Sullivan: The Return Of The McCarthyite Chill

Accurate:

…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 sayshe 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….

Source: The Return Of The McCarthyite Chill