Free Speech
Only 1,389 days to go...
“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.”
~Martin Niemöller, Lutheran Pastor in Nazi Germany
On February 19,1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the military to exclude any person from designated military areas, leading to the internment of Japanese Americans. The United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country. About two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens.
My dad told us a story about a classmate of his, who was a Japanese American. His family owned a small business in town. His classmate was even the president of the student council at Billings High School. Dad said that one day, the family just disappeared. Nobody really knew what happened — until after the war.
One can sort of understand the fear and the subsequent draconian actions after our country’s naval fleet had just been bombed and destroyed, which led to the incarceration of innocent American citizens. Although, one can’t help but notice, there were no round-up of German American citizens into concentration camps. Free speech wasn’t really the issue — just ethnicity.
It’s hard to believe that our country’s government would ever do something like that again.
But it is…
And we’re not even at war.
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ~ George Orwell
On Saturday, March 8, former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and his pregnant wife were returning home from dinner when they were confronted by several men in the lobby of their apartment building. The men were ICE agents.
Khalil is a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with any crime. His wife is an American citizen. Yet Trump's ICE operatives handcuffed Khalil, threatened his wife, and dragged him away. The next day, his lawyers couldn't even find where they took him.
The Trump administration acknowledges that Khalil was specifically targeted because of his participation in protests against Israel's war in Gaza. A White House official stated on the record that it's "not that he was breaking the law.” And chillingly, Donald Trump is promising that Khalil's arrest is "the first of many to come."
We don’t yet know all the details. There is a strong argument that Khalil’s actions during the protests were hateful. Among other things, he allegedly handed out fliers bearing the insignia of Hamas, which the United States has designated as a terrorist organization for decades. He served as a key leader of a student movement that engaged in illegal activities, including occupying a Columbia building. It is possible that he himself has committed crimes in the course of his activism, and if this is the case, the government has every right to prosecute him.
But this doesn’t give the government a blank check to punish Khalil for his speech, however distasteful. The First Amendment does not have an exception for hate speech, and for good reason. Free speech has been an instrumental tool for political, racial, and religious minorities facing injustice and discrimination. Hate speech can only be punished if it meets the high bar of imminent incitement to lawless action.
So far, the administration and arresting authorities have not presented evidence showing Khalil’s involvement in any sort of criminal activity. Nor have they alleged that he has incited “imminent lawless action” or provided material support for terrorism. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” an administration official told The Free Press. Source: Free Speech Hypocrites
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." ~Harry S. Truman
Many of the people who are being targeted are not necessarily the most sympathetic people. And I think that’s the point.
Mahmoud Khalil’s Detention Is a Trial Run
Leaders who aspire to absolute power always begin by demonizing groups that lack the political power to resist, and that might be awkward for the political opposition to defend. They say someone is a criminal, and they dare you to defend the rights of criminals. They say someone is a deviant, and they dare you to defend the rights of deviants. They call someone a terrorist, and they dare you to defend the rights of terrorists. And if you believe none of these apply to you, another category might be “traitor,” the label that Trump and his advisers, including the far-right billionaire Elon Musk, like to give to anyone who opposes them.
Trump’s assault on basic First Amendment principles may begin with Khalil, but it will not end with him. Trump’s ultimate target is anyone he finds useful to target. Trump and his advisers simply hope the public is foolish or shortsighted enough to believe that if they are not criminals, or deviants, or terrorists, or foreigners, or traitors, then they have no reason to worry. Eventually no one will have any rights that the state need respect, because the public will have sacrificed them in the name of punishing people it was told did not deserve them.
As of Tuesday, April 1 - Judge rejects Trump administration’s bid to move Mahmoud Khalil’s legal case to Louisiana.
It’s hard to rally people to be concerned about free speech and First Amendment rights, when you may not like the people being arrested. But as Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine said years ago, "If the First Amendment is intended to protect anything, it's intended to protect offensive speech. If you’re not going to offend anyone, you don't need protection."
The First Amendment to our Constitution is is so clear and unambiguous:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Every day this administration is trampling on our rights.
I only wonder where it’s all going to end.
“Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Call to Action
April 5, 2025. Hands Off 2025 Spread the word…
The best books on Free Speech…
Thought for the day in honor of his birthday…
"Can't we all just get along?"
~Rodney King
Must Read Article:
“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.” ~Oscar Wilde
How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left
“What the Woke Right fundamentally don’t understand as they make their bid for power now, and why they’ll lose is that none of us want more ideological crazy stuff. We don’t want another freaking movement. We want to go back to our lives.” The obligation to call people aliens or unlearn the name of a body of water appears every bit as petty as the prohibition on describing boring things as “lame.” More than that, it amounts to a politics of brute domination, a forced and demoralizing expression of subservience that only a genuine fanatic could abide.
Quote of the day:
“The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government. Perhaps it is a universal truth, that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad.”
~James Madison
What I’m reading today…
Susan Crawford defeated Brad Schimel for a State Supreme Court
With turnout extraordinarily high for a spring election in an off year, Judge Susan Crawford handily beat Judge Brad Schimel, who ran on his loyalty to President Trump and was aided by Elon Musk. Musk not only poured money into the race but also campaigned personally in the state, even donning a cheesehead. But his starring role seemed to inflame Democratic anger against him even more than it helped Judge Schimel.
The barrage of spending in the race may nearly double the previous record for a single judicial election. With about 95 percent of the vote counted on Tuesday evening, Judge Crawford held a lead of roughly 9 points.
An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison
The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims. But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody.
How many people are in ICE detention?
There are 122 detainee holding centers nationwide, a quarter of which are in states along the US-Mexico border. The most populated centers include the Adams County Detention Center in Natchez, Mississippi (2,148 average daily detainees in February 2025); the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, Texas (1,666); and the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia (1,559).
Trump Is Deporting ‘Them’ in Ways That Threaten Us
The White House has assured the public that individuals it is deporting or trying to deport are terrible people––vicious criminals or even terrorists. But in many of those cases, it has presented little or no evidence to back up its claims, and appears to be denying due process to contest or disprove them. The administration is also targeting some people for mere speech, which it casts as evidence of terrorist sympathies.
The Kind of Thing Dictators Do
Finding someone whose politics you don’t like and using some flimsy excuse to put him in handcuffs is the kind of thing dictators do. In the United States, we pride ourselves on front-loading our political tests: Once you are a citizen, you can say just about anything you want without government interference, but on your road to naturalization, the government can pull you over for certain speech infractions, such as saying nice things about terrorism or expressing a desire to overthrow the American government. The Trump administration may have had such infractions in mind last weekend, when it detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian Palestinian graduate student with U.S. permanent residency, and said it planned to eject him from the country for leading anti-Israel protests at Columbia University.
Immigrants and Freedom of Speech
While conservatives may feel empowered now, their approach could backfire in the future. Suppose that conservative immigrants — say, Trump-supporting Venezuelans, known as MAGAzuelans — attend a Make America Great Again rally. A Democratic administration could claim that participants of the rally supported an enemy of the United States by, for example, opposing aid to Ukraine. That administration could then try to deport the immigrants for their speech.
This is the slippery slope of exceptions to free speech and other constitutional rights: What counts as a violent act? What is a terrorist group? Who is an enemy of the United States? What does it mean to support them? A president can twist the answers to these questions to fit any agenda and go after people with opposing views, bypassing fundamental rights.
Russian medical researcher at Harvard, who protested the Ukraine war, detained by ICE
A Russian medical researcher at Harvard University is being detained at a Louisiana immigration facility after her visa was revoked last month over undeclared frog embryo samples found in her luggage, her lawyer told NBC News.
Kseniia Petrova has been in the U.S. on a J-1 scholar visa since May 2023, working at Harvard University. Her lawyer, Gregory Romanovsky, said Petrova is fighting the possible deportation back to Russia for fear of persecution and jail time over her protests decrying the Ukraine war.
The Gleeful Cruelty of the White House X Account
In previous administrations (including much of Donald Trump’s first term), the account was used to post anodyne updates, highlight press releases, and share information about the administration. It was, to be fair, often painfully dull or written in the stilted language of a brand. Now the account exists to troll its political enemies and delight the MAGA faithful…Although the account sometimes shares actual news, it’s frequently preoccupied by rapid-response engagement bait for MAGA diehards. Less information, more content. The intent is not to inform but to go viral.
Trump campaigned as a protector of free speech. Critics say his actions as president threaten it
First Amendment advocates say they’ve never seen freedom of speech under attack the way it has been in Trump’s second term. Trump’s Republican administration has threatened Democratic members of Congress with investigation for criticizing conservatives, pulled federal grants that include language it opposes, sanctioned law firms that represent Trump’s political opponents and arrested the organizer of student protests that Trump criticized as “anti-Semitic, anti-American.”
“Your right to say something depends on what the administration thinks of it, which is no free speech at all,” said Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan First Amendment group.
We Study Repression in Turkey. Now We See It Here.
As Americans who follow Turkish politics closely, we have spent the past two decades decrying the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey. We have pointed to repeated crackdowns on free speech, including the regular use of security forces to arrest and intimidate students. So we watched with particular horror as our own government sent masked agents to arrest a Turkish student because of her political opinions.
To anyone who has watched Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in action, all of this was far too familiar. For years the Turkish government has used “support for terrorism” as a sweeping charge to justify jailing its political enemies. Crucially, this support need not involve any action or association with an actual terrorist group. More often than not, it simply involves expressing an opinion critical of Erdoğan or his government.
Sen. Thom Tillis releases death threats. Free speech?
Chris Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University, told the Citizen Times that Tillis may be seeing a larger volume of threats and hate from the public due to his role as a more moderate Republican "deal-maker" in Congress.
"I think he's in the unique position of getting hit from both sides, right?" Cooper said. "Members of Congress today unfortunately receive death threats, but usually they come from one direction. People from the left get them from the right. People from the right get them from the left."
Cooper explained that some of Tillis' recent votes and rhetoric may have angered not only Democrats, but members of his own party, resulting in increased criticism and even threats from both ends of the political spectrum.
A Shock to the GOP From MAGA Country
Republicans might want to take this surprise loss in MAGA country as a warning. Mr. Trump’s tariff threats are whipsawing financial markets and the broader economy. The Conference Board said Tuesday that its survey of consumer confidence showed a drop in March, for the fourth consecutive month. Even voters who like the GOP’s policy agenda could be jolted by the impression of chaos in Washington, plus Mr. Trump’s recent focus on retribution.
The Trump administration has refused to acknowledge the possibility that innocent people are winding up in El Salvador's mega-prison, a legal black hole known for torture and inhumane conditions.
Trump has also abandoned habeas corpus and due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to seize mere suspects off the streets and transport them instantly to a terrifying foreign jail in El Salvador. The law has only been used twice before in wartime, and, ahem, we are not at war. Anyone with brown skin and the wrong kind of tattoo is therefore now at risk of being carted off to torture by the US government, with absolutely no safeguards that they have gotten the right people. Or do you think that an administration that confuses billions with millions, and puts classified intelligence on a Signal app, is incapable of making an error?
The order he signed behind closed doors puts Vice President JD Vance, who serves on the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents, in charge of overseeing efforts to “remove improper ideology” from all areas of the institution, including its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo…
The executive order also hints at the return of statues and monuments of Confederate figures, many of which were taken down or replaced around the country after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which is detested by Trump and other conservatives.
What We Know About the Detentions of Student Protesters
The Trump administration is trying to deport pro-Palestinian students and academics who are legally in the United States, a new front in its clash with elite schools over what it says is their failure to combat antisemitism.
The White House asserts that these moves — many of which involve immigrants with visas and green cards — are necessary because those taken into custody threaten national security. But some legal experts say that the administration is trampling on free speech rights and using lower-level laws to crack down on activism.
Columbia Student Hunted by ICE Sues to Prevent Deportation
A 21-year-old Columbia University student who has lived in the United States since she was a child sued President Trump and other high-ranking administration officials after immigration officials tried to arrest and deport her.
The student, Yunseo Chung, is a legal permanent resident and junior who has participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the school. The Trump administration is arguing that her presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda of halting the spread of antisemitism.
What I am listening to…
What I am watching…
What I read every day…
