[not_alexb]

Those details are not necessarily his firsthand account of things. I mean, in your own comment you quote something where Williams is posing as something else in order to take someone else down, why should it be any different in the case of providing these details?

[vlovich123]

Because the journalist is claiming to have validated the elements of the story. If the journalist is also lying about that or intentionally helping their source in lying that’s a huge breach of public trust and should be immediately blacklisted from working as such in the future. There are other ways the source could be protected without actually lying about things they’re claiming are true.

[Applejinx]

I don't think that source can really be protected, nor does he expect to be. He's pretty clear on 'I want the militias to know what I did and to live in fear that anybody they trust could be another me, ready to betray them'.

To some extent, the FBI has at least sometimes done just this. It's possible that some new leader like Kash Patel can remove the threat of the FBI infiltrating and betraying militias, but then what about moles infiltrating the FBI once they become effectively the same thing as the militias?

There's a fundamental difference between acting as a law enforcement agency, and acting as a militia seeking to wage secret war on a class of citizens, where if your intent is to STOP various humans from planting bombs etc. you're acting like law enforcement, and if your intent is to plant the bombs you are the militia even if you're wearing a law enforcement name.

This is shown in the struggles of the mole: would've been morally easier for him if he was just looking to rack up a body count. He wanted to protect what he saw as innocents, and so he had to calculate to what extent his infiltration was causing collateral damage, and when he acted on that he fled, cover blown as far as he knew. If he was more interested in just body count he might have been more blase about how things were going.