A man who has been described by the Times as “the most successful terrorist in American history” was captured after what the paper called the “9/11 of 1859.” He was sent to the gallows for, among other things, treason. Yet John Brown today is remembered as a martyr of the war against slavery, while statues of the Army officer who captured him, Robert E. Lee, are being toppled, and even melted, to expunge the general’s memory.

All of which we mention as a cautionary note after yesterday’s largely partisan vote by the House to ramp up federal efforts to combat domestic terrorism — and Governor Hochul’s creation of a new state anti-domestic terrorism unit — after the murders at Buffalo. The moves follow the Attorney General’s post-January 6 pledge “to prioritize combating domestic extremism” and a doubling, since 2020, of such investigations by the FBI. 

It’s not our intent here to put the gloss on the crimes perpetrated here at home by American extremists. While our own newspaper work has left us more concerned about terrorism from the left than the right, we don’t gainsay the problem on either flank. We just saw at Buffalo a murder of 10 persons by a young man who was reportedly a racist — yet who also apparently called himself an “eco-fascist,” a kind of radical environmentalist.

By our lights, the attack appears to be the work of an individual  deranged by mental illness and racism. Yet Democrats are treating the incident as a political act. While “Congress can’t stop the likes of Tucker Carlson from spewing hateful, dangerous replacement theory ideology across the airwaves,” Representative Brad Schneider said, the domestic terrorism bill “is what Congress can do this week to try to prevent future Buffalo shootings.”

That kind of glancing accusation against Mr. Carlson is every bit as outrageous as were the accusations against Governor Palin in the wake of the shooting that in 2011 killed six and cut short the career of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at Tucson. It was just the other day that the ex-editorial page editor of the Times was in a United States courtroom apologizing. Yet the Times was among those who just tried the same stunt against Mr. Carlson.

Senator Durbin even compared the attack at Buffalo to September 11. “This is a domestic form of the same terrorism that killed the innocent people of New York City and now this assault in Buffalo,” he said. This kind of rhetoric — yet again — from top Democrats raises concerns that they are attempting to redefine political viewpoints that they oppose not merely as objectionable, but as criminal.

Let us beware of letting political prejudices warp the definition of terrorism. It led to the Garland plan to use the Patriot Act against parents protesting educational policy. The slaughter at Tops deserves to be prosecuted aggressively. Yet it would be terrible for our authorities to treat what happened there as political terrorism. Terrorists, like John Brown, can get rehabilitated. That’s never going to happen with killers like the one who struck at Buffalo.