Senator Joseph McCarthy and his lieutenant Roy Cohn — who, of course, went on to become a close mentor of Donald Trump. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” - Leviticus 25:10, also inscribed on the Liberty Bell.
For those of us who have been worried about the erosion of free speech and discourse on American campuses, it is hard to think of a more chilling scene than this one, as reported in the NYT:
Days after immigration officers arrested a prominent pro-Palestinian campus activist, administrators at Columbia University gathered students and faculty from the journalism school and issued a warning ... “If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East,” [Stuart Karle, a First Amendment lawyer] told the gathering ... When a Palestinian student objected, the journalism school’s dean, Jelani Cobb, was more direct about the school’s inability to defend international students from federal prosecution. “Nobody can protect you,” Mr. Cobb said. “These are dangerous times.”
It’s important to note that this is not about protection from woke professors or ideologically captured deans. It’s protection from direct surveillance by the federal government. The Trump administration has launched a massive, all-of-government, AI-assisted program called “Catch and Revoke,” which will scan every social media comment and anything online they can use to flush out any noncitizen who might be seen as anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist or anti-Israel or indeed just getting on Marco Rubio’s wrong side.
Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, has not been accused of a crime. And that is the point. A White House official explained: “The allegation here is not that [Khalil] was breaking the law.” A DHS spokesman elaborated to NPR:
“We’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the Secretary of State can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.”
“Pro-Palestinian activity” is the reason. The DHS document citing the law being used against Khalil — and thereby potentially every other noncitizen, including green card holders — has this legal formula:
[T]he Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.
This is “the first arrest of many to come,” says Trump. DHS is already searching dorm rooms.
Note the astonishing breadth of this legal formula. You could, for example, be a Ukrainian exile who furiously opposes the Trump administration’s new policy toward Russia. Under the Rubio standard, if you do not have citizenship, merely expressing your views in a way that jeopardizes US foreign policy interests is now a deportable offense. The Trump administration, unless a court stops them, has effectively removed the First Amendment from tens of millions of inhabitants of this country.
It’s actually worse: if you merely potentially could say such a thing, you can be deported for a pre-crime, or rather pre-noncrime. Every noncitizen in the US now has to watch what they say about foreign policy — or else. You may have just arrived from Putin’s Russia, and are now being told by Trump: don’t think you now have free speech just because you’re in America. The US government is monitoring your every word and can deport you if you say the wrong thing. You have to wait until you’re a citizen to be free.
If the law seems McCarthyite, that’s because it was passed in 1952 and aimed specifically at Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe suspected of communist sympathies. According to historian David Nasaw in The Last Million, “suspected Communists were denied visas while untold numbers of antisemites, Nazi collaborators, and war criminals gained entrance to the United States.” It is one of the sublime ironies of this that the ADL now supports a law that once persecuted Holocaust survivors. Back in 1950s, the ADL called it “the worst kind of legislation, discriminatory and abusive of American concepts and ideals.” Now that the ADL can use the law to go after its foes, it’s fine.
Has the law been used before to revoke visas? Yes, for the deportation of otherwise-protected diplomats who might impede relations with another country. Here’s the single lonely example of a precedent:
The case involved Mario Ruiz Massieu, the former deputy attorney general of Mexico who entered the United States in 1995 on a visa. That year, the U.S. government tried to send him back to Mexico, where he was wanted on money laundering and other charges. The secretary of state at the time, Warren Christopher, said deportation was necessary for foreign policy reasons. Allowing [him] to stay would undermine the U.S. push for judicial reforms in Mexico…
The law has never been used, so far as I have been able to discover, to target noncitizens’ free-speech rights. Take the case of Irish immigrants who, for decades, openly supported a designated terrorist organization, the IRA, and provided the majority of the material support, i.e. most of the money, to kill innocents in an allied country, the UK, which has long been America’s most reliable ally. The Dish hasn’t been able to find a single case where an Irish noncitizen was deported for seriously adversely affecting the foreign policy of the US.
I suspect, in fact, that the Trump administration chose this law precisely to avoid accusing Khalil of an actual crime. All they have to prove now is that they consider him a serious potential impediment to their conduct of foreign policy. And because they fear that a judge might test the reasonableness of that Rubio decision, they swiftly transported Khalil to a notorious jail in Louisiana, a state where a more pliant judge is likelier. For good measure, they prevented him from talking to his lawyers for days — and they still can’t speak privately.
The White House mocked him from their X account: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Take a second to absorb that monstrosity: the glib and spiteful use of a Jewish term for goodbye to a Muslim. And not from some nasty X nutter. From the president who is supposed to represent all of us, but is, in fact, a deranged, bigoted troll.
I’m going to pause now for the unnecessary paragraph that is yet somehow necessary. I despise Hamas for its North Korean-level brainwashing of children, its Nazi-level anti-Semitism, and its barbaric use of women and children as human shields. I have absolutely no time for campus protests that go over the line into intimidation of other students. If crimes have been committed, I have no problem prosecuting. But offensive speech? It’s allowed in America. Handing out fliers? It’s how America began! A campus can (and should) discipline its students; but the federal government intervening to seize a legal resident and trying to deport him for speech — along with a dragnet for finding others to throw out — is an outrage in a free country.
Can the Trump administration win this fight? I suspect they can. Rubio says he intends to deport any noncitizen who merely “supports Hamas” — not materially supports, but just supports Hamas — and not just in the past, but in the future.
But they seem to believe a visa is the same as a green card. JD Vance — who lectured Europeans on free speech online, while his own administration was using AI to police the web for dissent! — said on Fox that a green card holder “doesn’t have an indefinite right to stay in America.” The formal name for a green card is “Legal Permanent Resident”, Mr Vice President, not Legal Provisional Resident. They enter the US in the citizen line. And until now, every applicant for a green card has waited for that moment of relief when it’s finally granted, the knowledge that now you are safe and here for good. It remains one of the best days of my own life. Vance just stripped all of that away from all of us. Probably because, like the rest of these incompetent thugs, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and doesn’t much care.
For the sake of argument, let’s say all this is technically lawful, if obviously a massive stretch. A further question remains: even if it is technically legal, do we want to live in an America that tells any noncitizen that they can obey every law, and commit no errors in their immigration journey, but they are still not safe from deportation if they speak their minds … about Israel? Do we want to tell their American-citizen wives, husbands, and children that they have no right to keep their family intact because of problematic speech?
And let’s not kid ourselves. The reason this is happening is because the government being assailed on American campuses and streets is not any government, and not even the American government, but the government of Israel. It’s part of a much broader campaign to chill criticism of the Jewish state. To give a simple example, the documentary No Other Land about the conflict on the West Bank just won an Oscar for Best Documentary. It has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 100 percent for both critic and audience scores, which damn near never happens. But try and find a place to see it in this country. You can’t stream it; no one will distribute it; the few movie theaters that do show it are brutally punished.
Of course I understand why. Antisemitism is surging on the Trump right — just this week, Joe Rogan had a Churchill-hater and Holocaust-minimizer on his show. It’s endemic on the far left. October 7 was a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. On campus in America, Jews have been harassed, spat on, intimidated, demonized — and the pathetic college deans have caved. I understand the outrage at these grotesque double standards. I truly do.
But there are emotions on the other side too. I am not defending Mahmoud Khalil’s worldview, but I can note that his grandmother was forced to leave her home near Tiberias during the first wave of Zionist ethnic cleansing in 1948; she walked 40 miles to exile, giving birth along the way; and the family lived in tents in a refugee camp in Syria for decades. Now the grandson watches as Israel obliterates Gaza, with thousands of women and children dead, and the US wants to ship all the Gaza Palestinians elsewhere so Jared Kushner can set up some new White Lotuses.
I’m not asking you to agree with Khalil. I am asking you to extend the same empathy to him as you would a Jewish-American traumatized by the surge in hideous antisemitism. I’m asking you to treat him as a human being: flawed, maybe misguided, but human. Not Jewish not Arab but human. I’m not defending Khalil’s rights because I hate Israel. I am defending him because I love America.
And stop changing the subject. The specific charge matters in a country with the rule of law: this case is not about terrorism even if you want it to be; it’s not about crime, even if you think it should be. It’s about a new McCarthyite apparatus to chill free debate on campus, make criticism of Israel legally hazardous to any noncitizen, and render every noncitizen in this country afraid to speak their mind on a vital matter. It is not a hard case. Rubio has made it a very simple one.
As for all those brave center-right defenders of free speech on campus these last few years? Just see if they are condemning this. And if they aren’t, never take them seriously on this subject again.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my talk with Michael Lewis on DOGE’s victims; reader dissents over the Khalil case; listener commentary on several recent episodes; nine notable quotes from the week in news, including three Yglesias Awards; 15 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of a young Ricky Gervais; an alpine window from Canada; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a new subscriber:
I decided to support your work because your piece on the president’s address to Congress was absolutely brilliant. I read a lot about what’s going on — from the Financial Times of London to the WSJ to the NYT — and your piece was one of the best.
Another newcomer:
The Dish has an essential perspective for people of all stripes to hear. I sometimes disagree, as is to be expected, but you have an incredible ability to cut through the nonsense, with wit to spare. Thank you for being a voice for a serious conservatism and a saner world against its many foes.
Back On The Dishcast: Michael Lewis
Michael is the best nonfiction writer in America — and an old friend. He’s the bestselling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, and Flash Boys. He was on the Dishcast four years ago to discuss The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, and his new book is Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service — a collection of essays by Michael and others about the federal workers now under assault by Elon Musk. Michael has a preternatural ability to sense what we want to read about when we want to read about it. This book is no exception.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on DOGE killing effective programs, and the calculated trauma imposed on federal workers. That link also takes you to commentary on our recent episodes with Chris Caldwell on Trump, Ross Douthat on the universe, Sebastian Junger on near-death experiences, and Adam Kirsch on “settler colonialism.” We also hear from readers on the state of liberal democracy, how parents should address their gay or trans kids, and the sexual orientation of Lincoln, with my replies throughout.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nick Denton on China’s inevitable world domination, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins on faith and science, Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza, and the genius filmmaker Mike White. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
We didn’t get much criticism over my response to Trump’s speech last week, but a reader writes:
In the course of your excellent piece, there was one throwaway line which — as an Israeli and student of Zionist history — got my hackles up: “Of course Trump sees Palestinian Arabs the way Jabotinsky did: weak, dispensable, contemptible, deserving of obliteration.”
This is a radical misreading of Jabotinsky — a classical liberal and ardent admirer of America’s Declaration of Independence. He in fact was the Zionist leader who most vocally and explicitly opposed expulsion of the Arabs of Palestine. In his seminal essay, “The Iron Wall,” he argued against trying to appease the Arabs with economic development: “they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter, because they are not a rabble, but a living people.” That’s the very opposite of seeing them as “contemptible”; and he certainly did not view them as deserving of obliteration. His disciple Menachem Begin, as opposition leader, was a strong opponent of the military curfew imposed on Israel’s Arab citizens by socialist Prime Minister David Ben Gurion.
Even highly informed intellectuals in the West with no particular anti-Israel animus (like yourself) have bought into a cartoon version of Israeli politics — with a “good” left and an “evil” right. The reality is that today’s Likud party is as close to Jabotinsky as today’s GOP is to Abe Lincoln; and the divide in Israel today is not really left vs. right, but liberal vs. illiberal.
A lot more dissent can be found in the flurry of posts I wrote this week in Substack Notes on the Khalil case. One reader wrote:
Just think about it. If I as an American citizen go to a country — like Slovenia for instance — and begin protesting their government, then I’m fairly certain that my ability to stay in that country will be called into question, at a bare minimum. Depending on how I conduct myself, which would include my words and actions, then I could very easily see myself being deported from Slovenia due to my behavior as a foreign national in their country. You are expected to have very good behavior when you visit other countries. Not doing so certainly earns you a ticket out the door very quickly. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have the same kind of attitude in the United States.
There is a difference between a tourist and a green card holder who is married to an American citizen, with an American child on the way. And Khalil’s thoughtcrime is not entering America to lambaste America, but to assail a foreign country, Israel. If you entered Slovenia and started slagging off, say, Cambodia, I doubt they’d notice.
As always, please keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the Dem resistance, tariffs, and smoke-free nicotine. Below is one example, followed by two new substacks:
Salomé Sibonex details “a paradox at the heart of human connection: the more we cling, the more we lose.”
In his new substack “Marriage After Equality,” Bryan Dumont makes the case for monogamy.
Sam Quinones is a great reporter, a great Dishcast guest, and now a Substacker — welcome!
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Here’s a colorful note from the super-sleuth in Bethlum (aka Bethlehem, which is about an hour from Philly), who covers public art for the contest every week:
This popped up in my Facebook feed today, so I had to tout it:
The mural is “Folding The Prism” by Jessie Unterhalter, Katey Truhn, and Ryan Strand Greenberg, located at 12th and Spring Garden Streets.
If it weren’t for my husband’s nephew — who does wonderful work for the Philly Streets Dept and promotes all sorts of great street art and city exploration — I wouldn’t be doing this public art “beat” for the VFYW. Shout out to EricInPhilly for all the inspiration. Those of you who might be in Philly should check out EricThePuzzler.com for a great way to experience parts of the city you might not normally see:
My unique puzzle experiences help curious people explore the world using teamwork and observation. They can be ticketed, bookable, or free. They can happen in public, in a business, or online. They almost always have prizes. Join The Puzzle Well to get the latest!
