White House Plans Broad Crackdown on Liberal Groups

Making this event into an excuse to crack down on any kind of group opens a door that nobody, left or right, should ever want open. JD and co. are playing a deadly game here.

1984 in full effect

There are many things about this article that lead me to dismiss the argument it's making.

The title element for the page differs: "On Charlie Kirk Show, JD Vance Talks of Crackdown on Liberal Groups - The New York Times". That "the White House plans" this does not logically follow, so the changed headline distorts the story.

TFA spends many paragraphs arguing e.g. that "Trump administration officials... seiz[ed] on the killing to make broad and unsubstantiated claims about their political opponents." and that "Mr. Vance and Mr. Miller spoke in vague and menacing terms about far-left groups that they said facilitated violence."; but they don't give any concrete indication of what these supposedly "unsubstantiated claims" were or how they expressed "menace", so it's impossible for the reader to evaluate NYT's characterization fairly.

TFA claims that a "broad crackdown" is "planned", but the authors do not evidence that any specific action is planned to be taken beyond:

> The goal, they said, was to categorize left-wing activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism, an escalation that critics said could lay the groundwork for crushing anti-conservative dissent more broadly.... An administration official said officials would be investigating people behind the recent burning of Teslas and assaults against immigration agents, and would be looking to draw links between those episodes and organized liberal groups.

(The categorization "as domestic terrorism" could potentially make sense in some cases, depending on the facts of course.)

Having a goal is not the same thing as having a plan, and it is only the critics who even hypothesize that there could be any "crushing" of "dissent". Similarly, they claim that there is a "[threat] to bring the weight of the federal government down", but this is neither specified nor substantiated.

Similarly, there is no indication of what "liberal groups" are supposedly going to be targeted; and that phrase didn't come from the officials anyway. The officials, rather, apparently refer to "what they called leftist nongovernmental organizations.", which is not the same thing. Reasonable people who knew which "groups" Vance had in mind might reasonably disagree with NYT about whether they are "liberal"; but we lack this information.

TFA also claims:

> The White House and President Trump’s allies suggested that he was part of a coordinated movement that was fomenting violence against conservatives — without presenting evidence that such a network existed.

but it only describes this as a suggestion (which therefore doesn't require evidence, only investigation) — while really not doing any more in itself than "suggesting".

TFA even claims that

> [Trump] appeared to excuse violence on the right by saying that it was driven by people who “don’t want to see crime.”

But without any context, I have no reason to believe that the "appearance of excusing violence" is a reasonable interpretation. Having just spent so much time explaining the "many fine people" debacle, I am not exactly disposed to take a mainstream media source such as NYT at face value here. Many mainstream media sources flagrantly misrepresented that video and showed decontextualized excerpts; it took years to get fact-checkers to represent the story fairly, and even now I can find outlets like The New Republic openly asking why Snopes would "sanitize" things by showing everything that Trump said and interpreting it in the natural way.

And then the article concludes with a pull quote from someone supporting their narrative:

> “It is not the job of law enforcement or government agencies to police thought,”

This is included in order to reinforce the impression that they have established an intent on the part of Trump's government to "police thought". But they have not actually done so.

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In short, all of this is fear-mongering and no concrete basis is presented. If it is indeed the case that

> Some of the highest-ranking officials in the federal government used Mr. Kirk’s podcast, “The Charlie Kirk Show,” to lay out their plans.

and that the officials indeed laid out what can be reasonably be called plans to do something harmful, then NYT owes it to their readers to show this with proper, contextualized citations. But what we are looking at right now is an editorial responding to something that isn't being shown to us.