As the more ghoulish denizens of the left are actually paying personal prices (for once) for vile comments they made in the wake of the assassination of Turning Point USA founder/conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the New York Times is getting defensive on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times, in a story ostensibly about VP JD Vance guest hosting Kirk’s podcast: “White House Threatens Crackdown on ‘Far Left.’”
They must put “Far Left” in quotes, because they can’t imagine such a claim.
White House correspondents Katie Rogers and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, whose liberal leanings come through in their reporting, complained nonstop that President Donald Trump was overstating left-wing violence while ignoring the right. (NewsBusters could say the same thing about the Times, but in reverse.)
President Trump and his top advisers threatened on Monday to unleash the power of the federal government to punish what they alleged was a left-wing network that funds and incites violence, seizing on Charlie Kirk’s killing to make broad and unsubstantiated claims about their political opponents.
Investigators were still working to identify a motive in the death of Mr. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist who was shot last week in Utah. The Republican governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has said that the suspect had a “leftist ideology” and that he acted alone.
But Mr. Trump and his top allies suggested that the suspect was part of a coordinated movement that was fomenting violence against conservatives, without presenting evidence that such a network existed. America has seen a wave of violence across the political spectrum, targeting Democrats and Republicans.
Mr. Trump, who has downplayed violence from right-wing or other supporters, said that he would like to designate a range of groups, including the loosely affiliated group of far-left anti-fascism activists, known as “antifa,” as domestic terrorists and bring racketeering cases against people funding protests.
The Times, a notorious defender of leftist billionaire activist George Soros, has no interest in exploring the radical organizations that Soros’s Open Society Foundations funded, some of whose protests have devolved into violence.
The president also promised investigations into who was funding and organizing the left, suggesting the violence was somehow coordinated. In recent days, Mr. Trump has renewed calls for prosecutors to file racketeering charges against George Soros, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors. Mr. Trump and his allies have long claimed without evidence that Mr. Soros foments violent protests. (A spokesman for Mr. Soros’s organization, Open Society Foundations, denied the allegations and called the threats “outrageous.”)
The article adopted a permanent defensive, denialist crouch: Whenever Trump blamed the radical left, it felt obliged to deflect the accusation with a reminder that right-wing extremism exists.
Mr. Trump has previously taken steps to mobilize federal law enforcement against his perceived political enemies. In the first term, the Trump administration shifted resources to target the “radical left,” even though law enforcement officials warned about the threat of right-wing extremism.
There was no mention of the previous phrase used by the Times itself: “stochastic terrorism,” one borrowed from left-wing academia, to blame anything bad that happens in America on Republican rhetoric, no matter how tenuous the connection. Meanwhile, we’ve had decades of the left smearing conservatives as “fascists” with tacit consent or open support from the traditional media.
Rogers and Kanno-Youngs treated a reasonable proposal on refusing to use taxpayer money to fund haters as a right-wing disease infecting previously reasonable people.
And Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, a Republican who has drifted further to the right during her time in Washington, pressed the Education Department in a letter on Friday to withhold federal funding from any school that did not “take immediate administrative action” against employees who had celebrated or made light of Mr. Kirk’s death.
In her letter, Ms. Mace — who is currently running in a contested primary for South Carolina governor — decried a rise in political violence in the country but cited only examples in which Republican figures were targeted.
