If the administration disagrees with this speech, it’s free to make its own statements, but when it starts making up legal categories of problematic speech, it is getting disturbingly close to discarding the Bill of Rights.

Unfortunately, when the Constitution conflicts with the demands of social justice, discarding the Bill of Rights is part of the Obama administration’s mission statement. The First Amendment takes a back seat to the administration’s desire to build a national “safe space” for Muslims. The Second Amendment should be tossed aside (without due process, no less) if a person’s name appears on a bloated bureaucratic watch list — a list so over-inclusive that it has included such nefarious characters as The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes and the late senator Ted Kennedy.