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Rh own cases show time and again how true-threats prosecutions sweep in political speech. See Black, 538 U. S., at 348–349; Watts, 394 U. S., at 707 (antiwar protest); Rogers, 422 U. S., at 41–42 (Marshall, J., concurring) (opposition to Nixon’s policies toward China). Not only that, but incitement itself is often only a hair’s-breadth away from threats.

Take the seminal incitement case NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., 458 U. S. 886 (1982). During a civil rights boycott, NAACP leader Charles Evers, brother of the murdered civil rights hero Medgar Evers, gave a series of heated speeches. See id., at 898–902. He intoned that “boycott violators would be ‘disciplined’ ” and that “ ‘[i]f we catch any of you going in any of them racist stores, we’re gonna break your damn neck.’ ” Id., at 902. The Court acknowledged that in this charged context, these speeches “might have been understood as inviting an unlawful form of discipline or, at least, as intending to create a fear of violence.” Id., at 927. Yet inflammatory and threatening as these speeches were, they did not constitute incitement. That was because “there [was] no evidence—apart from the speeches themselves—that Evers authorized, ratified, or directly threatened acts of violence.” Id., at 929. His speeches were thus not “ ‘directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action’ ” and he had not “specifically intended to further an unlawful goal.” Id., at 925, n. 68, 928.

Under a recklessness rule, Claiborne would have come out the other way. So long as Evers had some subjective awareness of some risk that a reasonable person could