Make no mistake: The chant is clearly First Amendment–protected speech, even if some would consider it hate speech. Contrary to what many progressive activists naively assume, hate speech is free speech. There is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment, because there is no mutually agreed-upon definition of hate speech, and there are no Supreme Court decisions supporting such an exception. The Supreme Court has carved out some categories of speech that don’t qualify for protection—threats of imminent violence, for instance—but hate speech isn’t one of them. On the contrary, the right to insult political leaders and government officials is perhaps the most important and obvious component of the First Amendment.

Ken Dilanian of NBC News said he called to ask the Secret Service whether “let’s go Brandon” emblazoned on an assault rifle represented a security threat to the president, which he thinks “is a reasonable question.”

That isn’t a reasonable question at all. Here’s a reasonable question: Why do mainstream media figures think their main job is to police speech that offends Democrats?