On its front page Sunday, the New York Times ran a story headlined “As Far-Right Peril Brewed, U.S. Eyed Threats on Left.” The editors, apparently thinking that description insufficiently tendentious, slapped on a sub-head to clarify: “Trump’s Insistence on Danger of Antifa Led Federal Officials to Shift Resources.”
The Times is often in the business of finding problems where none exists, but every so often its reporters and editors stumble upon a real one. Their point here was that the Trump administration devoted time and attention to antifa-led riots and violence while ignoring the threat posed by various far-right groups in the country. The clear implication was that undue obsession with violence from groups he didn’t like resulted in a misallocation of resources that, at best, allowed violence from groups presumably more simpatico with the president to happen or at worse implicitly countenanced it.