Free Mahmoud Khalil

DHS agents broke into the home of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil and detained him without charges. Khalil holds a Green Card for permanent residency; the Trump Administration is evidently trying to revoke it and deport him.

I have contributed ^$18 to support him and his legal defense. I encourage all people of consicence to make contributions if you can. I encourage making contributions in multiples of ^$18, exercising Jewish custom as a sign of solidarity, even if one is a gentile.

Team Trump are after Khalil because he is a Palestinian involved in organizing anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. They are violating due process in several ways, including that they stonewalled habeas corpus until that got too much attention. I have seen no credible argument that he violated any law.

I am not an Israel hardliner. When I call moves in support of Palestinian liberation antisemitic I extend a lot of grace to people who have just not thought through the implications of what they say. I remind y’all of that to contextualize that Khalil has said things about Israel-Palestine which I find repulsively antisemitic.

That is not a deterrent to my donation to his defense; it is one of the reasons why I consider it important. The Trump administration’s attempt to deport Khalil is a wedge to create openings for arbitrary deportation. To truly stand for liberal democracy — the universality of rights, for due process, for limits to state power — we must fight for them on the behalf of the people we like the least.

More commentaries

On Truth Social, the President said:

Following my previously signed Executive Orders, 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. 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, you 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. Thank you!

Journalist Jeff Sharlet reads that post closely:

Trump celebrating an illegal detention by name tells us a great deal.

1. This wasn’t overreach; it’s the plan.
2. Fact that Khalil is legal resident w/ no evident Hamas sympathies isn’t a glitch; it’s the point.
3. Gaza protesters are means to an end; real target is higher ed.

I know there are going to be good people who have a hard time with that 3^rd point. But after a few decades on the rightwing beat, I can tell you Gaza protesters are, to fascists, only the latest excuse. Trump not only doesn’t care about fighting antisemitism, real or imagined; he’s stoking it.

Journalist Josh Marshall underlines:

Those who know me know I was highly critical of what I saw as some of the rhetorical excesses of the campus protests. Khalil and I wld probably get into a spat immediately. It’s all the more important for people who believe as I do to say clearly, the protections of the law are for everyone.

This is not only outside of our traditions and values. It’s flatly illegal. This is the first step to others, not just green card holders but citizens getting rounded up in the middle of the night. Green cards can be revoked. But only for specific reasons. And only after a judicial process.

If the government has a real arguemnt, tell it to a judge. Trump wants everyone to feel afraid, foes and friends. Their liberty is at his whim. That’s a King not a president. We’re Americans. We’re not slaves or supplicants. Elected officials serve us. We don’t answer to them. We talk back to them.

Blogger Emptywheel describes in detail that it’s not the shameless executive power grab in plain sight, it’s the attempt to retcon it afterwards:

⋯ it appears that the Trump Administration made a shameless power grab without doing their investigative work first. So what we see going forward may be nothing more than an attempt to retcon it, to change their story after the fact to adjust for new facts

[⋯]

There’s that old adage, which seems inoperative since Nixon, that it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. With Trump and under expansive authorities of Article II, it often looks like it’s not the initial power grab that might create legal problems. It’s the attempt to retcon that power grab after it becomes clear the facts were not what Trump or others believed when the Administration took action.

Over and over, Trump 2.0 has taken aggressive steps based off bullshit, much of it coming from Elon or other far right propagandists. And over and over, Trump’s top people keep creating problems for themselves as they try to adjust the (legal) narrative to match their evolving understanding of the facts.

So as we go forward with discussions about Khalil, don’t necessarily assume that legal justifications that the government could have used were yet the legal justifications they may argue going forward.

John Ganz makes similar points:

The details here are very important: agents of the state without charging a crime or presenting a clear legal basis have detained a legal resident and are threatening him with deportation

[⋯]

The state cannot make it up as it goes along. It can’t seize people in the night and invent flimsy pretexts later. And if it does, then we no longer live under the rule of law, we live in a police state.

The Dem establishment and trans liberation

This post lines up the forks in a Bluesky discussion —

Reflecting on California governor Gavin Newsom taking a turn against trans liberation over bullshit about trans atheletes, Jamelle Bouie observes:

The thing about chasing what you think is public opinion is that if and when things turn you will have made a bunch of statements and taken a bunch of stances that you’ll have to disavow. probably a better strategy just to say what you actually believe and stand by it. anyway, this guy sucks.

John Rodgers underlines:

Interracial marriage did not cross 50% approval in the US until 1996, when I was 30 years old. Good political messaging drives opinion, it doesn’t follow it.

Newsom understands this better than almost every other major pol. His early, vigorous support for same-sex marriage — breaking with the Democratic Party by having San Francisco issue marriage licenses when he was mayor — bucked the conventional wisdom and moved public opinion practically overnight. It makes him especially culpable for his betrayal.

Sharp-eyed journalist David Forbes replied with sage wisdom:

I think an underrated part of this is the degree to which anti-trans bigotry is an elite phenomenon across political parties. That comes out in everything from the New York Times’ anti-trans crusade to, well, Newsom’s actions here.

The gentry leans conservative (also why Newsom and Kirk can chat like this). Cis gays in marriages? Outside the far-right they can go with that. But trans rights are driven by a working class movement that threatens some core status quos around gender and identity, so they're frantic to crush it.

I asked about reading trans liberation as a “working class” movement, since I tend to take elites as fearing trans liberation as an elite movement resisted by non-elites. Forbes continued:

In U.S. especially, elites always think they’re more salt of the earth than they are. Also: see painting rural gentry as working class.

Trans liberation gets painted otherwise, but overwhelmingly comes from poor / working class. On the ground a lot of “how dare they talk back to me” reaction from liberal pols.

Those elites viewed marriage as the concession (perhaps with some toothless non-discrimination laws too) so after that the “gay rights” box was checked. On the ground I see a fair amount of queerphobia from liberal pols around any continuing activism and about queers outside the elite.

One local pol (wealthy her entire life) exemplifies this. In private, contemptuous of trans organizing as “baristas with weird hair and pronouns” and felt that support for marriage a decade ago and a proclamation for pride each year was “more than enough.” Newsom’s turn ain’t all that surprising.

I suspect that part of the thing with marriage is how the Dem establishment were blindsided by how quickly popular opinion turned once Newsom broke the ice. Since they thought it would never fly, they have to rationalize that it burned up all the political capital. Of course all of that is animated by their own queerphobia which they do not want to admit to themselves.

After the war, the dishes

There’s a little memoir I read on the internet ages ago. I have tried in vain to find it again. I find myself thinking about it more and more.

The narrator describes how in the 1970s he and his colleagues would go to lunch at a little restaurant near their office, run by a sweet, graying immigrant couple. They had family pictures all over the walls, memories of the Old Country. They loved talking with the customers.

One day, the memoirist goes out to lunch there with the usual crew, plus a guy in his 60s who was visiting their offices. The new guy is surprisingly interested in the family photos. When the owners drop by their table to talk, the new guy asks them some questions about the photos.

Four or five questions in, the sweet old couple are angry. How dare you ask that?

The usual lunch gang are still baffled. What has gone wrong?

The new guy asks, “Will you tell them, or do I have to?”

Two minutes later they are leaving the restaurant, the little old lady screaming at them. “You don’t understand! You were not there! You don’t know what the Jews did to us!”

Ukraine, NATO, and Russia

I have seen a resurgence of a false account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so I have assembled a debunking here. I expect I may add resources over time, if it keeps coming up.

The false thesis goes something like this:

It is wrong for the West (the US & Western Europe) to fault Russia for invading Ukraine. It was a predictable response to Western foolishness & aggessiveness toward Russia.

Given Napoleon in the 19^th century and Hitler in the 20^th, Russians have good reasons to worry about security threats from the West. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, they have said clearly that they would read expansion of NATO toward Russia as an existential threat, so the West promised back in the 1990s not to rouse that concern.

The West betrayed that promise with aggressive expansion of NATO, toward the end of Western troops right on Russia’s border with Ukraine.

Much as the Soviets created a buffer of client states in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, Russia has seized part of eastern Ukraine as a buffer against the West now. Putin is eager to embrace peace with Ukraine, if they simply allow that ethnically-Russian territory to have an independent, Russia-friendly government, but because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi is an instrument of the West’s dangerous betrayal of Russia he refuses.

I dug down the rabbit hole of this argument a couple of years ago. It is deceitful Russian propaganda.

The biggest hole in this thesis is how Ukraine has not joined NATO! That should end the argument right there.

But but but, they say, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was triggered by the security threat presented by a pattern of aggressive NATO expansion pointing to Ukraine eventually joining.

This does not hold water.

Russia invaded Ukraine in the 2020s because the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania which share a border with Russia joined NATO … in ’04? Between then and Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the Russians sent weapons and troops into Ukraine starting in 2014 while the only addition to NATO was North Macedonia ’20, which does not share a border with Russia. The West made no such promise, and the timeline of Western violations of that supposed promise provoking Russia makes no sense.

But but but, they say, there has been talk of Ukraine joining NATO!

True. That results from Ukranian parliament voting to pursue NATO membership at the end of 2014, reversing their prior disinterest.

Aha oho oho, they counter, Ukraine changed their tune because in 2014 the West created the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in order to get a friendly government which would support NATO expansion.

That reading compounds several absurdities.

It ignores the Ukrainian motivation that earlier in 2014, Russia sent weapons and troops into eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea on Ukraine’s southern border.

Yes, Maidan did have Western support, but it was an organic popular movement which did not need the help. Ukrainians have obvious reasons to favor building ties to the (rich & democratic) West over ties to Russia, which is impoverished, ruled by a dictator who denies Ukrainian national legitimacy, and genocided millions of Ukrainians in the 20^th century.

Again, how is the West “pushing” for NATO expansion if a decade after Ukraine made these overtures, it still is not a member? For the last decade, NATO has responded to Ukraine, “yeah, okay, we can offer some support and someday maybe we will let you join”, while some NATO member states remain hesitant over the prospect, since it would commit them to potential war with Russia.

This claim that the West provoked Russia is not just absurd, it is morally repulsive. NATO is not an aggressive alliance, it is a mutual-defense agreement: an attack on one is an attack on all. Sying that Russia had to invade Ukraine to prevent it from joining an alliance which would defending it from invasion is like saying:

“That domestic violence shelter is responsible for provoking Ukraine’s ex-husband to break into her house and beat her again, like he did years ago. They should not have endangered Ukraine by accepting a call to their hotline after he showed up pounding on her door.”

And Zelens’kyi? He refuses “peace” because the only “peace” on offer from Russia is seizure of Ukranian territory with zero security guarantees against further Russian aggression. That is not diplomacy, that is a demand of surrender.

References:

• Russian Disinformation on NATO Expansion and the War in Ukraine (2023) — from a US Army analyst
• Exposing the myth of Western betrayal of Russia over NATO’s eastern enlargement (2022) — a succinct analysis from an expert
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never about NATO expansion (2025) — a short critique of the thesis, with numerous links to supporting resources
• Putin debunks his own propaganda by disarming Russia’s NATO borders (2023) — what it says on the tin
• Russia’s belief in Nato ‘betrayal’ – and why it matters today (2022) — contextualizing the thesis in the historical half-truths it relies upon
• Ex-Nato head says Putin wanted to join alliance early on in his rule (2021) — more on Putin’s frame of mind: “‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’ And [Putin] said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’”
• Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine (2022) — an interview with the most promiment American proponent of the Russian thesis, in which he cannot answer straightforward questions about his argument
• The American Pundits Who Can’t Resist “Westsplaining” Ukraine (2022) — digging into Mearsheimer and other commentators
• Antisemitism in the Oval Office — historian Timothy Snyder contextualizng at instructive length how the White House meeting emerges from antisemitic Russian propaganda about Zelens’kyi

Trump and war

Capturing nested threads from Bluesky. These are quotes, not me. But for what it’s worth, I agree with Hilzoy.

Ian Leslie

The Fight: Notes on the Oval Office Debacle, Plus a Rattle Bag

[⋯]

Second, and relatedly, I get the feeling that many politicians and commentators haven’t quite grasped the strength of Trump’s aversion to war. It’s one of the things that makes him a very unusual president. This is something that crystalized for me in my excellent conversation with Jemima Kelly. As we’ve just seen, Trump is frequently belligernet, aggressive, and angry in person, and instinctively we expect a leader’s personality to align with their attitude to military engagement. But inside the red-faced hawk is a dove, with an almost physical horror of violence.

[⋯]

Trump is as close to a pacifist as we’ve seen in the White House, more dovish than any US president since Carter. He does not seem interested in the exercise of American military power at all, and is openly cynical about America’s motivations for entering into previous conflicts like Iraq. He is bent on shrinking America’s defence spending. In short, Trump’s attitude to American military power is almost indistinguishable from that of, say, Jeremy Corbyn. Given everything else about him, this has been understandably hard for the rest of the world to get their heads around.

Jamelle Bouie

Trump was literally president for four years during which he wildly escalated drone warfare, tried to provoke a war with Iran, and got into dangerous saber-rattling with North Korea. Now, he is threatening to take Greenland and the Panama Canal by force. What is this horseshit?

Why do so many people refuse to grapple with the actually existing Donald Trump!?!?

Judah Grunstein

I think it’s important to distinguish Trump I from what we’re seeing now, but also to tease out where and how Trump I diverged from US militarized foreign policy, and where it didn’t, to understand why some people see him as a “peace” president.

I’ve tried previously, so here goes again.

First, the primary case for Trump I being a warmonger is, as Jamelle Bouie notes, the escalation of the drone war but also the air war against ISIS in Mosul. There was also the initial escalation in Afghanistan.

As I’ve argued in the past, though, these both occurred early in his first term.

And they came in response to demand from the Pentagon on both counts. To my mind, that reflects the way the Department Of Defense tends to roll every inexperienced first-term president to get its wish list early.

That it also satisfied Trump’s penchant for chest-thumping doesn’t necessarily change that.

Later in Trump’s first term, in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Syria, he tried to remove US forces from longstanding deployments. In Syria, he was essentially blocked by the Pentagon from doing so on multiple occasions, and in Afghanistan he was (rightly) criticized for making the rush to the exits that Biden consummated.

I disagree that he tried to start a war with Iran, mainly because on two occasions Trump backed away from one: the airstrike he called back en route after the downed US drone and the decision to deescalate despite US casualties in the Iranian riposte to Soleimani’s assassination.

The Soleimani assassination was certainly reckless, but there, too, I suspect it was pushed by Pompeo and channeled the US military’s longstanding grudge against him, dating back at least to the Iraq occupation and probably further.

Finally, with regard to US alliances, Trump’s hostility to them coded as “restraint” and retrenchment in a way that would in theory reduce US exposure to moral hazard and unintended escalation, even if in practice he didn’t really move the needle much on forward basing or commitments.

Why do I think this is important enough to now on multiple occasions take what is a very unpopular side of a debate no one in the anti-Trump camp (of which I am a part) even wants to have?

For two reasons.

First, Trump targeted legacy wars in ways that he can opportunistically use to portray himself as anti-war. And he targeted US security commitments in ways that allow him to claim he achieved changed behavior of US allies that decades of lectures about freeriding by Bush and Obama had not. So politically, it’s important to recognize that, instead of just reflexively claiming he was a warmonger. Because any US president who really wants a war against a non-nuclear state can get it.

Second, and more importantly, to blame the areas where Trump’s first-term record was bellicose lets the interests behind the militarization of US foreign policy, particularly in the Pentagon, off the hook. And that leaves the militarization of US foreign policy in place.

To be very clear, I think Trump is a bully who now wields the most preponderant military power any individual in the human history ever has. That’s not a good or comforting combination.

I don’t think he’s a pacifist or even anti-war, but neither do I think he’s a warmonger.

We’re all less safe with him in office, especially given his imperialist agenda this time around.

But while Trump is a problem, he is not the only problem with regard to US militarization.

Louis Evans

At the risk of over-simplifying, I think the postwar hegemonic consensus in the US was that the US should fight (only) “Good Wars” — justified by principle and necessity rather than avarice or aggrandizement, restrained in conduct, pursuing a peaceful settlement of self-determination.

This consensus held across parties, across civilian-military, and across both elite and mass sectors, although of course it was interpreted differently in each place.

Proponents of wars went to great length to cast their wars as Good. The primary critical posture was that some war was in fact Bad.

The left wing criticism was that the military establishment systematically misrepresented which wars were Good; the radical critique was that wars are axiomatically Bad.

Donald Trump (and his faction) represent a different position.

Donald Trump is against Good Wars, and in favor of Bad Wars.

He views Goodness as suckerdom. He views Badness as savvy. He is opposed to principle or necessity, and in favor of avarice and aggrandizement. He is against good conduct in wars and in favor of war crimes.

Those who found themselves outside the consensus recognized that Trump, too, was outside.

But they (often) lack imagination as to how many positions are outside the Good Wars consensus, and as to their relative strength.

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“Good” vs. “bad” is a fuzzy, pejorative, polemical, and basilectal choice here, but I do think it actually points to a core element of Trump’s posture. He is, quite self-consciously, a Heel, and he does international relations as a Heel.

Lots of analysis — pro and con! — embed the idea that he is a Face, but he’s not, and he’s not trying to be.

Adding some final thoughts as this reply helped clarify something I’d been struggling to articulate.

The reason Trump can portray himself and be portrayed as “anti-war” is because he opposed the wars the US historically fought and alliances it formed as part of its global role in the liberal order.

So another way of expressing what Louis Evans says here is that Trump rejects the kinds of wars most people associate with the US because he views the global order and the US role in it as a chump’s game.

But he embraced the use of force in cases that transgressed the traditional US role.

Hilzoy

For my part, I think Trump is neither a warmonger nor a pacifist. Those are the wrong axes. He is a person with the emotional maturity of a three year old who has absolutely no idea of what’s at stake in his decisions and is given to temper tantrums.

If you think he’s a warmonger, it’s probably because he likes to threaten people, and does not draw the line at threatening them with military force; and also because he seems to have no clue what that would mean.

If you think he’s a peacemaker, it’s probably because he sometimes says things to that effect, and also because many of the things that we might have responded to with force before are things that simply do not register with him at all.

He does not react to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine not only because he likes Putin and hates Zelensky, but because he just does not see — at all — what’s wrong with what Russia did.

But ‘pro-war’ or ‘pro-peace’ is just not the right way to assess him.