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dissent
Dissent for a Democratic Revival
If hope is to survive these dark and dangerous times, the scattered majority cannot afford to lose its democratic voice.
Sep 24, 2025
The premise of After Empire: Myth, Rhetoric, and Democratic Revival (which I coauthored with Oscar Giner last year) is that the backlash to the decline of US empire bodes ill for democracy. Indeed, the roots of democracy are being torn up in the name of “Making America Great Again.” Authoritarian rule is ascendant. While not dead yet, collective self-rule in America—whether it is called liberal democracy, electoral democracy, representative democracy, or constitutional democracy—is rapidly disintegrating. The alternative of reviving the nation’s flagging democracy, I want to suggest, must include the practice of deliberative dissent.
One can hope that democracy will bounce back, starting with the 2026 election, eventually to recover its previous status and perhaps even deepen its cultural roots. It is too early not to hope. Already, though, those who would defend democracy are operating on undemocratic terrain. Citizens speak up at the risk of their freedom and livelihood. Intimidation suppresses deliberation. Dissent is rendered unpatriotic. Voting, along with the attack on freedom of speech, is being engineered to prevent free and fair elections. And there is little evidence so far that the party out of power will rally the country’s scattered, fragmented, bullied, and increasingly demoralized majority to turn the tide of authoritarian rule.
If hope is to survive these dark and dangerous times, the scattered majority cannot afford to lose its democratic voice. The spirit of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, of the right to assemble peacefully, to protest, and to hold government accountable is a commitment to deliberation and nonviolent dissent as the lifeblood of democratic citizenship. Confronted with government intimidation and coercion, citizens who would, in the language of the First Amendment, “petition the Government for a redress of grievances” must weigh the consequences of silence relative to the costs of voicing criticism, and they must pragmatically consider whom to address, what to say, and how to say it. When and where to speak are less essential questions in a digital world where nearly anything said can be retrieved, decontextualized, and disciplined.
One can hope that democracy will bounce back...
Democratic dissent is rapidly becoming a fugitive practice. Fugitive democracy, in the late Sheldon Wolin’s terms, is “the best hope for a democratic revival” in exigent circumstances. It is necessarily an episodic intervention “in the service of commonality.” To become a small-d democrat, he maintains, is “to learn how to act collectively” as “democratic citizenries,” which requires going public, thereby helping “to constitute a ‘public’ and an ‘open’ politics.” (Democracy Incorporated, pp. 287, 289-90).
Deliberative democratic dissent (deliberative dissent for short) refers here to a hybrid political discourse that enacts democracy by objecting strongly to a perceived injustice in order to promote public deliberation and hold governing power accountable. It serves as a prompt to consider the reasons for and against a challenged measure, rule, policy, law, practice, or proposal, that is, to open debate and decision-making to public scrutiny, privileging nonviolence and persuasion in support of collective self-rule. The deliberative hybrid of dissent is realized most fully in discursive forms of speaking and writing, such as a speech delivered at a political rally or in a deliberative body, or an editorial or commentary published in a newspaper, magazine, or blog.
As a fugitive act against authoritarian rule, the challenge and the risk of engaging in deliberative democratic dissent necessitates careful consideration of how it is enacted, that is, how to cultivate a public prudently. Mitigating risk—short of eliminating it, for there is always a degree of risk when speaking publicly—is constructive. Speaking not only of democratic principles but in those principled ways contributes to the formation of a public confronting the emergence of an authoritarian juggernaut. Moreover, it advances democratic principles and practices in a manner harder to assail as radical, hateful, unpatriotic, conspiratorial, vengeful, violent, criminal, and otherwise alien.
Speaking of and in democratic terms is a gesture of affirmation, one of the two gestures essential to deliberative dissent. The other essential gesture is one of opposition. A gesture of affirmation locates the argument and its intended audience at a point of shared perception, opinion, attitude, or value. It identifies the speaker with the listener and claims shared convictions. The gesture of opposition locates a point of negation, disagreement, and disapproval resistant to a political or governmental posture, proposal, practice, or policy. The two gestures complement one another to constitute a statement of what one is for and against, consistent with democratic principles.
By way of brief example, both gestures were evident and intertwined when Illinois Governor JB Pritzker spoke out on August 25 against Trump’s developing plan to occupy Chicago with military troops, supposedly to fight crime. The governor’s gesture of opposition and disapproval took various forms. Among them, he insisted “there is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention,” and he then proceeded to elaborate on this point of disagreement with the Trump administration.
Pritzker reinforced the significance of his objection by interweaving a gesture of affirmation grounded in democratic principles that would be violated by a military intervention. The planned action, Pritzker insisted, is an illegal, unconstitutional, un-American invasion of the city for partisan gain. “This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see,” Pritzker warned, “where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored.” The public is asked to stand up for democracy over authoritarianism.
Enacting the double gesture of deliberative dissent is a principled and politically pragmatic way of reconstituting a democratic public. It sets in motion myriad ways of revivifying the nation’s democratic heritage and reframes present struggles in terms of democratic aspirations. It is a corrective to the downward spiral of a discourse of recrimination. It is dissent in a constructive voice, avoiding pitfalls while building a dynamic community that respects diversity, safeguards freedom, upholds equality, privileges the rule of law, seeks justice, conducts free and fair elections, and pursues the common good.
Enacting the double gesture of deliberative dissent is a principled and politically pragmatic way of reconstituting a democratic public.
William Connolly’s Aspirational Fascism (2017) draws on the principles of pluralism and egalitarianism to resist Trump’s endangerment of democracy. A politics of egalitarianism, he argues, is “the best available antidote to aspirational fascism.” Egalitarianism is relational, an engagement that traverses pluralism’s diversity—a diversity that includes working and middle classes, environmentalists, ethnic and racial minorities, and gender and sexual orientation communities among others—by articulating “agonistic respect across intersecting [and interdependent] constituencies” with a “focus on the question of equality.” Developing an egalitarian agenda is necessary “to recapture a [larger segment of a working-class] constituency that has been pulling away from pluralism,” he maintains. Doing so offers the best chance of drawing together disaffected citizenries, for “you cannot secure democratic pluralism unless and until its active supporters also become profoundly committed to reducing significantly class inequalities of income, job security, educational opportunity, retirement prospects, wealth, and conditions of work” (pp. xlii, 86, 97, 99, 105-6). Thus, Connolly develops a detailed agenda that aims to pull together and broaden a coalition of progressives.
Whether or not Connolly’s particular vision of a coalitional agenda gains traction in the current political crisis, it illustrates a process of constructing a positive defense of democracy in democratic terms. One might even ask if, through a similar process, an agenda could be constructed to bring progressives together with moderates on democratic grounds to blunt authoritarianism. In one configuration or another, exercising the democratic voice of deliberative dissent raises the prospect of forming a working coalition of the currently fragmented majority split along multiple fault lines. No one subset of a democratic public can achieve its aims alone, nor can it achieve everything it seeks in coalition with other subsets. But the collective public might advance together in sufficient numbers and on democratic terms in these exigent circumstances under a banner of intersecting interests and in the service of a commonality of citizenries to resist the authoritarian advance. One can hope.
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Colbert's Termination Is a Win for Trump—and the Corporate Assault on Dissent
The conglomerates that dominate our media and our society have one and only one value: profit-maximization.
Jul 19, 2025
When media critic A.J. Liebling wrote in The New Yorker 65 years ago that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” he might have glimpsed a media system dangerously dominated by a small number of companies.
But it’s unlikely he could have foreseen a president as authoritarian as Donald Trump, and media conglomerates eager to capitulate to him.
Thanks to the Paramount conglomerate and its greed-fueled boss, Shari Redstone, the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” will vanish next year. After the Trump administration responds by approving the Paramount merger with Skydance, Redstone will be roughly $2 billion richer than she is today, and Paramount/CBS may become even more Trump-friendly.
Months ago, when I predicted the demise of Colbert or “The Daily Show,” another Paramount property, it sounded paranoid. But now it’s reality. (“The Daily Show” may be next on the chopping block.)
In recent months, we’ve seen one media conglomerate after another offer what amounted to multimillion-dollar bribes to Trump by settling frivolous Trump lawsuits that these companies could not possibly have lost in court.
Last December, the Disney Company paid Trump a thinly-disguised bribe—$15 million to Trump’s future presidential library—to settle a harassment lawsuit against ABC News over a segment mentioning E. Jean Carroll’s victorious case against Trump.
In January, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta made a bribe-like payment of $25 million to Trump to settle a ridiculous lawsuit after the company followed its own well-understood guidelines and suspended Trump from Facebook and Instagram for inciting violence on January 6, 2021 at the Capitol. (Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s 2025 inaugural fund.)
But there was a snag in settlement negotiations between Paramount and Trump over an even more laughable suit he could never win in court. This one concerned how CBS “60 Minutes” had edited an interview with Kamala Harris, a suit that Paramount had called “meritless.”
During negotiations, respected executive producer of “60 Minutes” Bill Owens resigned over Paramount meddling, soon followed by the resignation of the CEO of CBS News. But that wasn’t enough to get the suit settled, and it was far from sufficient to get the Trump administration to approve the Paramount merger. That’s when I worried that Colbert or Jon Stewart would have to be sacrificed to placate the authoritarian-in-chief and get Paramount and Redstone the riches that a merger would bring.
Three weeks ago, Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle the suit, amid rumors of side deals that content would shift at the new Paramount. And now Colbert, one of Trump’s most effective critics, is being shown the door. On Monday’s show, Colbert carried on at length, making fun of what he called Paramount’s “big, fat bribe.”
Colbert is funny.
What’s not funny is that our country’s democratic experiment is on the verge of collapse—and it has less to do with Trump than with the capitulation of corporate liberals and corporate centrist institutions to Trump.
Big universities have capitulated. Big law firms have capitulated. Big media companies have capitulated.
The lesson to be learned from today’s political reality is that big corporate institutions don’t care about democracy or free speech. They will bend the political system toward their own economic benefit—and be complicit with authoritarianism if it keeps getting them wealthier.
The conglomerates that dominate our media and our society have one and only one value: profit-maximization. This was pretty much admitted by Shari Redstone’s late father, Sumner, who built the Viacom (now Paramount) media conglomerate. Sumner Redstone was considered a liberal, a son of Massachusetts who’d been friendly with Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic candidate for president. But Redstone famously endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2004.
As Redstone explained: “I vote for what’s good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom... I don’t want to denigrate Kerry, but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on.”
I know I’m not the only progressive who has survived the Trump years with my sanity intact thanks in large part to TV comedians employed by media conglomerates: Colbert (Paramount), Jon Stewart and team (Paramount), Jimmy Kimmel (Disney), Seth Meyers (Comcast); and the best investigative journalist on mainstream TV, John Oliver (Warner Discovery).
There’s a quote usually attributed—perhaps inaccurately—to George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
I’ve offered a twist on this quote for the Trump era: “In a time of political craziness, keeping one’s sanity is a revolutionary act.”
It’s hard to stay sane without laughter, and the comedians listed above are often uplifting. But just as we’ve moved to independent news outlets out of distrust for corporate news, we’re likely to be looking outside the media conglomerates for our comedy when many a truth is truly spoken in jest.
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'We Need Calls Now!' Republicans Slip Nonprofit Killer Bill Into Tax Package
"If Democrats capitulate to the wanton destruction of crucial civil society institutions, they had better expect civil society to burn them to the ground for that betrayal."
May 13, 2025
House Republicans on Monday quietly revived a proposal that would grant the Trump administration broad authority to crush nonprofits it views as part of the political opposition, from environmental justice organizations to news outlets.
Fight for the Future and other advocacy groups called attention to the measure, which was buried in the final pages of the House Ways and Means Committee's draft reconciliation bill, starting on page 380.
A markup hearing for the legislation is scheduled to take place on Tuesday at 2:30 pm ET.
The proposal would empower the U.S. Treasury Department to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofits deemed material supporters of terrorism, with only a hollow simulacrum of due process for the accused organizations. It is already illegal for nonprofits to provide material support for terrorism.
"The House is about to hand the Trump administration the ability to strip nonprofits of their 501(c)3 status without any reason or recourse. This is a five-alarm fire for nonprofits nationwide," said Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director at Fight for the Future. "If the text of last autumn's H.R. 9495 is passed in the budget, any organization with goals that do not line up with MAGA can be destroyed with a wink from Trump to the Treasury."
The measure passed the Republican-controlled House late last year with the support of more than a dozen Democrats, but it never received a vote in the Senate.
"This terribly thought-out legislation means that under the current administration, every environmental, racial justice, LGBTQ+, gender justice, immigration justice, and—particularly—any anti-genocide organization throughout the country may be on the chopping block," said Holland. "If Democrats capitulate to the wanton destruction of crucial civil society institutions, they had better expect civil society to burn them to the ground for that betrayal."
WE NEED CALLS NOW! HR 9495, now known as Section 112209, if passed, would give the Trump administration unprecedented power in suppressing nonprofits, by allowing the administration the power to strip organizations of their tax exempt status! Call 319-313-7674
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— Fight for the Future (@fightforthefuture.org) May 12, 2025 at 7:53 PM
The GOP's renewed push for what opponents have called the "nonprofit killer bill" comes as the Trump administration wages war on nonprofit organizations, threatening to strip them of their tax-exempt status as part of a sweeping attack on the president's political opponents.
"In the months since inauguration, Trump and his Cabinet have found other means of cracking down on political speech—particularly speech in favor of Palestinians—by deporting student activists and revoking hundreds of student visas. He has already threatened to attempt to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, part of his larger quest to discipline and punish colleges," journalist Noah Hurowitz wrote for The Intercept late Monday.
"But the nonprofit clause of the tax bill would give the president wider power to go after organizations that stand in his way," Hurowitz added.
Robert McCaw, government affairs director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Monday that "this provision is the latest in a growing wave of legislative attacks on constitutional rights."
"CAIR is urging every member of the Ways and Means Committee to VOTE NO on the inclusion of this provision and to support an expected amendment to strike the language," the group said in a statement. "Three Democratic members of the committee—Reps. Brad Schneider (Ill.), Tom Suozzi (N.Y.), and Jimmy Panetta (Calif.)—previously voted in favor of the Nonprofit Killer Bill on the House floor last year. They must reverse course and vote to oppose it in committee."
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Mahmoud Khalil Rips Columbia University's Complicity in Trump Rampage
"The logic used by the federal government to target myself and my peers is a direct extension of Columbia's repression playbook concerning Palestine."
Apr 07, 2025
In an op-ed dictated to his attorney from a detention facility in Louisiana, Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil late last week condemned the Ivy League institution's complicity in the Trump administration's targeting of Palestinian rights advocates and campus dissent more broadly.
Khalil, who has said he is a political prisoner, argued in the Friday op-ed that Columbia "laid the groundwork for my abduction" last month by U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents. The Trump administration's detention of and effort to deport Khalil—who helped lead student protests against Israel's assault on Gaza—have sparked widespread alarm and backlash, much of it directed at Columbia.
"The logic used by the federal government to target myself and my peers is a direct extension of Columbia's repression playbook concerning Palestine," Khalil wrote, pointing to the recent arrests of other international students who have spoken out in support of Palestinian rights.
Writing in the university's daily student newspaper, Khalil noted that "Columbia has suppressed student dissent under the auspices of combating antisemitism," an approach also taken by the Trump administration, which said the arrest of Khalil was carried out in alignment with the president's "executive orders prohibiting antisemitism."
"This institution's singular concern has always been the vitality of its financial profile, not the safety of Jewish students. This is why Columbia was all too happy to embrace a superficial progressive agenda while still disregarding Palestine, and this is why it will soon turn on you, too," he warned. "If there was any illusion left, it shattered last week when the board of trustees executed a historic maneuver to seize direct control of the presidency. Cutting out their middleman, the board appointed fellow trustee Claire Shipman to a position reserved for academic leadership. Who can still pretend this is an educational institution and not the 'Vichy on the Hudson'?"
"Faced with a movement for divestment they couldn't crush, your trustees opted to set fire to the institution they're entrusted with," Khalil continued. "It is incumbent upon each of you to reclaim the university and join the student movement to carry forward the work of the past year."
Khalil and his legal team are currently fighting the Trump administration's effort to remove him from the country. Earlier this month, a second federal judge rejected the Trump administration's request to transfer Khalil's case to Louisiana, a demand that civil liberties advocates decried as a ploy to "manipulate federal court jurisdiction" in order to receive a favorable ruling.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union—which is representing Khalil—stressed in an NBC News op-ed last week that Khalil "has never been accused, charged, or convicted of any crime."
"The Trump administration is sending a message to everyone in America: If you dare to disagree with the president, you will be punished," Lieberman wrote, alluding to a fight over federal funding. "Columbia was just the first target. Harvard and Princeton are now in danger of similar treatment. This is a full-scale attack on the system of free inquiry, discussion, and debate that is at the core of higher education, which is so crucial to the strength of our democracy."
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From Vietnam to Today: Lessons in Resistance for the Trump Era
More than ever before, Americans of conscience are being forced to answer the question: What does it mean to be a responsible citizen?
Apr 06, 2025
The return of Donald Trump to the presidency is revealing itself to be a time of significant national division and turmoil. He is pursuing policies that reflect international bellicosity and a frightening dedication to xenophobia, misogyny, and intolerance. I take him seriously when he promises retribution and punishment of his “enemies.”
More than ever before, Americans of conscience are being forced to answer the question: What does it mean to be a responsible citizen?
Throughout our national history, Americans have had to come to grips with national leaders bent on suppressing dissent, punishing those who disagree, and harnessing the power of government to enact legislation designed to restrict freedom and diminish equality. Citizens who find the moral courage to dissent, must ask themselves about the cost—professional, social, or personal—they are willing to pay. We know from bitter experience that silence in the face of evil aids the oppressor and neutrality often disguises indifference.
I had to redefine manhood, patriotism, duty, obligation, courage, honor—even when my definitions were bound to run up against opposition.
At its core, moral courage is the ability to stand up against wrong. Bayard Rustin said that moral courage happens when we speak truth to power, when we directly confront wrong, aware that our decision may result in harm to our personal well-being. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. exhorted us to act with principle. He said that the time is always right to do right. And Susan B. Anthony comforted those who felt that the fight may be endless: “Failure is impossible.”
Quiet moral courage may be invisible to many, unnoticed by louder voices, stridently demanding a stage for their protest. Moral courage does not belong exclusively to those with advanced degrees. As Bob Dylan noted, “You don’t need to be a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows.” At its best, moral courage is an act of selfless love.. a caring for community and an affirmation of the possibilities of a kinder, more compassionate world.
In my recently published memoir, 90: A Conscientious Objector’s Journey of Quiet Resistance, I try to describe how the moral courage I expressed personally ricocheted in larger arenas. Some 50 years ago, I had to face the prospect of fighting in a war I felt was morally repugnant. Resistance to a terribly misguided national policy meant alienating family members and facing the fact that refusing military service would be disgraceful to my recently deceased, beloved father. Then, as now, our nation was in a state of upheaval; the dislocations of the Vietnam War swirled in the tumultuous eddies of the civil rights movement and the emergence of a rebellious counterculture.
I was only 20 when the United States introduced a lottery to determine who would be called to don the uniform of our military. I drew 90, a number that placed me squarely in the crosshairs of being drafted. Naïve, traumatized by the recent death of my father, and idealistic, I made the decision to resist the war as a conscientious objector. I had little hope of gaining this status, as I didn’t belong to a religious sect that opposed all war and my draft board was in San Diego, California—a notoriously conservative, pro-war city. More and more, I became convinced that I would go to jail if the board rejected my application. This terrified me, despite knowing that scores of brave Americans have chosen prison as a means of expressing dissent.
Where did I find the moral courage to join some 170,000 other men who filed for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam era? I remembered my soft-spoken father whose example told me to never back down when faced with issues of right or wrong. I recalled my grandmother Rose, who fled czarist persecution to find meaning in an America that would welcome all comers, especially the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” I sat in awe-struck admiration of the men, women, and children of the civil rights movement who sacrificed even their lives for the ideals that America ought to represent.
I had to redefine manhood, patriotism, duty, obligation, courage, honor—even when my definitions were bound to run up against opposition. Somehow, I had to summon the strength to follow Henry David Thoreau’s model when he stopped paying taxes and was thrown in jail to protest slavery and an immoral, expansionist war that would expand that evil. He demanded, well over a century and a half ago, “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”
I became a CO and learned to live with the consequences of that act of quiet resistance. For two years, in lieu of serving in the military, I worked as a laboratory glassware washer at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital.
My decision to protest an unjust war derailed my dreams of a career in the law but opened my eyes to other possibilities for honoring my need to serve America.
More importantly, the most crucial lesson I learned was that a good American needs to obey the dictates of conscience rather than blindly follow the demands of their government.
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'This Felt Like a Kidnapping Because It Was': Family of Mahmoud Khalil Releases Arrest Video
Khalil's wife said that "officers in plain clothes—who refused to show us a warrant, speak with our attorney, or even tell us their names—forced my husband into an unmarked car and took him away from me."
Mar 14, 2025
The family of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States now at risk of deportation because he helped lead pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University last spring, on Friday released a video of his recent arrest by U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents in New York City, which has sparked legal battles and protests.
"You're watching the most terrifying moment of my life," Khalil's wife, Noor, said in a statement about the two-minute video. "This felt like a kidnapping because it was: Officers in plain clothes—who refused to show us a warrant, speak with our attorney, or even tell us their names—forced my husband into an unmarked car and took him away from me."
"Everyone should be alarmed and urgently calling for the freedom of Mahmoud and all other students under attack for their advocacy for Palestinian human rights."
"They threatened to take me too, even though we were calm and fully cooperating. For the next 38 hours after this video, neither I or our lawyers knew where Mahmoud was being held. Now, he's over 1,000 miles from home, still being wrongfully detained by U.S. immigration," said Noor, whose husband is detained at a facility in Jena, Louisiana.
Noor, who is eight months pregnant, noted that "Mahmoud has repeatedly warned of growing threats from Columbia University and the U.S. government unjustly targeting students who want to see an end to Israel's genocide in Gaza. Now, the Trump administration and DHS are targeting him, and other students too."
"Mahmoud is clearly the first of many to be illegally repressed for their speech in support of Palestinian rights," she added. "Everyone should be alarmed and urgently calling for the freedom of Mahmoud and all other students under attack for their advocacy for Palestinian human rights."
Khalil, who finished his graduate studies at Columbia in December, is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent. He was living in the United States with a green card until his arrest on Saturday. In response to a filing by his legal team—which includes Amy Greer from Dratel & Lewis, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project—a judge has temporarily blocked his deportation.
The ACLU and its New York arm have joined Khalil's legal team, and his attorneys filed an amended petition and complaint on Thursday. NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman said that with the new "filing, we are making it crystal clear that no president can arrest, detain, or deport anyone for disagreeing with the government. The Trump administration has selectively targeted Mr. Khalil, a student, husband, and father-to-be who has not been accused of a single crime, to send a message of just how far they will go to crack down on dissent."
"But we at the NYCLU and ACLU won't stand for it—under the Constitution, the Trump administration has no basis to continue this cruel weaponization of Mr. Khalil's life," Lieberman added. "The court must release Mr. Khalil immediately and let him go home to his family in New York, where he belongs. Ideas are not illegal, and dissent is not grounds for deportation."
Samah Sisay of CCR reiterated those messages as the arrest video circulated on Friday, saying that "Mr. Khalil was taken by plainclothes DHS agents in front of his pregnant wife without any legal justification. Mr. Khalil must be freed because the government cannot use these coercive tactics to unlawfully suppress his First Amendment protected speech in support of Palestinian rights."
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Make No Mistake, Trump Is Turning the US Into a Police State
The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil is a blatant attack on the civil liberties without which there can be no meaningful democracy for anyone. Our dark days are getting darker by the moment.
Mar 12, 2025
“America, this republic, this democracy in which we are, is a living thing which cannot be contemplated or categorized, like the image of a thing I can make . . . . It is not and never will be perfect because the standard of perfection does not apply here. Dissent belongs to this living matter as much as consent does. The limitations on dissent are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and no one else. If you ‘try to make America more American’ . . . you can only destroy it. Your methods, finally, are the justified methods of the police, and only the police.” —Hannah Arendt, “The Ex-Communists,” Commonweal (March 20, 1953).
Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish immigrant, wrote the above words at the high point of McCarthyism in 1950’s America. It took courage for her to publish these words. For, as her biographer, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, reports: “The attorney general of the democracy in which she was living had made a speech three days earlier in which he announced that 10,000 citizens were being investigated for denaturalization and 12,000 aliens for deportation as ‘subversives.”
Indeed Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blucher, was a former communist who was especially vulnerable to the threats of the Attorney General, Albert Brownell. As Blucher himself had written in a letter to Arendt about Brownell’s revival of the harsh McCarran-Walters Act: “The acceptance without opposition of the dreadful new immigration bill has demoralized the best people here, so much so that the forces of the Left, which never really were put in motion, are stunned . . . It seems that one can now deprive someone of citizenship with a simple denunciation . . . And how soon these ‘Born American’ people could become a Master Race.”
That was then, and this is now.
Last weekend, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) arrested Khalil Mahmoud, a Columbia University graduate student, living in campus housing, who has been one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement on campus. Mahmoud is a Palestinian who was born in Syria, who has been in the U.S. on a student visa, is currently holding a green card, and is married to a U.S. citizen. There is no evidence that he has ever engaged in a violent act. He was apparently arrested in accordance with the Trump Executive Order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” signed on January 29, 2025, and also in connection with the recently announced State Department “catch and revoke” policy, which employs AI tools to locate, detain, and deport international students considered to be pro-Palestinian and thus, by definition, “anti-Semitic.”
This is not about Hamas or Palestine or Israel or antisemitism. It is about the crackdown on dissent. Period.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly acknowledged the action, announcing that “we will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” [It must be noted that a U.S. federal judge has just ordered a temporary halt to Mahmoud’s deportation. But it must be noted only parenthetically, because the halt is only temporary, and Mahmoud remains in ICE custody, and if there is any domain where the Trump administration can be relied upon to stick to its metaphorical—and actual—guns, it is this one.]
The arrest of Khalil is a major escalation in a “New Campus McCarthyism” that has beset U.S. higher education for at least the past two years. It follows hard on the Trump administration’s cancellation of over $400 million in Columbia University grants and contracts, and preceded by one day Tuesday’s announcement that the U.S. Department of Education has sent letters to 60 universities “under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment.”
At the same time, what we are now experiencing is more than an attack on academic freedom and university autonomy. It is nothing less than a wholesale assault on constitutional democracy itself, by an authoritarian administration determined to “Make America Great Again,” the Constitution, and democracy, be damned. The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil is a blatant attack on the civil liberties without which there can be no meaningful democracy for anyone. As columnist Michelle Goldberg put it in the New York Times, “This is The Greatest Threat to Free Speech Since the Red Scare.”
That this arrest and the policy behind it is being justified by this administration–with its Nazi-saluting “DOGE” head and neo-Nazi supporting Vice President and “fine people on both sides” President–as a defense of Jews is beyond cynical. And that many Jewish leaders apparently support this arrest is simply deplorable. For Trump clearly has no real interest in either Jews or Arabs, and is quite content to disrespect the former while trolling the latter, as he did on Elon Musk’s X, posting “Shalom, Mahmoud” above a caption that read: “ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of @Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come.” Trump followed up with an even more threatening Truth Social post:
We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country – never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.
But even more ominous was a statement Trump posted last week:
All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
This is not about Hamas or Palestine or Israel or antisemitism.
It is about the crackdown on dissent. Period. Foreign “agitators,” American “agitators,” it makes no difference.
And while it involves the Education Department’s financial intimidation and punishment of universities, it also involves the coercive power of the federal government—through Homeland Security, Justice, and even Defense—to arrest those among us, regardless of their citizenship status, who engage in “anti-American” behavior as defined by Donald Trump, in other words, those who oppose what Trump is doing.
This should surprise no one. For Trump promised exactly this, in pretty much every speech he gave on the 2023-24 campaign trail, but never more directly that in his too-easily forgotten 2023 Veteran’s Day Speech:
We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream. . . the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.
Trump is now doing what he promised. And all too many Americans are either excited that he is doing so or merely blasé about their president’s proud decision to literally take a torch to the U.S. Constitution.
Martin Niemöller’s famous saying has been quoted so many times that it is a veritable cliché. All the same, the sentiment it expressed is as true now as it ever was, and it is especially appropriate to note that it is featured on the website of the U.S. Holocaust Museum:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The arrest of Khalil Mahmoud is an offense to every citizen of the United States, and it sets a precedent that endangers us all.
Trump is turning the United States into a police state.
Are the tattered and tarnished instrumentalities of democracy still at our disposal sufficient to prevent him from succeeding? And if we do not exercise them now, how much longer will they even persist?
Our dark time is getting darker by the day.
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Experts Warn Cybercrime Treaty Gives Governments New Powers to Crush Dissent
"States should not ratify this treaty," said Deborah Brown of Human Rights Watch.
Dec 30, 2024
A technology expert at Human Rights Watch on Monday urged countries not to ratify a first-of-its-kind cybercrime treaty that the United Nations General Assembly adopted without a vote last week, warning that the measure would give governments additional powers with which to crack down on journalists, whistleblowers, and peaceful protesters.
Deborah Brown, HRW's deputy director of technology, rights, and investigations, said that the Convention Against Cybercrime "extends far beyond addressing cybercrime—malicious attacks on computer networks, systems, and data."
"It obligates states to establish broad electronic surveillance powers to investigate and cooperate on a wide range of crimes, including those that don't involve information and communication systems. And it does so without adequate human rights safeguards," Brown warned, noting that "years of heated negotiations" produced a "deeply problematic outcome" backed by the United States and other major governments that had previously expressed opposition.
Brown explained that the newly adopted convention—which is set to take effect 90 days after 40 nations ratify it—"will obligate governments to collect electronic evidence and share it with foreign authorities for any 'serious crime,' defined as an offense punishable by at least four years of imprisonment under domestic law."
"Many governments treat activities protected by international human rights law as serious offenses, such as criticism of the government, peaceful protest, same-sex relationships, investigative journalism, and whistleblowing," Brown wrote. "Additionally, the convention could be misused to criminalize the conduct of children in certain consensual relationships as well as the ordinary activities of security researchers and journalists."
"The U.N. Cybercrime Convention is excessively broad and introduces significant legal uncertainty."
The U.N. General Assembly's adoption of the treaty last week brought to an end a five-year negotiation process during which civil society organizations voiced deep concerns about the emerging document.
In October, a coalition of groups including HRW, Amnesty International, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation urged the U.N. General Assembly to oppose the treaty, warning that its adoption and ratification would undermine "democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, endangering a wide range of communities and jeopardizing the safety and privacy of Internet users globally."
"The U.N. Cybercrime Convention is excessively broad and introduces significant legal uncertainty," the coalition said. "It provides for states to leverage highly intrusive domestic and cross-border surveillance powers for the purpose of a broadly defined list of criminal offenses which bear only a minimal nexus to information and communications technology systems and go far beyond the scope of core cyber-dependent crimes."
The groups pointed specifically to Article 23 of the convention, which they said mandates "the collection of e-evidence on a wide range of crimes, even those that don't involve information and communication systems." Such a requirement, the coalition warned, could easily be "misused by governments to stifle dissent."
Brown echoed that concern on Monday and argued that the human rights safeguards embedded in the treaty are limited and "many are optional."
"Others lack any means of enforcement, which provides no confidence that international human rights standards will prevail over abusive state practices," Brown added. "States should not ratify this treaty and those that do should take significant measures through domestic law and negotiations over the protocol to ensure it will be implemented in a way that respects human rights in practice, not just on paper."
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Journalists, Dissenters Targets of Egypt's Draconian 'Anti-Terror' Law
President Abdel Fattah al Sisi, who already rules by decree, further tightens grip on power with sweeping new legislation
Aug 17, 2015
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday officially signed into law sweeping new "anti-terrorism" legislation that dramatically expands his powers to impose the death penalty, crackdown on dissent, and stamp out journalism that the government deems to be "false."
The law was passed over widespread opposition, including protests from the Egyptian Press Syndicate, whose members say the legislation threatens what's left of free media in the country. Al Sisi, who already rules by decree amid a suspended parliament, fast-tracked the rule following the late-June killing of state prosecutor Hisham Barakat in a car bombing and a subsequent wave of violence in the North Sinai Peninsula.
The legislation allows authorities to impose the death penalty for anyone the government deems to be leading a "terrorist" group and increases the power of officials to arrest and interrogate suspects. It also buffers Egyptian authorities, including soldiers and police officers, from legal consequences for using force.
One article gives the president the authority, pending approval from the non-active parliament, to impose curfews and isolation on areas of the country for up to six months.
The law also bans journalists from providing information about militant attacks that diverge from the government account, under penalty of steep fines. In addition, while not mentioning journalism, the rule allows the courts to "prevent the convicted from practicing the profession for no more than one year if the crime violates the profession's principles."
At least 18 journalists are already incarcerated in Egypt on charges that include "broadcasting false information," according to Amnesty International.
The rule follows another law passed in February that grants the government broad powers to break up protests. It comes amid an escalating crisis of government killings, torture, and jailing of its critics. Friday was the second anniversary of a massacre in Cairo's Rabaa al-Adawiya Square in which Egyptian security forces killed up to 1,000 sit-in protesters. Al Sisi was in charge of the army at the time, and no one has been held accountable for the mass killing.
"One of the key reasons the Egyptian people took to the streets in 2011 was to abolish the 30-year-long state of emergency imposed by Hosni Mubarak," declared Said Boumedouha, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Amnesty International, in a statement released ahead of the legislation's passage. "Granting the current President similar absolute powers is a deadly blow to human rights in Egypt."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently pledged that Egypt's human rights abuses will not get in the way of increased aid, arms, and military "cooperation."
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