The New York Times has been on a front-page bender about Trump curtailing speech, when they never could muster outrage about squelching Team Biden and their 57 censorship initiatives.
On Friday's Page One came a 2,400-word article by editor-at-large Matthew Purdy and Alan Feuer:
How Trump Has Cracked Down On Dissent Since the Killing of Charlie Kirk
The White House has labeled critics terrorists, attributed violence to a left-wing conspiracy and investigated unions, nonprofits and other groups in a battle over free speech.
Yes, after years of crackdowns on free expression and speech, both online and in the street, including double standards on protests and masking during COVID, with dissent from the conventional hysteria on vaccination, masking, and the lab leak theory labeled disinformation and squelched online, people being fired for criticizing Black Lives Matter or George Floyd, the Times has woken in 2026 to discover threats to dissent...from the right.
Purdy and Feuer used Kirk’s murder as a starting point, skipping over the leftist assassin and the resulting glee displayed by leftists online in the wake of Kirk’s murder, to somehow finger Trump as the overarching threat to America:
The very public murder of Charlie Kirk on a Utah campus last September sent convulsions of grief through the political right. Within days, the Trump administration began transforming the slain prophet of young conservatives from a martyr to a cause.
….
….a year later, it is clear how bright a line of demarcation the period after Mr. Kirk’s death has become in the efforts by President Trump and his allies to target Americans they see as “the enemy within.”
The administration’s nearly exclusive crackdown on left-leaning organizations and activities has ushered in a pitched battle over political dissent and free speech.
Just perhaps, considering the murder of Kirk and the howls of approval from the left (similar to the celebration of the murder of United Healthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in 2024), a federal crackdown on left-wing violence has become necessary?
Officials have taken a governmentwide approach to scrutinizing citizens and organizations opposed to Trump policies. Tax agents have examined nonprofit groups. Investigators have looked into the books of labor unions. Prosecutors have brought charges against anti-ICE protesters, asserting that a leftist conspiracy is provoking political violence on the streets.
The Times aggressively prodded the Obama Administration to investigate GOP fundraising and the Tea Party. But now, federal enforcement of law is sinister overkill.
From the start of his second term, Mr. Trump has wielded power to punish those he views as opponents, including law firms, universities, pro-Palestinian activists and news outlets, three of which he banned last week from the White House. But after the Kirk killing and assassination attempts on the president, Mr. Trump and his allies have recast the effort in existential terms.
American politics has been reshaped by belligerent, sometimes threatening, language on all sides and by heightened security concerns, underscored by the murders of Mr. Kirk and a Democratic lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota. While Mr. Trump’s allies say the left’s accusatory language encourages violence, demonizing on the right filters down from the Oval Office. In July, Mr. Miller described participants in “antifa protests” as “deformed in some way — in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”
Within days of the Kirk murder, Vice President JD Vance called for the punishment of anyone “celebrating” the shooting. Hundreds of people who criticized Mr. Kirk’s politics online lost or were threatened with losing their jobs.
This happened by the score after the summer of 2020, with no defense of “dissent” from the Times to condemn anti-mask dissenters while keeping schools and businesses shuttered, or people (many not even conservatives) getting fired or pushed out of positions for insufficient reverence of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The paper let lawyer Jenin Younes mildly chide President Biden’s Covid-era “free speech violations,” regarding so-called Covid misinformation, but insisted Trump is far worse.
“But you can’t compare that to bringing criminal charges, expelling people from universities, putting them behind bars and trying to deport them, ” said Ms. Younes, who now heads the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “The chilling effect of what the current administration has done is so much more severe.”
Why not? Those expelled "students" include the likes of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate who led protest that suppressed the rights of Jewish students trying to get an education during the 2024 campus protests and encampments in support of Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel, including charming slogans like “Yes Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets too” and “We say justice you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” and were physically harassed and attacked. Good riddance.
