By Ryan McMaken/Mises Institute
Last Thursday, Enrique Tarrio, a reputed national leader of the Proud Boys organization was convicted in federal court of seditious conspiracy along with three-co-defendants. This conviction in a District of Columbia court represents a victory for the Justice Department which has now charged more than a thousand people with “crimes” related to the January 6 riot at the US capitol. Most of the charges related to the riot have been for small-time offenses that amount to vandalism and trespassing. A handful of those allegedly involved in the riot, however, have been convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Notably, Tarrio wasn’t even in Washington, DC on the day of the riot, and thus could not have engaged in any violent acts against Capitol personnel. Yet, he has nonetheless been convicted on grounds that he was involved in some sort of “agreement” to “hinder” federal laws, and thus is guilty of saying things that allegedly led to the riot. The Tarrio case is an excellent example of how federal “crimes” can be spun by federal prosecutors from actions that are neither violence, nor fraud, nor any other act that a normal person would recognize as a real crime.
Seditious Conspiracy Was Invented to Get Around Limitations on Treason Prosecutions
Seditious conspiracy must not be confused with the act of treason legally defined in the US Constitution, however. Generally speaking, while treason requires an overt act of some kind, seditious conspiracy is a charge that a person has said things designed to undermine government authority. In other words, it is a “crime” of intent as interpreted by state authorities. This is fundamentally different from picking up a weapon and using it against agents of a government.
Of course, as we’ve noted here at mises.org before, the very idea of treason is itself problematic, since it assumes that violence against a government agent is somehow worse than a crime against a private citizen. Governments love this double standard because it reinforces the idea that the regime is more important than the voluntary private sector. Ultimately, however, violence against a person or property should be prosecuted as exactly that, and not as some separate category of crime against the “special” human beings who work for a regime.
Seditious conspiracy suffers from this same problem but is even more problematic because it relies primarily on circumstantial evidence to “prove” that a person was saying things in favor of obstructing or overthrowing a government. Indeed, the supposed necessity of such a “crime” is belied by the fact that no such crime existed even in federal law between the repeal of the hated Alien and Sedition Acts and the advent of the Civil War. Nor did seditious conspiracy laws play an important role in the US regime’s military success against the Southern secessionists.
Instead, what we find is that seditious conspiracy is a crime that is both prone to abuse by state authorities and unnecessary in terms of preventing violence to life and property. In cases such as the January 6 riot, crimes against persons and property ought to simply be considered violent crimes and property crimes of the usual sort. Seditious conspiracy, in contrast, is merely a type of “thought crime.”
PERCEPTION RESET 