Here’s the clean version without the smoke machine or the scare caps: a Fox-famous ex-judge pitches a RICO-style clampdown she says would expose “foreign-influenced dark money” behind American protests, with George Soros as the walking headline. The pitch travels fast, because it always does. But if you’ve spent any time in courtrooms or committee rooms, you know how this movie ends: big rhetoric crashes into the First Amendment, and the credits roll over a pile of unresolved invoices. Meanwhile, a small, human story—thirty-seven seconds of nervous laughter from a Chicago teacher—gets fed into the outrage mill and comes out as proof of everything for everyone. Two tales, same machinery.

Jeanine Pirro’s announcement landed where lights are flattering and doubts are short. The bill, as she framed it, would treat the secret funding of protests and advocacy like organized crime. Think RICO, but for political money. With it comes the brawniest part of the promise: the power to freeze accounts overnight. That’s the kind of line that fills segments and fundraising emails. It’s also the kind that makes judges reach for the brakes.

RICO isn’t a vibe; it’s an elements test. Enterprise. Predicate crimes. A pattern. It was built for crews running extortion, fraud, bribery—the ugly verbs. Courts don’t extend it to unpopular donations because someone on TV insists the money feels coordinated. If cash is being moved to commit crimes—violence, laundering, material support—you can already prosecute under existing statutes. What Pirro is selling is a sledgehammer for a thumbtack, with the bonus feature of pretrial asset freezes that smell like prior restraint when the targets are expressive associations. That’s not a friendly neighborhood for government power.

The politics are the easy part. On the right, “Soros” functions as a metonym—one name that stands in for progressive infrastructure, globalism, and whatever else needs a villain that night. On the left, he’s a checkbook for civil society. Both frames are shortcuts. Neither helps write constitutional law. Soros is a U.S. citizen. His foundations, when spending here, operate under U.S. rules. If there’s unlawful conduct, charge it. But criminalizing a category of giving because the recipients chant things you dislike won’t survive first contact with a federal judge.

Where Pirro does touch a nerve is the part no one reads on-air: opacity. The donor-advised labyrinths, the pop-up 501(c)(4)s, the rinse-repeat transfers timed to disclosure windows—none of that inspires public trust. If Congress wants to clean the pipes, there are ways that don’t dress up as mob busts: near-real-time disclosure of large gifts to politically active nonprofits; harmonized definitions of “political activity” that accountants can’t game in their sleep; symmetric enforcement so the rules apply to your billionaires and mine; expedited judicial review for any pretrial restraints on expressive groups. Not TV-sexy, but durable. And legal.

If you want to see how the other machine works—the one that eats people—watch the Lucy Martinez story. Thirty-seven seconds of awkward gallows humor at a Chicago protest. A phone camera grabs a sliver. An anonymous account posts it. The clip jumps to aggregators, then to commentary channels that can stretch anything to twelve minutes and a mid-roll ad. By morning, Lucy’s name, workplace, and address are public property. She’s on leave by 9:15. By lunch, the district has a statement that reads like it was composed by a committee instructed not to feel.

I’ve seen this cycle too many times to pretend it’s surprising. The algorithms reward volatility; the platforms print money off attention. Context loses every footrace. A local reporter finds out what happened only after the clip has calcified into a meme. A student says it was nervous humor. The full video sinks under a tide of edits that fit the story people want. Lucy resigns quietly. Her colleagues feel like they’ve all been put on notice by a camera. The public moves on to a new scandal with the speed of a thumb.

We call this “accountability” when we like the target and “cancel culture” when we don’t. Mostly, it’s scale. Institutions aren’t built to absorb internet-sized waves. School districts, nonprofits, city agencies—they reflex to protect the logo and hope the weather changes. Lawyers advise silence. PR people write phrases like “reflects our community values.” Everyone waits for the storm to pick a different house.

There’s a study out of Illinois that puts numbers to the gut feeling: most people who shared Lucy’s clip never saw context. Outrage acts like identity—condemnation as a credential. For platforms, that’s not a bug. It’s the business model. Her thirty-seven seconds generated ad revenue she will never see, and consequences she can’t turn off. The internet turned a person into content, then blamed her for being consumable.

If there’s a common lesson between Pirro’s bill and Lucy’s fall, it’s this: power prefers blunt instruments. Legislators reach for sledgehammers that signal intent more than they solve problems. Audiences reach for moral certainties that feel good in the comments. Both flatten nuance. Both produce collateral damage. And neither changes the thing they claim to fix—dark money keeps moving; viral punishment keeps paying.

A veteran’s prescription is unglamorous. On money: disclose faster, define clearer, enforce evenly. Don’t freeze accounts tied to expressive activity without a bright-line predicate and a judge who can read it in daylight. On the outrage economy: build slow, boring friction—context prompts before sharing, rewinds to original source, de-amplification of edits that hide provenance. These changes will never trend. They would help more people than any primetime speech.

We also need a little cultural humility. If a proposal only restrains your political opponents, it’s not principle—it’s a cudgel. If a clip punishes a stranger more than it informs the public, maybe it belongs in a smaller circle. Imagine the tool in the other side’s hands. Imagine the headline with your name in it. If the picture chills you, that’s the temperature check you were looking for.

Back to the presumed finale. Pirro’s bill, or the thing that looks like it, will raise money, break the news crawl for a few days, maybe make it to a hearing. If it advances, courts will do what courts do: look for crimes, not vibes; protect speech, not just speech they like. The First Amendment will take another lap and keep making the same old demand—prove the act, not the association.

And Lucy? She’ll keep getting recognized by people who only know a sentence. She’ll find quieter rooms, smaller classrooms, work that doesn’t require an apology every time someone hits play. The clip will still be out there. It always is. But the rest of us can decide what we amplify and what we let drop. That’s not a law. It’s a habit. Old-school, unfashionable, and, for once, within reach.