9 ms·

White House Plans Broad Crackdown on Liberal Groups

41 points by hughw 1y ago

bix6 1y ago
“It is not the job of law enforcement or government agencies to police thought,” 1984 in full effect
- dns_snek 1y ago
  This quote has now been scrubbed from the article. Before: https://archive.is/KIGjp#selection-4705.0-4705.176 https://archive.is/KIGjp#selection-4705.0-4705.176 After: https://archive.is/bimqq#selection-1057.0-1057.114 https://archive.is/bimqq#selection-1057.0-1057.114
bediger4000 1y ago
This is impeachable, will lead to immediate bad places, and ultimately, political violence. Nobody will enjoy the end point.
- quantified 1y ago
  Won't be impeached, though. Won't be prosecuted after the fact, either. There are far more of us than there are of POTUS, SCOTUS and Congress. Not sure why it's so quiet out there.
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    it is quiet because the few that pillage us made us all quiet (social media immensely helped)
  - burnt-resistor 1y ago
    Impeachment and conviction are pipe dreams. Protesting in-person is basically pointless virtue signaling because it lacks effective impact without the sustained and organized effort with specific, reasonable, realistic demands of millions of people bringing the economy to a screeching halt by not working, not buying anything, and impeding commercial transportation. 5-6 weeks and the king would need to abdicate. Also need to go: - PACs, especially AIPAC - Citizens' United - Non-independent state-level gerrymandering - Campaign finance corruption - Financial conflicts of interest, i.e., emoluments, stock trading, and insider disclosure to friends/family Required: - National voting holiday, perhaps combined with the July 4 holiday weekend - Score Then Automatic Runoff (STAR) voting - Mandatory, nationwide option for permanent mail-in ballot - Mandatory sufficient polling stations with sufficient required polling stations per capita, maximum average waiting time, maximum average driving distance, and blockchain transaction voting (not crypto bullshit, just blockchain recording) with a paper record that can be located on the public blockchain that also indicates total number of votes and the contents of all votes. With mail-in ballots, a receipt is sent to the sender similar to in-person voting and so they can prove their vote was counted themselves. Provisional ballots are only for unregistered persons without identity docs who go on a provisional blockchain until the identity verification issue is resolved. - Same day, no-registration-needed voting for any unregistered people with a valid, physical original seal birth certificate or valid passport - Restoration of the Tillman Act (prohibit corporate contributions to political campaigns)
GlickWick 1y ago
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.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > obsession with making it look like I think many of the people involved sincerely believe it.
  - GlickWick 1y ago
    I find that hard to believe after watching the FBI shift the narrative like 6 times in a matter of days. They're just fishing.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      The FBI is not creating a narrative, never mind shifting it. They are trying to explain what currently best fits the evidence. Much of what they said was clearly premature. IIRC they even caught the wrong guy initially and then had to apologize. By "the people involved" I mean those who would propose to make lists of leftist organizations and do whatever unspecified thing NYT is vaguely alluding to.
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
        > They are trying to explain what currently best fits the evidence. This is a narrative. If they got things wrong and had to change their explanation, it is reasonable to describe that as a "shift".
- krapp 1y ago
  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. [0]https://www.wired.com/story/far-right-reactions-charlie-kirk-shooting-civil-war/ https://www.wired.com/story/far-right-reactions-charlie-kirk... [1]https://forward.com/news/768607/horst-wessel-charlie-kirk-nazi/ https://forward.com/news/768607/horst-wessel-charlie-kirk-na...
bix6 1y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20250915194523/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/jd-vance-charlie-kirk-show.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250915194523/https://www.nytim...
tastyface 1y ago
[flagged]
zahlman 1y ago
https://archive.ph/KIGjp https://archive.ph/KIGjp 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. ---- 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.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
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.
- krapp 1y ago
  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.
phendrenad2 1y ago
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.

41 points by hughw 1y ago

bix6 1y ago

“It is not the job of law enforcement or government agencies to police thought,” 1984 in full effect

dns_snek 1y ago
This quote has now been scrubbed from the article. Before: https://archive.is/KIGjp#selection-4705.0-4705.176 https://archive.is/KIGjp#selection-4705.0-4705.176 After: https://archive.is/bimqq#selection-1057.0-1057.114 https://archive.is/bimqq#selection-1057.0-1057.114

bediger4000 1y ago

This is impeachable, will lead to immediate bad places, and ultimately, political violence. Nobody will enjoy the end point.

quantified 1y ago
Won't be impeached, though. Won't be prosecuted after the fact, either. There are far more of us than there are of POTUS, SCOTUS and Congress. Not sure why it's so quiet out there.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  it is quiet because the few that pillage us made us all quiet (social media immensely helped)
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Impeachment and conviction are pipe dreams. Protesting in-person is basically pointless virtue signaling because it lacks effective impact without the sustained and organized effort with specific, reasonable, realistic demands of millions of people bringing the economy to a screeching halt by not working, not buying anything, and impeding commercial transportation. 5-6 weeks and the king would need to abdicate. Also need to go: - PACs, especially AIPAC - Citizens' United - Non-independent state-level gerrymandering - Campaign finance corruption - Financial conflicts of interest, i.e., emoluments, stock trading, and insider disclosure to friends/family Required: - National voting holiday, perhaps combined with the July 4 holiday weekend - Score Then Automatic Runoff (STAR) voting - Mandatory, nationwide option for permanent mail-in ballot - Mandatory sufficient polling stations with sufficient required polling stations per capita, maximum average waiting time, maximum average driving distance, and blockchain transaction voting (not crypto bullshit, just blockchain recording) with a paper record that can be located on the public blockchain that also indicates total number of votes and the contents of all votes. With mail-in ballots, a receipt is sent to the sender similar to in-person voting and so they can prove their vote was counted themselves. Provisional ballots are only for unregistered persons without identity docs who go on a provisional blockchain until the identity verification issue is resolved. - Same day, no-registration-needed voting for any unregistered people with a valid, physical original seal birth certificate or valid passport - Restoration of the Tillman Act (prohibit corporate contributions to political campaigns)

GlickWick 1y ago

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.

zahlman 1y ago
> obsession with making it look like I think many of the people involved sincerely believe it.
- GlickWick 1y ago
  I find that hard to believe after watching the FBI shift the narrative like 6 times in a matter of days. They're just fishing.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    The FBI is not creating a narrative, never mind shifting it. They are trying to explain what currently best fits the evidence. Much of what they said was clearly premature. IIRC they even caught the wrong guy initially and then had to apologize. By "the people involved" I mean those who would propose to make lists of leftist organizations and do whatever unspecified thing NYT is vaguely alluding to.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
      > They are trying to explain what currently best fits the evidence. This is a narrative. If they got things wrong and had to change their explanation, it is reasonable to describe that as a "shift".
krapp 1y ago
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. [0]https://www.wired.com/story/far-right-reactions-charlie-kirk-shooting-civil-war/ https://www.wired.com/story/far-right-reactions-charlie-kirk... [1]https://forward.com/news/768607/horst-wessel-charlie-kirk-nazi/ https://forward.com/news/768607/horst-wessel-charlie-kirk-na...

bix6 1y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20250915194523/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/jd-vance-charlie-kirk-show.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250915194523/https://www.nytim...

tastyface 1y ago

[flagged]

zahlman 1y ago

https://archive.ph/KIGjp https://archive.ph/KIGjp 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. ---- 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.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

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.

krapp 1y ago
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.

phendrenad2 1y ago

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.