That last post's point about the NYT article is one of the reasons I'm trying to encourage looking into what a source says and not just accepting the source at face value because of who it's coming from, when you're talking about something like "links." Because having "links" to a particular group or person can mean anything. It could mean that you're working closely with them on many different things and endorsing their own aims, which is obviously what people who make these claims want you to think it means, but it could also mean one or more of these: 1. you met that person one time and had a reasonably civil conversation with them, possibly in an environment where pointedly ignoring them or loudly ripping them a new asshole wasn't possible, 2. you were close to them before they acquired the beliefs/practices that are so abhorrent, and distanced yourself from them afterward (or just drifted apart for other reasons/no particular reason before they made that shift, as happens sometimes in life), 3. someone gave you money, and you didn't reject it either because you didn't know who they were, or the thing that made them bad was wholly unrelated to why they were giving you money, or why/how they gave it to you wasn't in a way that suggested you were endorsing / influenced by them (a good example of this last one was the way that brocialist douchebag David Sirota tried to slur Beto O'Rourke as "in the pocket of Big Oil" and it turned out that he had received donations from some people who worked for oil companies in lower-level positions, a thing that is true about literally any politician in Texas since that's a famously huge industry in the state; it would be like suggesting a Michigan politician is "in the pocket of the Big Three" because some of the people who gave them money were auto workers. Also, by the same standard, I and anyone else with a graduate degree from my alma mater in Texas is "in the pocket of Big Oil" since it was largely donations from oil barons that have given those universities the resources, programs, etc. that support graduate research), 4. you were both doing something like giving urgent medical care and in that particular moment, you weren't focused on grilling people for what their larger goals or aims were but just on getting that job done. I'm sure y'all can come up with any number of other reasons if you use your imagination and look into specious cases where people tried to draw a "link" between someone or other. There were a ton of cases in the immediate post-9/11 era where individual Muslims were "investigated" for "links to terrorism" that turned out to be shit like "they were in the same room as someone who wrote something that can be interpreted as pro-Al Qaeda / pro-Hezbollah / etc." or "they went to the same mosque as another person, not the imam or other staff member, but another random person in the congregation, who has extremist beliefs or supports an extremist and/or militant organization" (which, if that concerns you and you're a Christian, consider the high likelihood that you've attended at least one church service with at least one person who has financially supported a SPLC-defined hate group like the Family Research Council or Alliance Defending Freedom or whatever). There were soooooo many of these in metro Detroit, with its large Arab-American population, during the 2000s that it was the subject of several prominent local scandals, as well as people just speculating about if a local chain business run by a Lebanese person was shut down for legal reasons it was because of "embezzling to Hezbollah" rather than the typical sort of white-collar crime that all kinds of people who run those kinds of businesses do.
