Excerpt:
"In the coming years, the feds may treat libertarians like Muslims were treated after 9/11. Any new crackdown on terrorism will turn into a numbers game in which justice and fair play don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. Between 2001 and 2006, federal prosecutors charged 10 times as many people in terrorism investigations as they convicted on terrorism-related charges. President Bush declared in 2005 that “federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted.” But only 39 people were convicted on crimes tied to terrorism or national security, a Washington Post analysis found.

Entrapment opened the floodgates to federal terrorism indictments. Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1 percent of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats. Thirty times as many were induced by the FBI to behave in ways that prompted their arrest. In 2006, the FBI fabricated a terror scheme by the Liberty City Seven, where an informant encouraged a bunch of dimwits in Florida to babble about blowing up government buildings. That group was so knuckle-headed that they asked the FBI informant for military uniforms and wanted to conduct a parade.

Few Americans recognize how badly the legal playing field is tilted against them. When FBI agents knock on their doors, many Americans won’t hesitate to open up because they assume “those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.” But the FBI is exploiting a sweeping law that criminalizes casual comments. Federal agents have the right to lie to you and to put you in prison if you lie to them. Any citizen who makes even a single-word (“no” or “yes”) false utterance to a federal agent faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

It gets worse. You don’t have to actually lie. FBI agents can fabricate the sentences they use to hang you. Unlike most law enforcement agencies, the FBI rarely videotapes interviews, thereby permitting agents to create the narrative or “facts” which then can be used to charge individuals with false statements. Instead of a transcript, an FBI agent writes up a memo a day or two later asserting what you said. FBI agents have been taught that subjects of FBI investigations “have forfeited their right to the truth,” which helps explain the vast increase in federal entrapment operations.

If the FBI shows up at your door, they might have already accessed every email and text message you sent in recent years. They may have vacuumed all your social media activity—those private Facebook messages you sent—HA! They may have also accessed all your credit card and other financial data. And the FBI may have already interrogated other people to squeeze out accusations against you that they can throw in your face. Then they launch into a game of 20 questions—with a federal indictment awaiting if they claim you answered untruthfully.

Politicians in Washington don’t see such abuses as a problem; instead, they are a grand opportunity to smite people who don’t kowtow. It wasn’t that long ago—in the final 15 years of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign—that the FBI became America’s thought police. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy marriages with poison pen letters, and to cripple or destroy leftist, black, white racist, and anti-war organizations. A 1976 Senate report warned, “The American people need to be assured that never again will a federal agency be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order.” But legal and administrative restrictions on the FBI evaporated in the post 9/11 panic, resulting in pervasive abuses of Americans’ rights.

The FBI now operates with near-total impunity. The same is true of many state and local police departments who may be hungering for new federal subsidies to crackdown on the extremist peril.

How might this play out in the daily lives of people guilty of entertaining libertarian ideas? Consider Duncan Lemp, a 21-year-old Maryland man who was shot to death in a predawn raid in March 2021 after police smashed in his bedroom window and tossed flash bang grenades into his bedroom. Lemp was active on Twitter and liked several tweets by Libertarian presidential candidate John McAfee. Lemp’s last tweet declared, “The Constitution is dead.” Two months later, so was Lemp.

The Montgomery County, Maryland government later admitted that Lemp was targeted in part because was “anti-government” and “anti-police.” Plus, Lemp was outspoken about his support of the Second Amendment and posted photos of himself with guns on Instagram. Police saw one such photo and concluded that Lemp possessed a semi-automatic rifle that was illegal to own in Maryland. After they killed him and searched the Lemp home, they realized they had mis-identified the firearm—it was legal. But police, prosecutors, and local politicians treated that like a harmless paperwork error: nobody cared about the wrongful killing of Duncan Lemp."