> opinions that were contributing to making the lives of several demographic groups more unsafe

Mere opinions cannot do this, even in principle.

As I'm sure you're aware, merely voicing opinions doesn't cause people to agree, either.

> The first amendment is important, but it has boundaries, and Kirk made a living from being very close (arguably sometimes over) these boundaries.

The boundaries are far tighter than you imply. Nothing I have seen him say comes anywhere close at all. Even the most uncharitable representations being spread around of his out-of-context excerpts would absolutely be protected speech in the USA. I am not a lawyer but I have spent a lot of time researching this. When Kirk and others like him say that US law does not recognize a concept of "hate speech", they are objectively correct. Wikipedia agrees:

> Hate speech in the United States cannot be directly regulated by the government due to the fundamental right to freedom of speech protected by the Constitution.[1] While "hate speech" is not a legal term in the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that most of what would qualify as hate speech in other western countries is legally protected speech under the First Amendment. In a Supreme Court case on the issue, Matal v. Tam (2017), the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment and that the U.S. government may not discriminate against speech on the basis of the speaker's viewpoint.[2]

Note that this was a unanimous reaffirmation, in quite recent, very ideologically polarized history.

Correct. To the extent "hate speech" has legal meaning, it's that its presence in a defendant's history where they are accused of another crime (such as assault) could raise that crime to the level of "hate crime." A hate crime differs from a regular crime in that the plaintiff must prove that the defendant had a racially-motivated mens rea: they weren't transgressing against a victim for reasons such as personal grudge, but because they have a broad hatred of people in a category the victim is a member of and committed the crime because of that.

Saying "America is better off without black people in it" is not a crime by itself. Having a prosecutor dig up the Twitter post where you said that while you're defending a battery charge can turn a six months in jail / $2,000 fine crime into a one year / $5,000 fine crime.