The Democrats and their media allies are trying to convince the American people that President Donald Trump is guilty of inciting an insurrection last week. In both legal terms and in terms of the plain meaning of the English language, their claim is absurd on its face. There are two fundamental reasons for this: Trump did not incite the riots at the Capitol, and the riots were not an insurrection.
The Standard for Incitement
Legally speaking, incitement has an incredibly high bar that none of Trump’s actions since the election come close to meeting. These standards were set by the Supreme Court in its landmark Brandenburg v. Ohio case. Among other things, the decision held that in order to constitute incitement to violence, speech must include intent and specific, not abstract, instructions to act. It also required that the speech in question would likely produce “imminent lawless action,” which went a step further than the previous legal tests for incitement. According to the ruling: