The video shows Michael Yon making false claims regarding so-called “terrorists coming across the border being funded by Jewish money.” Yon was speaking at a “Take Back Our Border” convoy in Texas.
In the video posted on X, formerly Twitter, the man can be heard claiming that HIAS, a global Jewish nonprofit that works to protect refugees, is responsible for funding terrorists coming to America.
When does free speech descend into incitement?
When black people do it.
See: BLM protests
Technically there is a legal answer but unfortunately in the States it has different possible definitions at the State and Federal level.
In a very general sense one in part looks at intention and also all the factors around in the environment. If I were to go “we should kill the !” in a forum such as this where generally speaking we are all just people talking and hyperbole is more or less the norm it’s probably not going to meet the criteria of a chargeable incitement. If I as a speaker at a podium where I have been marketed as some kind of authority - even if that is just implied by the fact I am on the podium - start winding up a crowd with the intention of setting them loose to a criminal purpose or start yelling at someone who is already weilding a gun to shoot then that’s a pretty strong case for incitement. Your intention is made fairly clear and you are in a place to directly influence in an outsized fashion how events might play out.
A lot of the harmful rhetoric that goes on, while priming the stage for individual people to become aggressive and more predisposed to take out their aggressions on the target (stochastic terrorism) has been leaned on quite heavily in modern times it does so basically cheating the system. If you start low and slow and let the water appear to boil itself then it generally protects you from a incitement charge.