According to President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, you may be a member of a criminal conspiracy if you have done any of the following: worn black to a demonstration, given face masks to protesters, joined a book club, distributed a zine. Recently, federal prosecutors have cited these actions as evidence that activists protesting Trump’s deportation machine are part of an organized criminal enterprise. Call it antifa, domestic terrorism, the radical left—in Trump’s eyes, dissent is never organic. It’s all just part of one big “conspiracy.”

Over the past year, prosecutors have increasingly levied conspiracy charges against activists in federal indictments from Chicago to Spokane, Washington. Some of these cases crumbled quickly; others, like the government’s attempt to paint leftist activists in Texas as an “antifa cell,” resulted in shocking convictions. According to Steffen Seitz, a litigation fellow at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law who has studied conspiracy law, this isn’t a haphazard strategy. “I think they are trying to explicitly go after social movements, and conspiracy is something that allows them to do that particularly effectively,” Seitz told me.

It’s no surprise that protest conspiracy charges have surged as conspiracy theorists have become entrenched in our federal government.

“Conspiracy” comes from the Latin conspirare, or “to breathe together.” Under US law, a conspiracy is just an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act. Criminalizing conspiracy is supposed to allow law enforcement to disrupt criminal plots before they occur and prosecute groups acting in concert—the idea being that organized crime poses a greater threat than individuals acting alone. G. Robert Blakey, the principal author of the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt........

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