I've never liked that "incitement" is not protected by the First Amendment, and I've been extremely dismayed lately by how its lack of protection is almost universally accepted, by liberals especially, though this dreadfulness is understandable because the illegality of incitement has been validated by the U.S. Supreme Court for decades. Nonetheless, think about what outlawing incitement means. Does it not invoke, and answer in the affirmative on everyone's behalf, the sententious question asked of children, "If someone told you to go jump off a bridge, would you do it?"

Banning incitement is infantilizing and dehumanizing. With this concept, we've made an unseemly, morally obtuse concession to the trope of the Mob, a long-standing, anti-democratic slander in political theory that goes back to Plato and neutralizes the responsibility of those who listen to an inciter to restrain themselves (assuming they are moved), and not commit crimes afterwards. Proof: the disavowal of responsibility by some of those who stormed the Capitol on the ground that Trump incited them. In essence, these idiots are saying, and asking the rest of us to accept, that they were lemmings and should be treated as such. This is not morally valid in a would-be free, democratic society.

But if you don't buy that, I am here to inform you that, as we speak, the concept of incitement is being negligently and willfully stretched to encompass "incitements" beyond the current legal standard that supposedly circumscribes its unwarranted extension, and that doing this has been a project of the political establishment and its officious intellectuals, e.g. Cass Sunstein, for a long time. Glenn Greenwald just did a very fine run down of how this expansion is unfolding, and the threat to freedom of speech it poses is obvious. Therefore, watch out: if you encourage this development, then all the limits on the concept's current misapplication to less than indisputable incitements to "imminent lawless action", as the dubious saying goes, will fall away, leaving any government stooge or tech monopoly free to claim that it also applies to unauthorized thoughts and speech where the threat of violence is unquestionably non-existent.