2 ELONIS v. UNITED STATES THOMAS, J., dissenting This failure to decide throws everyone from appellate judges to everyday Facebook users into a state of uncer­ tainty. This uncertainty could have been avoided had we simply adhered to the background rule of the common law favoring general intent. Although I am sympathetic to my colleagues’ policy concerns about the risks associated with threat prosecutions, the answer to such fears is not to discard our traditional approach to state-of-mind require­ ments in criminal law. Because the Court of Appeals properly applied the general-intent standard, and because the communications transmitted by Elonis were “true threats” unprotected by the First Amendment, I would affirm the judgment below. I A Enacted in 1939, §875(c) provides, “Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.” Because §875(c) criminalizes speech, the First Amendment requires that the term “threat” be limited to a narrow class of historically unprotected communications called “true threats.” To qualify as a true threat, a communica­ tion must be a serious expression of an intention to com­ mit unlawful physical violence, not merely “political hy­ perbole”; “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks”; or “vituperative, abusive, and inexact” statements. Watts v. United States, 394 U. S. 705, 708 (1969) (per curiam) (internal quotation marks omitted). It also cannot be determined solely by the reaction of the recipient, but must instead be “determined by the inter­ pretation of a reasonable recipient familiar with the con­ text of the communication,” United States v. Darby, 37 F. 3d 1059, 1066 (CA4 1994) (emphasis added), lest histor­