Why is Kansas Democrat Barbara Bollier making volunteers sign non-disclosure agreements?

We have rightly come to see non-disclosure agreements as invisibility cloaks for scoundrels. For decades, they protected Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump from damaging press about their predations.

The NDAs also protected Fox News and NBC from having to change work cultures that saw sexual harassment as no big deal.

That’s why, when they were competing for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Elizabeth Warren unsuccessfully tried to get Michael Bloomberg to release former employees from the NDAs they’d signed after settling harassment and hostile work environment complaints against his company.

All such agreements attempt to abridge the signer’s First Amendment rights.

So we do not agree with Kansas Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Barbara Bollier’s decision to make even her campaign volunteers sign up for these limits on speech.

Yes, they are already common for paid staff on political campaigns, which is a sad commentary on the paranoia in public life. But it’s too much to ask of even the young people we’re so hoping to get interested and involved in elections.

We don’t buy the excuse that, as an email sent by the Bollier campaign says, this has been made necessary by “all of the foreign interference we’ve seen in recent election cycles.”

More likely, the campaign doesn’t want to be O’Keefed. James O’Keefe, the conservative activist who founded Project Veritas a decade ago, specializes in secretly taping Democratic operations. In 2010, he pleaded guilty to entering federal property under false pretenses. He received three years probation, a fine of $1,500 and 100 hours of community service. He’s gotten better at infiltration since then.

Two years ago, someone from his group signed up as an intern for then-Democratic Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill’s campaign.

Undercover videos of the McCaskill campaign didn’t reveal anything more damaging than a low-level staffer’s OMG observation that in an election year in her conservative state, McCaskill was downplaying her support for gun control and her support from former President Barack Obama.

Were there any Missourians paying any attention at all who needed Project Veritas to tell them that? And are there any who think an NDA would deter an O’Keefe?

Presidential campaigns have made volunteers sign NDAs, too, but as The Star has reported, neither Bollier’s Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall, nor any other top-tier candidate in the region is requiring volunteers to do that.

A Kansas Statehouse intern made to sign such an agreement told The Star two years ago that doing so “made me feel like there was like some very dark politics.”

Sure there are. But is it really necessary to highlight that grim reality to a young (or not-so-young) idealist signing up to work for the common good? Our growing lack of faith in one another inevitably leads to more of the same.