A college student wrote a blog about killing tyrants. The Secret Service had questions

A George Mason University student who got a visit from President Donald Trump’s Secret Service after publishing an essay on his blog was nonplussed, telling Salon that the attention might even help him land a job even as First Amendment experts say the visit fits in a larger campaign by the administration aimed at intimidating its critics.

Nicholas Decker, an economics PhD student at George Mason University, was visited by the Secret Service after the university referred the student to federal law enforcement for what the university characterized as “evaluation of criminal behavior.” That was apparently because Decker published an essay, titled "When Must We Kill Them?," on his blog posing the question of when violence becomes justified in the face of authoritarianism.

"Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one. If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution," the essay reads.

Against the backdrop of a crackdown on criticism of the administration and anti-war protesters, the visit from the Secret Service has been criticized as an attempt to curtail First Amendment rights, by organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which said that George Mason University's behavior has "no place at an American university bound by the First Amendment." In response, defenders of the president unleashed a wave of online harassment against the student, although Decker said that hasn’t translated to in-person harassment, at least yet.

Decker, a self-described liberal who graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics from George Mason University in 2023, has helped raise money for research on transgender youth and match refugees with sponsors in the United States. When asked whether he was concerned the incident might make it harder for him to get a job in the future, Decker said that, actually, “I think this does benefit me,” citing the fact that it drew attention to his work.

In the interview, Decker, whose blog focuses mostly on libertarian economic policy and features interviews with far-right commentators like Richard Hanania, mostly wanted to discuss trade policy, saying that, in his opinion, the Trump administration is “spiritually leftist,” which he portrayed as a bad thing. He cited the president's fixation on tariffs and "constrictions on free enterprise, price controls, trade barriers and whatnot — cartelization of the economy, many very bad things."

Asked what advice he had for other students facing Trump’s crackdown on criticism of the administration, Decker said, “Certainly, I think that free expression is very important.”

"That's another margin upon which the gains from trade occur in terms of communicating ideas across borders that might be tacit, and that's one of the reasons why I believe that export subsidies are not isomorphic to import barriers like tariffs, in spite of the Lerner symmetry," Decker said.

Decker has other objections to the Trump administration, citing how it has, in his view, "arbitrarily imprisoned its opponents, revoked the visas of thousands of students, imposed taxes upon us without our consent and seeks to destroy the institutions which oppose it." But in his essay, and while speaking to Salon, he preferred talking bout trade policy over his own encounter with law enforcement.

While the Secret Service ultimately did not decide to arrest Decker, other students haven’t been so lucky. On Wednesday, pro-Palestinian students at the University of Michigan were temporarily detained after FBI agents broke down the door of their apartment, accusing them of “multi-jurisdictional vandalism,” an allegation that the agency has not elaborated on.

Axios has also reported that some administration officials are considering bringing criminal charges against critics of the administration, based on the assertion that they are aiding terrorists. Seb Gorka, a senior counterterrorism director at the White House, alluded to this plan in an interview with Newsmax.

"You have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them, because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime," Gorka said.

Wayne Unger, a professor at Quinnipiac University’s school of law, told Salon that in the context of the current administration’s actions, moves like the one against Decker should be interpreted as an effort “to chill speech or to retaliate for certain speech.”

“We don't want to police speech insofar as it chills it,” Unger said. “And for those individuals who choose to remain anonymous in your peers and their reporting, I think it's clear that there is an effort to chill speech. For what it's worth, I think the immigration cases against the international students are perhaps the strongest illustration of the administration's efforts to attack the First Amendment and First Amendment rights.”

Unger also said that, given that George Mason University is a public school, administrators have an obligation to respect First Amendment rights. While he said that the university didn’t do anything unconstitutional by referring a student for speech that they thought might be criminal to law enforcement, he did say that the university doesn’t have any legal basis to discipline Decker.

On Friday, Decker told Salon that he had been informed the school would not be pursuing any disciplinary action against him.

In response to a request for comment from Salon, the school said in a statement: "The George Mason University student in question published an essay on social media calling for the killings of federal officials, which officials referred to university police for evaluation. Because of the student’s circumstances and the fact that the threats were directed at federal authorities and not the university community, the matter is outside the jurisdiction of university police. The department followed standard procedure by referring the matter to federal law enforcement for further evaluation."

Lyrissa Lidsky, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Florida, told Salon that she thought the Secret Service made the right decision in choosing not to arrest Decke. But she pointed out that, given previous attempts on Trump’s life, there is a reason why they might take perceived threats more seriously.

“It's not incitement, it's not a true threat,” Lidsky said. “I think it's a musing about when violence would be justified with a kind of subtext critical of the administration.”