One needn’t endorse or repudiate the Oath Keepers organization to observe that the hack and release of its internal communications raises disturbing questions at a time when state and federal government agencies are seeking more of a view into private donor lists and personal bank accounts:

The emails were obtained by BuzzFeed News after an anonymous group claimed to have hacked the Oath Keepers’ servers and released the records to a group called Distributed Denial of Secrets, which posted much of the data publicly and shared some additional files with journalists and researchers.

Although the hacked Oath Keepers data does not appear to be complete, it provides an unprecedented glimpse inside the workings of the secretive organization, which was founded in 2009 by former Army paratrooper Stewart Rhodes and gets its name from the oath to uphold the Constitution sworn by all law enforcement and military personnel.

The facts are thus:  An anonymous group — which could have been small-time activists, a foreign government, federal agents spying on Americans, or somebody else — stole the group’s information and released it publicly.  Mainstream media organizations (and BuzzFeed is definitely not alone) took the cue and rushed to investigate individual Americans with gusto.  Despite having claimed in the past that hacked data could not be shared on their platforms, the major social media sites are promulgating its spread in this case.  One also can’t help but connect this with the U.S. military’s bizarre pledge to root out white supremacists from its ranks.

BuzzFeed all but laughs in the face of one police officer caught up in the hack, quoting his email to Oath Keepers as saying he’s “not looking to be on some Liberal hit list.”

The potential at any time to end up on a hit list is the future that the Left wants for all Americans.  To a movement that insists “silence is violence” and “colorblindness is racism,” anybody who disagrees is a dangerous insurgent who has forfeit his or her rights to privacy, freedom, or anything else.  They will studiously observe a double standard that protects their co-ideologues while thwarting their opposition by any means necessary.

This is why we have to fight at every instance of erosion of our privacy and rights of association, even when it means standing with organizations with which we otherwise wouldn’t engage.

Featured image by Chris Yang on Unsplash.