Extremely against any kind of murder over difference of opinion, but this obsession with making it look like an evil coordinated group was behind this killing is legitimately one of the larger threats to US I've witnessed in my life.
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.
They intend to play a deadly game. And they've been ginning up the specter of a vast and dangerous left-wing conspiracy for a long time. Look at what QAnon's beliefs actually were, and their intersection with Evangelical Christian beliefs about the inherently satanic nature of secular and leftist ideology. Trump was accusing the media of being run by leftists coordinating with the DNC to steal the election from him in 2016. "The Nazis were really leftists","BLM was a leftist terrorist organization burning down entire cities","leftists tried to kill Trump once," etc. They've been laying the foundations for a road that only leads to one place. Hell, they were talking about a "cold civil war" back in the Obama days.
Just look at the reactions from the right and the government after the shooting[0]. Immediate calls for war and violence. The narrative was constructed and deployed everywhere, even on Hacker News - that this is the evil of "the left" [and trans people] on display. I'm not claiming it was a coordinated psyop on the part of the Trump administration or anything - I do believe the right sincerely considers the left to be vermin only wort crushing under their boot - but as many people have pointed out in other contexts, you don't always need a conspiracy, sometimes you just need a confluence of interests.
I only just learned about the "Horst Wessel effect" in relation to this[1] and it's chilling how much history is seeming to repeat itself here. The only question to me is how far Trump administration is able to take this? Simply harassing leftist organizations isn't that unusual - the US has been doing that since the end of World War 2. Right wing militias are going to keep killing "leftists," again, that's just America. I hope this administration just isn't organized enough to take us back to the 1940s instead of just the 1960s or 1950s.
Note that when I say "leftist" I implicitly include LGBTQ people, black people, immigrants, feminists, Jews and a lot of other groups that for some reason are "left coded" to the right. When the Overton Window shifts so far that the Democratic Party are considered Marxist by half the country, "the left" encompasses a hell of a lot of people.
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,”
The US is half a skip and a jump from masked federal agents not just kidnapping and disappearing people without judicial warrants but lining people up who are on their AI-generated list of suspect collaborators and enemies of the state against a wall and summarily executing them. Way, way past claims of "It can't happen here". because it's getting closer each and every day with deviance grooming as the populace, the rich, the media, the police, and the political establishment are sufficiently on-board and gradually shifting their views to tolerate "the new normal". Even Fox News guy openly called for euthanasia of poor street people while his sidekick agreed with him; that's eugenics; on several days later he was forced to make a sorry-not-sorry, perfunctory "apology" because he got too far ahead of his skis / dear leader's plan.
Too many Americans have been indoctrinated into believing tyranny and fascism are impossible in the US because of their "well-armed militia," and that theirs is the only truly free society in the world. It's going to take a lot of hard shocks to break that delusion.
And let's be honest...too many Americans would be perfectly happy if certain demographics were put up against the wall.
I don't see this going anywhere. The calls for violence are coming from the low-levels of these organizations, not from the top. Now, if the case can be made that people at the top have stated that violence is the goal, or they have trained people below them to promote violence, then maybe.
10 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] threadMaking 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.
Just look at the reactions from the right and the government after the shooting[0]. Immediate calls for war and violence. The narrative was constructed and deployed everywhere, even on Hacker News - that this is the evil of "the left" [and trans people] on display. I'm not claiming it was a coordinated psyop on the part of the Trump administration or anything - I do believe the right sincerely considers the left to be vermin only wort crushing under their boot - but as many people have pointed out in other contexts, you don't always need a conspiracy, sometimes you just need a confluence of interests.
I only just learned about the "Horst Wessel effect" in relation to this[1] and it's chilling how much history is seeming to repeat itself here. The only question to me is how far Trump administration is able to take this? Simply harassing leftist organizations isn't that unusual - the US has been doing that since the end of World War 2. Right wing militias are going to keep killing "leftists," again, that's just America. I hope this administration just isn't organized enough to take us back to the 1940s instead of just the 1960s or 1950s.
Note that when I say "leftist" I implicitly include LGBTQ people, black people, immigrants, feminists, Jews and a lot of other groups that for some reason are "left coded" to the right. When the Overton Window shifts so far that the Democratic Party are considered Marxist by half the country, "the left" encompasses a hell of a lot of people.
[0]https://www.wired.com/story/far-right-reactions-charlie-kirk...
[1]https://forward.com/news/768607/horst-wessel-charlie-kirk-na...
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 reinf...
And let's be honest...too many Americans would be perfectly happy if certain demographics were put up against the wall.