Opinion editors at the Wall Street Journal are to be commended for their consistent willingness to publish commentaries that, at other major dailies, might lead to a woketivist newsroom drum circle and outraged demands that someone be fired. One such piece this morning is headlined “Beware New Laws Against ‘Domestic Terror’” [A17], by retired FBI special agent and legal attache’ Thomas J. Baker.
Mr. Baker’s seasoned, sober view stands in sharp contrast to much recent media cheerleading for the Stalinist-Maoist inclinations of some in Congress (yes, you Dick Durbin and Brad Schneider of Illinois, et al.) who wish to push through to our twilighting president’s desk a new law that could give federal agents and local police sweeping new powers to surveil and investigate “domestic terrorists.” Which is to say virtually anyone who might question the wisdom of: open borders, an ever growing welfare state, inflation-inviting Modern Monetary Theory, indoctrinating young school children with lessons about their irredeemably “racist” country, allowing biological boys wearing lipstick and hair braids to dominate girls’ athletic competitions, or star-chamber proceedings at colleges and universities that afford the accused no substantive due process.
Speaking of due process, Mr. Baker, like all sensible people, has no problem with surveillance and investigations of those actually suspected of committing or even contemplating the commission of criminally violent acts. But his overarching point is that to investigate Americans “for their advocacy rather than their actions” flies in the face of our Bill of Rights. And since a “menu of federal criminal laws already on the books can be and have been invoked to fight domestic terrorism without compromising the First Amendment” — from the Klan and the Weathermen to Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski — hyperpartisan politicians should not “get lost in an urge to ‘do something'” under the fraudulent cover of national security.
The piece closes with an appropriate quote from former FBI director William Webster who frequently reminded investigators: “We must do the job the American people expect of us, but in the manner that the Constitution demands of us.” All members of Congress and the voters who elect them would do well to read the rest of what Mr. Baker has to say.