Does the Constitution still exist?

Free Mahmoud Khalil

Luke O'Neil

11 Mar 2025 • 18 min read

A nice reader named Dave in Iowa has purchased three subscriptions for anyone who has wanted to get one but hasn't been able to. Reply if you'd like one. Thank you to Dave. If you happen to be rich feel free to do the same. For anyone else your support with a subscription is always appreciated.

This is it. I know that sounds hyperbolic – or perhaps naïve depending on how far down the slide you think we are at this point – but this is in fact the turning point. The detention and disappearance and planned deportation of Columbia student and legal resident Mahmoud Khalil for invented charges at the order of the president will determine the near future and perhaps entire future of this country. Are we or are we not a country of law anymore? Does the Constitution still exist?

I've been sort of reticent to write much the past week because I feel like my response to those questions is too pessimistic:

lol;lmao

Or something like this if I'm feeling metaphorical:

We were already fucking dead. Suspended in mid-air after running off the side of the mountain. Not looking back at the camera. Not even self aware enough to know there was a camera in the first place never mind the terrible drop below.

Khalil's removal has been temporarily blocked for now but they promise there will be more of this coming.

As a side note it's so cool that so many of you are still hanging out on this monster's stochastic terrorism machine. No you leaving Twitter isn't going to solve capitalism or fascism but Jesus Christ man.

Serwer there is exactly right. Or as I put it:

Much like Joel S. here I know this is not the worst part of the abuse of Khalil but I can't stop thinking about it.

Complicating matters is that we do this to human beings all the time. Always have done. It's just usually ones who – unlike Khalil – do not have their papers in order. I do not personally give one single fucking shit about a human being's papers but the law is supposed to. I guess we'll find out soon if it still does.

Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe like I said above we were already gone.

Trump is of course magnitudes worse at (almost) everything than any previous administration but it's not like he invented this shit. I thought back to something I wrote about one year ago:

This is one of those moments where I’m overwhelmed and do not feel up to the task of capturing exactly what is happening in words as peaceful college students across the country are being thrown into the carceral grinder by their own administrations for the crime of sitting around and asking for the facilitation of less death but I will tell you one thing which is that we are currently experiencing a period of collective mass hysteria and mass psychosis I haven’t seen since the early 2000s where every lever of power in the so-called American liberal order – from the ostensibly liberal government to the ostensibly liberal media to ostensibly liberal academia – are all laser focused on one single thing: No matter the cost in blood or money, no matter the suffering of innocents, no matter the violations of supposed norms, the state of Israel must be allowed to massacre as many Palestinians as they wish and any effort to forestall that from Boston to Los Angeles to Atlanta to New York City should be met with the full force of the militarized police to “restore the peace.”

This specific slaughter for some reason – and yes I know a number of the reasons – is worth any price we might have to pay at home in terms of dismantling our own Constitutional rights. It’s madness. People have gone mad. Normal people that we all know not just the easily dismissed as "evil" ones.

And this:

This is the one story of the world right now. Yes the U.S. election is important (and I still hope Trump loses) and yes climate change is an existential threat. But if we cannot pressure our government to do something as easy as just fucking stop arming and funding a genocide then what hope is there that they will ever do anything much more difficult down the line? (Killing people is easy as I said and saving them is hard). What hope is there that when the climate does finally take an even worse turn that this sort of wanton indifference to human life isn't how we'll start treating everyone? First at the border and then everywhere inside the country. Imperial wars always come home after all. If we can do all of this killing (with zero benefit to our country or our people by the way) then something like Palestine awaits us all in the near future.

Under Biden we already abrogated our own freedom of speech to support the slaughter of Palestine. For nothing. Even cynically speaking there was nothing to be gained. We just surrendered to death.

If you believe in God and the Devil – and many Americans do! – how could Gaza have not been seen as one last at bat for the American experiment? To see if we deserve to keep it or not.

We obviously flunked and are now receiving our ironic punishment.

Sorry. See what I meant about being too pessimistic.

Read this statement from Writers Against the War on Gaza and in particular this call to action today for people at universities around the country.

At 12pm on Tuesday, March 11th, National Students for Justice in Palestine calls on the widest swath of organizations, formations, and individuals to walk out of class, take over central space on campus, and assert our mass power.

Our message to every university in this country is clear: succumbing to federal pressure by repressing your students will not save you. The state views intellectual and academic freedom as an existential threat to the ruling class and their political structure. Columbia University may be the testing ground for these repressive methods, but rest assured, they will be deployed against every college and university if there is no unified resistance from the campus community.

All we have left at this point is our numbers. Trump and his people are bullies yes but like all bullies they are also cowards. We can either roll over for them or we can show how many of us there are by engaging our First Amendment right of freedom of peaceful assembly while we still have it.

More reading on the issue.

Spencer Ackerman:

Drop Site News and the Spectator both reported that Khalil's detention followed days of Zionist social-media agitation, including by Columbia Business School Professor Shai Davidai, urging the Trump administration to specifically detain and deport Khalil. It also follows months of advocacy from administration figures to examine campus protests against Israel for the potential of deporting participants, as well as Friday's decision to revoke $400 million federal funding for Columbia for not sufficiently repressing the anti-genocide protests. [Even after all that, Columbia’s interim president sent an email to staff assuring them she was “committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns.”] Ostensibly, caging Khalil (like the funding cancellation) is meant to protect the safety of Jewish students on campus.

All of this obscures the realities that Jewish students on campus are not in any meaningful danger from protests on behalf of Palestine; and that the government has not charged Khalil himself with committing any act of violence, let alone terrorism.

These are the wages of replacing actual antisemitism, a virulent danger that opens the violent panoply of authoritarian ambitions, with anti-Zionism, a legitimate political perspective relentlessly validated by the behavior of the Israeli state. Shortly after Khalil was arrested, Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen announced that there will be no more electricity entering the Gaza Strip, which will mean that a wastewater treatment plant in Gaza will cease to function, imperiling the ability of Palestinians to access clean water. I hope you can understand the disgust a Jew such as myself feels to see the repression of antisemitism replaced by the repression of anti-Zionism for the purpose of expanding the remit of the Security State to abridge the most basic political freedoms the Constitution allegedly protects.

Jack Mirkinson:

There are many, many, many reasons why the fevered, brutal repression of the Palestine movement from all sectors of the establishment—both public and private—is so loathsome and dangerous. The main reason is that Palestine is a righteous cause and the attacks on the Palestine movement violate basic civil liberties and morality. But Khalil’s detention shows another key reason: that the suppression of the Palestine movement is a perfect test case for the embedding of fascism within our society.

For the past year-and-a-half, universities, politicians of all stripes and at every level of government, key parts of the media, corporate America, and a whole host of other institutions have happily moved heaven and earth to annihilate the Palestine movement, to tarnish its activists as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, and generally to use every authoritarian trick in the book to ensure that, once it’s destroyed, it won’t come back.

This is not only wrong on its face; like all partnerships with fascism, it also opens the door to a broader crackdown on civil society and civil rights. These people won’t stop with Palestine activists. They are trying to create a new legal and political reality in which they can just sweep away anyone who challenges their ideology or their mission. And anyone who supports them—like the disgusting collaborators at the ADL, who issued a statement backing Khalil’s kidnapping, or like Columbia itself, which helped create the ludicrous pretext for Khalil’s detention and which appears less than troubled by everything that’s taken place—will have to answer for what comes next.

Jonathan Katz:

This story should horrify anyone with even a minimal belief in civil liberties. That horror should be heightened when you learn that the only publicly alleged offense committed by the detained man is that he participated in protests against the government and university, including (reportedly) a library sit-in last week. What the Trump administration is counting on is that millions of Americans will lose those deeply rooted instincts when they see that the detained man in question has an Arabic name, that he is of Palestinian descent, and that the protests he participated in were against the government and his university’s support for Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza.

They are counting on that because their goal—overtly stated today by the president—is that the detention of Mahmoud Khalil will be “the first arrest of many to come.” Those, including some purported liberals, who are cheering right now would do well to pay attention to the president’s specific warning: that they are targeting students who engaged in “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity,” a threat that will loom large as other kinds of protests bubble up among an increasingly restive public.

Early returns are not encouraging.

Tom Scocca:

A president who does a thing like this, giving the reasons Trump gave for doing it, is simply not acting as president of the United States. He is inhabiting some other role, a role that is the opposite of preserving, protecting, and defending the constitution, or of taking care that the laws be faithfully executed. Typing the fact out like that may have some value, but it feels like it's of limited use. Impeachment, done immediately, would be the most minor and restrained of appropriate responses to this kind of behavior from someone occupying the White House.

Instead, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries would put out a statement suggesting that Khalil could deserve university discipline, "[t]o the extent his actions were inconsistent with Columbia University policy and created an unacceptable hostile academic environment for Jewish students and others," before saying that "[a]bsent evidence of a crime, such as providing material support for a terrorist organization, the actions undertaken by the Trump administration are wildly inconsistent with the United States Constitution." Columbia University had ordered everyone to hold classes as usual, regardless of anyone's concerns about ICE operating on campus.

Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: What are you calling for? And can you talk about your criticism of the Columbia campus around the issue of the pro-Palestinian protests that took place all last year, how Columbia dealt with it? Ultimately, you have the president, Minouche Shafik, leaving. The president had called in police over and over again.

JOSEPH HOWLEY: Sure. Look, for the last year, a number of my colleagues and I have been trying to make the point to university leadership, to our colleagues that these attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement as somehow inherently antisemitic or the idea that the presence of the solidarity movement poses a threat to all Jewish students on campus are very dangerous lies and bad-faith attacks on higher education that we really should be engaging with as threats rather than as sincere complaints. So, we wrote a letter to former President Shafik last spring, that we published. We’ve written a few other letters and statements since then.

And the point is really this: We know that the political right in this country hates higher education and wants to destroy it or remake it in its own image. We’ve seen this in the public education system in places like Florida and North Carolina. And it’s been very clear to anyone who’s watching since last spring that this issue is being used as a wedge. But now what we can see is that everyone who spent the year pointing to anyone with a keffiyeh and yelling “Hamas!” pointing to anyone with a Palestinian flag and calling them a terrorist, everyone who spent the last year going on the public record and saying that Colombia has some sort of uniform, cultural, widespread problem with antisemitism, has been, you know, loading the gun for the Trump administration to do what they always wanted to do, which is cripple major institutions of learning in this country.

Gaby Del Valle:

It’s not unheard of for ICE to arrest people with green cards; anyone who’s not a US citizen, including lawful permanent residents, can be put into deportation proceedings for violating immigration law. But the onus is on ICE to prove that someone is “deportable.” Since lawful permanent residents have legal status in the US, those who end up in deportation proceedings often get put on ICE’s radar after being charged with certain criminal offenses. Under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, legal immigrants, including those with green cards, can be deported for having been convicted of a vast array of crimes — months or even years after their conviction. But those deportations have to be ordered by an immigration judge; a person’s green card can’t be revoked without due process.

But there are no reports of Khalil having a criminal record, which raises questions about why ICE detained him — and how they found him. (The NYPD did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.) His arrest raises questions about ICE’s surveillance apparatus and the possibility of government overreach.

In the meantime more European tourists are being detained.

The other day I collected a bunch of responses from people about whether or not they would chance visiting the U.S. anymore at this point. Another reply from a reader named Conall:

The timing on this is fucking mad. I’m flying in to NY tomorrow (from Ireland) with my 78-year old socialist, Cuba-fanboy, homelessness campaigner father.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the US, more than the average Irish blow-in maybe. After a year or so working in a bar in Southie in my early twenties (while I was ostensibly “studying” at BC) I packed my bags and spent about 6 months traveling around - South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Nebraska, Montana. “Gone to look for America” or whatever. Anyway, I fell in love with the place.

Thanks to some white European privilege I’ve since been lucky enough to see the world, crossed continents - but America is where I always came back to. LA last summer for a couple weeks. New Orleans the previous winter for a while. Denver before that. But now I’m just not sure anymore. The first Trump term felt different - like that friend of yours who’s seeing a total loser but you know they’ll just disappear into vague memory - a punchline for the future. This term feels like your friend has just told you they’re gonna marry that fucking loser.

The plan was to move back at some point, join the melting pot I guess. Now, not so much. How do I ask my (same-sex) partner to take that on, to take that risk? Like where does this end? Trump might be the symptom but the infection is rooted somewhere deeper.

Anyway I’ll distract myself in NYC for the next 4 days with faded jazz bars and subway rats the size of beagles, but beyond that am I coming back? Nothing booked, for the first time in a long time.

I thought this piece by Gareth Watkins was extraordinary.

There's too many great parts to choose from to quote but here are a handful:

No amount of normalisation and ‘validation’, however, can alter the fact that AI imagery looks like shit. But that, I want to argue, is its main draw to the right. If AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, then they wouldn’t want it. They would be repelled by it.

...

If art is the establishing or breaking of aesthetic rules, then AI art, as practiced by the right, says that there are no rules but the naked exercise of power by an in-group over an out-group. It says that the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it is hurting somebody. That hurt can be direct, targeted at a particular group (like Britain First’s AI propaganda), or it can be directed at art itself, and by extension, anybody who thinks that art can have any kind of value. It can often be playful – in the way that the cruel children of literary cliché play at pulling the wings off flies – and ironised; Musk’s Nazi salute partook of a tradition of ironic-not-ironic appropriation of fascist iconography that winds its way through 4Chan (Musk’s touchpoint) and back into the countercultural far right of the 20^th century.

...

AI is a cruel technology. It replaces workers, devours millions of gallons of water, vomits CO2 into the atmosphere, propagandises exclusively for the worst ideologies, and fills the world with more ugliness and stupidity. Cruelty is the central tenet of right wing ideology. It is at the heart of everything they do. They are now quite willing to lose money or their lives in order to make the world a crueller place, and AI is a part of this – a mad rush to make a machine god that will liberate capital from labour for good. (This is no exaggeration: there is a lineage from OpenAI’s senior management back to the Lesswrong blog, originator of the concept of Roko’s Basilisk.) Moreso even than cryptocurrency, AI is entirely nihilistic, with zero redeeming qualities. It is a blight upon the world, and it will take decades to clear up the mountains of slop it has generated in the past two or three years.

Somewhat relatedly this deconstruction of Joe Rogan and his comedy sycophants was truly something else. I think it might be the first YouTube-ass-YouTube I have ever watched all the way through. Just really well done and brutal.

In other news if you're in New York City this week why not check out a performance by friend of Hell World Athena Anthea. Supporting trans art is still a radical action at this point.

I asked them to explain more about the performance:

I have been in a choreographic process since November ostensibly about babies and beachballs. But it has been about much more than that. We have been delving deep into what it is to decay, what it is to exist as an object and a subject under the force of global capitalism. By engaging in a process of showing up as we are, without strict requirements, without negative consequences for choosing rest, we have been able to bring a radical perspective to examine the light and the dark of society through care and neglect, abundance and scarcity. I have come to know one of the dancers, Kit Hancock, pretty well through this process, and every few weeks for the past few months, they have sent me a voice message where they express that the space I am creating is the one they have always been looking for: one that is process based, where people are not policed, where we get weird and delve into the improvisational process without expectation, and where it is a true collaboration. Receiving these messages makes me happy because that is what I am trying to do. Resisting fascism isn’t something I just do with protest in the streets. It is something I try to bring into every corner of my existence, and engaging in creative process in an anti-fascist mode toward liberation is a way to bring light in the dark. If you are interested in coming to see our show, you can find a button to buy tickets at calmour7.org and you can get a big discount with code hellworld.

A poem and a song for the road.