US v Peter Stinson: MAGAReport 11/1/25

A trial you may have missed

This past week I testified as an expert witness in a criminal trial. It is one of the most important cases I’ve worked on, and, in my opinion, a critically important free speech case in the current political environment.

Peter Stinson, a former Coast Guard officer, was charged with soliciting the murder of the President. He was charged based on a single BlueSky post he made back in February that said “Take the shot. We’ll deal with the fallout.” The entirety of the evidence against him was a bunch of other tweets, some going back to 2020, where he said things like he wishes someone would shoot Trump or asking whether we could crowdsource a hitman.

On one hand, I don’t think it’s a great idea to post stuff like this online. On the other hand, simply advocating for other people to commit violence, even against the President, is very explicitly protected speech under the First Amendment. Peter didn’t reach out to anyone to ask them to shoot Trump. He didn’t buy guns, he didn’t go on the dark web looking for a hitman, he didn’t convert a bunch of money to crypto to pay one, he didn’t DM with anyone about doing it. He just ranted on social media that he wished someone would do it. That’s it.

I testified on his side to say that people say things like this online all the time and that, on the spectrum of violent speech - which I share often here in the MAGAReport - Peter’s language is pretty mild. If you go on a social media platform and search for phrases like “take out <political figure>” or “can/should/could I hire a hitman” or “hang <political figure>”, you will find hundreds of posts. If people fantasizing about and rooting for the death of public figures they don’t like is a crime, then there are hundreds of thousands of people who would go to jail.

During the trial, the Defense (Peter was represented by an amazing Federal Public Defender) asked me questions for about 20 minutes. I testified about how social media works and what politically violent speech looks like. I defined “shitposting” in Federal Court. The prosecution then cross examined me for a couple hours, mostly by bringing up various copies of the MAGAReport. I think their goal was to make me look politically biased, but I had to keep explaining that this whole report is about a group of MAGAs so extreme that they have been banned from mainstream platforms, they advocate for purge days where they can shoot immigrants and deliver their bodies to the government for a bounty payment, and that they regularly argue that women shouldn’t have the right to vote. (And for the record, in case any prosecutors subscribed, I think this language is profoundly dangerous but also that it is almost always legal.)

In the course of my cross-examination, I got to explain that I thought launching a civil war because one’s preferred candidate loses is unpatriotic and anti-democratic, and I got to tell the jury that they should all read Jason Stanley’s book How Fascism Works.

The trial was only two days, Monday and Tuesday. The only prosecution witness was the FBI guy who presented the tweets (I was not allowed in the courtroom before I testified, so I didn’t get to see him). The defense’s only witnesses were me, and a woman who Peter had organized protests with who briefly spoke as a character witness. The jury got the case at 3:30 Tuesday afternoon.

As we sat around waiting for a verdict, I thought about the implications. There are whole social media accounts dedicated to tracking if Trump has died yet, followed by hundreds of thousands of people. If Peter were found guilty, would the government come after the people who run those accounts and everyone who comments? Would we see mass prosecutions of everyone who tweeted things like “I wish that shooter in Butler had been a few inches to the right” - a post I have seen repeated dozens of times? This little trial, where there was no media in the courtroom, was the thing standing between preserving our right to speak against the President and the destruction of the First Amendment.

At 5:45, the jury announced they had reached a verdict. The existential anxiety I had for the country in the minutes waiting to here - not to mention the anxiety I had for Peter whose freedom depended on the outcome - was pretty overwhelming. After those 2 hours of deliberation, the jury found Peter Not Guilty.

As I testified when asked, I would have taken the stand on behalf of someone on the right if they had said the same things about Biden or Fauci or Clinton. And I pointed out the government has not been especially savvy at understanding online culture lately and it has impacted the way they interpret people's motivations and actions.

If you’re curious about what Peter is up to now, you can find him on Instagram where he is posting up a storm.

Updates on the MAGAs coming soon but the quick update is: they aren’t talking at all about the shutdown (except to blame democrats) or the SNAP lapse. They are primarily celebrating ICE arrests and immigrants’ suffering.

(Interesting side note: Peter’s posts were up on social media for months or years and Peter only got investigated and charged after he applied for permits for the Mayday protest, which is a long-running demonstration advocating for peaceful protest and Trump’s impeachment. It feels like a very politically-motivated prosecution to me…)