U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media before departing for a state visit to Britain, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 16, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
On Tuesday, September 16, prosecutors announced that Tyler Robinson — the 22-year-old suspect in the fatal shooting of MAGA activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk — is being charged with aggravated murder and said they will seek the death penalty.
The New York Times' Michael Barbaro discussed the case with reporters Jack Healy and Kenneth P. Vogel in a podcast posted on September 17. While Healy talked about the suspect's possible motives, Vogel got into what Barbaro described as a "rational for cracking down on left-wing groups across the country."
Vogel noted recent comments by Vice President JD Vance and White House adviser Stephen Miller calling for a crackdown on left-wing groups.
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The Times reporter told Barbaro, "Miller (made) a really impassioned proclamation about how he and the federal government was going to use every resource at their disposal to go after and disrupt and dismantle and destroy these networks that he says, on the left, are making America unsafe."
When Barbaro asked Vogel if there is "a sense" of "which groups specifically" Vance and Miller "are referring to," Vogel responded, "I think there are a number of groups that could probably fit into this category based on my conversations with people around the White House, around Trump's orbit."
"Two organizations specifically have come up," Vogel told Barbaro. "One of them is Open Society Foundations, and that's George Soros' philanthropic organization. And the other is the Ford Foundation. Now, they don't really do programming of their own. So, what seems to be at issue here is the organizations that they fund and what those organizations, in turn, are doing."
When Barbaro asked Vogel what groups Open Society and the Ford Foundation fund, the Times reporter explained, "Open Society, for instance — and, I believe, the Ford Foundation — were big funders of sort of racial justice groups around the Black Lives Matter movement. And some of those groups clearly were involved in organizing protests."
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Vogel continued, "And it is theoretically possible that at some of the protests where some of these groups were involved in the organization, there may have been vandalism or violence…. But for people around the White House, it's really about what they think of as a broader network of liberal nonprofit groups and firms that administer them that they believe are stoking violence through really extreme rhetoric and polarization. And they attribute to these groups other seemingly disconnected acts of vandalism."
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Listen to the full New York Times podcast at this link (subscription required).