"Those nasty things you wrote about police misconduct might incite someone to attack a law enforcement officer. Therefore, those posts are not protected by the First Amendment."
That's what can happen with a broad view of "incitement" -- you mean well by it, but your definition isn't universally shared.
The distinction drawn in American law is not based on the content itself. Pro-Nazi speech or white supremacist speech isn't always incitement. The distinction is whether there's an imminent danger. See the summary that Warren DeMontague posted in #39 -- speech can be banned if it "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". As it happens, that language is from a Supreme Court decision, Brandenburg v. Ohio, that overturned the conviction of a Klan leader. From the Wikipedia article about the case:
Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader in rural Ohio, contacted a reporter at a Cincinnati television station and invited him to cover a KKK rally that would take place in Hamilton County in the summer of 1964.[7] Portions of the rally were filmed, showing several men in robes and hoods, some carrying firearms, first burning a cross and then making speeches. One of the speeches made reference to the possibility of "revengeance" against "niggers", "Jews", and those who supported them. One of the speeches also claimed that "our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race", and announced plans for a march on Washington to take place on the Fourth of July. Brandenburg was charged with advocating violence under Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute for his participation in the rally and for the speech he made. In relevant part, the statute – enacted in 1919 during the First Red Scare – proscribed "advocat{ing}...the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform" and "voluntarily assembl{ing} with any society, group or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism".
All that seems at least as vile as anything that came out of Charlottesville. The point of
Brandenburg is that, although you could always draw some sort of causal link between speech and illegal conduct, the Supreme Court refused to allow a First Amendment loophole that would greatly weaken the protection of freedom of speech. In brief, suppression on the basis of incitement was no longer permitted just because speech had a "bad tendency". Instead, there had to be the danger of "imminent lawless action".
A bunch of neo-Nazis waving tiki torches and chanting "Jews will not replace us" does not represent an imminent threat that one of them will drive a car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators. That's just hindsight.
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