Editor: Most of us knew the right wasn’t speaking from principle as they hailed the right to free speech and decried the “censoring of conservative voices” on social media. As usual, they meant: “Freedom of speech for me but not for thee.” Now GOP officials are saying Trump can arrest people for protesting.
It became even more apparent when the “free speech absolutist,” Elon Musk, bought Twitter to end censorship and promote our First Amendment right to free speech. That turned out to mean: “The right can say hateful things and use racist slurs, but the left will have their posts hidden under conservatives and if you dare say anything Musk doesn’t like, you’ll be banned or have the blue check (that you paid for!) removed.
The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil didn’t come as too much of a surprise after some of the politicians in Congress and mainstream media kept referring to pro-peace, pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses as “anti-Israel” and “pro-Hamas.” In his first term, Trump wanted to use the military on Black Lives Matter protests and asked if the protesters could be shot. He has always hated protests that don’t align with his beliefs. He recently called the peaceful protests and boycotts of Tesla “illegal.”
Mother Jones has an article out right now about Republicans wanting to arrest protesters:
When Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, he made a solemn pledge.
“After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” he declared. “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”
It hasn’t quite worked out that way.
In the first two months of Trump’s second term, we’ve seen the “immense power of the state” weaponized so often that it’s difficult to keep track. The president and his administration have sought to investigate and punish law firms that represent Trump’s foes, news outlets whose reporting displeases the right, and universities whose policies or curricula Republicans dislike.
In perhaps the most chilling abuse thus far, the administration arrested and is attempting to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a green card-holder and outspoken Palestinian activist who was a graduate student at Columbia University during last year’s protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Khalil has not been accused of any crime. Rather, the administration has made the constitutionally dubious argument that he was legally targeted because Secretary of State Marco Rubio “has reasonable grounds to believe that his presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
In their public comments, Trump’s aides and allies have explained what Rubio’s legalese means in practice: Khalil is being punished because he is an immigrant who participated in protests that Trump doesn’t like. “This is somebody that we’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity,” Troy Edgar, Trump’s deputy Homeland Security secretary, told NPR earlier this month.
Later in the interview, Edgar was asked whether he believes that “any criticism of the government” is “a deportable offense.”
