Politics & Power Quote by Pete du Pont

The question is engineered to make the extraordinary feel like common sense. Pete du Pont doesn’t argue for warrantless surveillance outright; he stages a hypothetical so morally loaded that disagreement starts to sound like negligence. “If we had known” is the sleight of hand: governments rarely “know” an attack is coming in the clean, cinematic way the sentence implies. But by granting that premise, du Pont smuggles in the idea that the only thing standing between safety and catastrophe is a legal formality.

The phrasing also pre-sorts the suspects. “The attackers” are presented as a clearly identifiable set, not a fog of leads, false positives, and people who look suspicious in hindsight. That matters, because the real debate after major attacks isn’t whether to listen in on someone already confirmed guilty; it’s who gets swept into the dragnet before certainty exists. The word “electronically” does quiet work too, making surveillance sound technical and antiseptic, less like intrusion and more like infrastructure.

As a politician from an era when law-and-order rhetoric met the rise of digital intelligence, du Pont is tapping a post-crisis reflex: trade procedure for speed, courts for executive discretion, due process for “just in case.” The subtext isn’t merely that warrants are inconvenient. It’s that the rule of law is a luxury item we can’t afford when fear is on the ballot.