The pamphlet is not the pistol

The Guardian reports that federal prosecutors used handmade political publications — so-called zines — as evidence to convict protesters of terrorism charges connected to a 2025 demonstration at an immigration detention facility in Texas. One woman cited in the story, Elizabeth Soto, is now facing decades in prison. I am told, based on that reporting, that the printed material in question expressed political opposition to immigration enforcement policy. Whether the individuals also committed acts of violence I cannot say from the record before me; the story does not fully resolve that question. But the central alarm the reporters are sounding — that written political sentiment was placed before a jury as evidence of terrorist intent — is the matter I wish to address.

A free government rests on a compact between the citizenry and the law. That compact has two load-bearing walls: the government may not suppress opinion, and the citizen owes the government lawful conduct. The moment a prosecutor holds up a pamphlet and says this is why we believe the defendant is dangerous, those two walls begin to lean against each other. Ideas are not deeds. Anger committed to paper is not an act of destruction. I was myself the subject of broadsides and political prints that portrayed me in the most unflattering terms imaginable, and I regarded the suppression of such material as a far graver threat to the Republic than any insult they contained.

I must be careful here about what I do not know. If individuals physically obstructed lawful officers, damaged property, or threatened lives, the law may address those acts — and should. Civic protest does not confer immunity from consequences for unlawful conduct. But the charge is terrorism, which carries with it a weight that demands extraordinary precision. To apply that weight to citizens whose crime appears, at least in part, to be the ownership of political literature is to use a cannon where the law intended a scalpel. Inference, not recollection: such prosecutorial choices, once established as precedent, do not remain confined to one political tendency. The government that imprisons the left for its pamphlets has built a tool the right will also one day feel.

The rule of law is not simply the existence of law. It is the disciplined, proportionate, and impartial application of law — with the full weight of constitutional protection standing between the citizen and the state's considerable power. The First Amendment, as I understand it to have been interpreted across two centuries, exists precisely for speech that authorities find uncomfortable. Comfortable speech requires no protection. It is the dissident pamphlet, the protest march, the furious broadside that the guarantee was written to shelter.

I counsel the following. The courts — not the passions of any administration, and not the alarm of any faction — must scrutinize whether the introduction of political literature as evidence of criminal intent meets the Republic's own standard for the gravest of charges. Congress, for its part, ought to ask whether terrorism statutes drafted for catastrophic organized violence are being stretched beyond their proper domain. And the citizenry should watch this case with the attention it deserves, because the precedent being set here will outlast the particular politics of the moment. A government that learns it may frighten its critics into silence with a terrorism charge will not easily unlearn that lesson.