"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. "
Of course the severity of this sentence is another story.
Brandenburg v. Ohio and Hess v. Indiana are the key SCOTUS cases that established and clarified the imminent lawless action test. Generally it's pretty hard to demonstrate imminence when it's just someone ranting on the internet.
E.g. probably if two guys are arguing in physical proximity and you're shouting for guy A to shoot guy B, that counts.
But maybe if you tweet, "hey everybody, go kill that guy", it's not imminent/directed enough?
I only say this because I feel like I'm pretty often surprised by how high the standards are for applying some laws, despite the title/brief description of the law (of course as a rule, high standards are good here, but sometimes they can feel so high that the law has no teeth).
IANAL, but imminence I believe has to do with speech in a context where people nearby are inflamed and ready to commit violence. E.g., pro-genocide speech in Rwanda in 1994 by people carrying machetes would absolutely count. But a speech calling for violence on the Washington mall in front of a huge crowd wouldn't count unless the speech also included exhortations to said crowd to commit violence immediately. If you went up to a crowd of elementary school children and started exhorting them to kill their teachers that might not count because no one would believe the kids would do it. It's tricky.
The point is that the First Amendment protects speech that calls for violence but without imminence for a reason: if that were not the case then any administration (including state administrations) could punish speech they don't like by exaggerating the speech as calling for violence. By insisting on such a high bar the courts have made it difficult to lower the bar to a point that many might view as tyrannical.
"The three distinct elements of this test (intent to speak, imminence of lawlessness, and likelihood of lawlessness) ..."
The random tweet from a random person fails 2 of the 3.
It's how Kathy Griffin can show the photo of a decapitated Trump.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/05/31/did-ka...