Hamas! Hamas! Hamas! Hamas!

They’re everywhere, even hiding under your child’s bed.

You can’t yell “Fire” in a crowded theater. You can’t call a cop a pig and not expect consequences. You can’t disseminate untruthful and awful things and not expect to get sued. There are limits to freedom of expression in the land of the free. And there should be, particularly if people are harmed.

But the First Amendment’s freedoms of expression have taken a beating over the years. Our government deported anarchists and antiwar activists during WWI. Local government in San Diego winked when Wobblies were kidnapped and beaten. Academics, entertainers, and intellectuals cowered in fear during the McCarthy hearings.

In addition to scrubbing words and phrases from government publications and programs it’s now a bad thing in government circles to even exist as a Palestinian. The term is being treated as an obscenity.

Here’s President Trump, reacting to the Senate Minority Leader saying words (probably voting no on a continuing budget resolution) that displeased him:

• Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I'm concerned. He's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian.

I guess “motherfucking sonofabitch” wasn’t strong enough, so “Palestinian” was the President’s choice of epithets.

Mahmoud Khalil was snatched off his front porch at graduate housing at Columbia University, held incommunicado, and whisked off to a jurisdiction where judges don’t like his “type.”

Khalil is a legal permanent resident of the United States. That status should mean there is credible evidence of wrongdoing if the government wants him deported. He is not now, nor has he ever been charged with a crime.

He has been a prominent Palestinian activist, and helped lead protests at Columbia University over the Israel-Hamas war last spring. Students were urging the university to cut financial and educational ties with Israel in the wake of widespread and deadly retribution against a population thought to harbor those responsible for a horrific terrorist attack.

Khalil was picked up on orders from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The White House responded to inquiries by saying Khalil had participated in activities “aligned to Hamas,” with no further details or specific accusations.

Officials have justified Khalil’s arrest using vague provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, giving the administration the right to deport “an alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

A federal judge in New York has ordered the government to keep Khalil in the U.S. and refrain from deportation until it can resolve the issues in his case. Protests against his arrest have sprung up nationwide.

A lot of people assumed the worst about the Palestinian. Videos of Khalil as a protest leader were shared with commentary saying the images and audio were proof of his connection to terrorists. Anybody who actually viewed the frames saw nothing of the sort, other than language accusing the university of negotiating in bad faith and expressing the belief that genocide was occurring in Gaza. Oh, and there were images of a pamphlet on Hamas laying on a table during a protest.

Posts made on Instagram by another person ranting about destroying western civilization are wrongly being attributed to Khalil. The funny-not funny thing is expressing that sentiment falls within the confines of Freedom of Speech, unless there was a provable means or intent to act on it.

And that sort of accusation is at the root of the problem. Call it by any name you choose, but living in Gaza was hell on earth. People protesting the military actions were automatically labeled anti semitic, even though many Jewish students organized and participated in protests.

Then there are questions about what the government will do to Palestinian students who are deported. Is Khalil a stateless person? If they deport him, where will they deport him to? Palestine? He is a Palestinian born in Syria and Palestinians are not granted citizenship in Syria. Certainly Israel would never have him. So, Gitmo?

I’d just like to note that if Mahmoud Khalil is arrested for being antisemitic he'd be the first person so charged in American history.

Jordan Zakarin at Progress Report just returned from Amsterdam, where he toured the Anne Frank House and absorbed just how terrible life under Nazis was for her family. He wrote The American Gestapo Won’t Spare Anybody upon learning of the arrest at Columbia.

• The situation is ostensibly complicated by the fact that he was protesting an Israeli war, which as Trump’s triumphant post indicates, has been classified as antisemitism by those who support the war. And there were many Democrats who helped to make this happen by visiting Columbia to protest the protestors, repeatedly condemning them on broadcast television, and playing into this trap.

• Just the Beginning

• As a Jewish person, you’re taught to maintain an all-consuming vigilance against antisemitism, to understand that the past is prologue, that historic persecutions promise future attacks. For many, that fear has turned into a whatever-it-takes approach to defending against any and all threats, real or perceived. It has codified the belief that Israel is capable of no wrongdoing and that its critics are automatically bigots.

• And now, according to some prominent voices, including the Anti-Defamation League, it also means that protesting — exercising the right to free speech — is enough to warrant arrest and deportation.

President Trump weighed in on Monday, declaring:

• “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. ... If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children ... you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.”

More than 60 American colleges and universities are under investigation by whatever’s left of the Department of Education.

UC San Diego is one of those institutions accused by the Trump administration of allowing "relentless" antisemitic harassment and discrimination to disrupt campus life. President Trump is threatening to pull federal funding from schools that fail to protect Jewish students and allow "illegal protests" on campus, likely directed at pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

The Justice Department has also launched an investigation into the University of California to assess whether campuses have allowed "an antisemitic hostile work environment to exist" amid pro-Palestinian protests.

The question with free speech and anti semitic harassment is who gets to define those things and what level of alleged antisemitism or “anti-American activity” warrants arrest and deportation. A number of prominent Trump allies have made antisemitic comments, for instance, and Trump himself has trafficked in antisemitic tropes.

The charge of “anti-American activity” is even broader and could seemingly include merely criticizing the federal government. I’m guessing this definition could include the “illegal” boycott of Tesla. Trump did promise to prosecute anti-Tesla activists as “terrorists” on Tuesday.

Going beyond the issues raised by the snatching of Mahmoud Khalil, we’ve already been told he’s the first of many. It came out in court today that he’s been denied the right to have a private conversation with his lawyer.

The precedent being established here can swiftly be expanded. How about eco-disruptions?

The U.S. media are increasingly being threatened via Trump libel lawsuits, the Los Angeles Times publisher using AI to rate the “fairness” of content, and by the likes of Jeff Bezos currying favor.

Elected Democrats that should be raising hell over this are mostly silent, afraid of being called pro-terrorist, or worse, a Palestinian.

This sort of self-censorship is being all too common on a wide range of issues, including suppression of reporting on the bigger picture of what tech-billionaires aspire to once the government has been hollowed out.

Meta (Facebook, etc) recently got caught restricting the visibility of journalist Gil Duran’s coverage of Elon Musk’s government takeover, preventing users from accessing and distributing the article.

Memo: Capture of U.S. Critical Infrastructure by Neoreactionaries, details how a group of anonymous researchers explained Elon Musk’s “stunning takeover of the U.S. government” and how such a takeover is in line with Silicon Valley’s broader goals of establishing a “Network State.”

Via Taylor Lorenz:

• The Network State movement is a well-funded effort by Silicon Valley billionaires, including Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman, that seeks to create tech-controlled governments around the world. It’s a new, corporation-driven model of government, which does not function according to the laws of the U.S. or other nations. Instead of a government, citizens are controlled by a corporation, which can evade regulations, democracy, and laws.

• Duran reports that Musk, who once declared, "government is the ultimate corporation,” is seeking to advance the Network State initiative through DOGE. “One way to establish a Network State is to build your own country somewhere and work with a host government to get rights to create sovereign territories,” Duran explained. “The other way to do it is to take over an existing government, which is what we see Elon Musk doing in Washington.”

***

It doesn’t matter if I disagree or agree with the cause of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. I agree with their right to say (peacefully & legally) that our government is funding military actions we all should find repugnant, and to try to bring that to the attention of the American people.

Re-reading the previous sentence makes me realize that I do, in fact, agree with at least the premise of these student protesters–who are not all foreign students, by the way. Not supporting Israel’s military response should not be equated with being pro-Hamas, but that is what is happening..

Let’s face the facts. We as a people have been getting our chain yanked by people yelling the word terrorist ever since our domestic warmongers ran out of communists to bleat about.

Turning Gaza into a Trump resort is one of the most abhorrent things I’ve ever heard. The people who’ve occupied that land should be granted the right to live in peace, free from fear of the IDF soldiers who hate them and Hamas leaders who also hate them.

Meanwhile, the far righties at the Heritage Foundation were probably also impacted by the detention of Khalili. They were all set to release a report this week, according to the Jewish Insider, calling for ending U.S. aid to Israel. I’m guessing the timing wasn’t right.

• “The Heritage Foundation has composed a new proposal calling for the U.S. to cut off aid to Israel by 2047 and require the Jewish state to increase its purchasing of U.S. defense materials … It was set to announce the report at an event on Wednesday, which has since been canceled.”

A great chill is passing through the country. Organizations at all levels are engaging in self-censorship to protect themselves from government retribution. “Illegal” DEI programs, materials referencing LGBTQA+ humans, climate change, and vaccines are all triggers for an administration intent on rewriting history and suppressing diversity.

Trump is seeking to unilaterally gut the law that forgives student loans to graduates who go on to perform public service at nonprofits or other organizations by denying forgiveness to anyone who works in a field that promotes DEI, pro-Palestine positions, immigrant rights or acknowledges transgender people.

It’s as if an elected president has decided to shred the First Amendment. (He has.) If you believe in free speech, the time to stand up is now. Most of us would agree that Hamas is evil, but we should have learned after 9/11 that expanding anger against one group always leads to no good.

Trump’s FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups by Malcolm Ferguson at The New Republic

• The FBI is moving to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration.

• Citibank revealed in a court filing Wednesday that it was told to freeze the groups’ bank accounts at the FBI’s request. The reason? The FBI alleges that the groups are involved in “possible criminal violations,” including “conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

• “The FBI has told Citibank that recipients of EPA climate grants are being considered as potentially liable for fraud. That is, the Trump administration wants to criminalize work on climate science and impacts,” the @capitolhunters account wrote Wednesday on X. “An incoming administration not only cancels federal grants but declares recipients as criminals. All these grantees applied under government calls FOR ENVIRONMENTAL WORK, were reviewed and accepted. Trump wants to jail them.“

***

US Border Agents Are Seizing Way More Eggs Than Fentanyl by Luis Prada at Vice News

• According to the report, since October border officers have seized 3,768 poultry-related products compared to only 352 fentanyl seizures across all US borders. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to let up anytime soon. Egg prices are expected to rise by as much as 41.1 percent through 2025.

• If you’re looking for someone to blame, you might want to put your political affiliations aside for a second because politics doesn’t have much to do with it. Those late-season hurricanes from the end of 2024 disrupted bird migratory patterns, diverting some birds carrying the virus into areas with chicken farms that they normally wouldn’t have visited.

• But, if you’re just itching to blame some political entity for it, blame all of them for not doing enough about climate change, which is making hurricanes stronger and much more unpredictable.

***

FTC can’t afford to fight Amazon’s allegedly deceptive sign-ups after DOGE cuts by Ashley Balanger at Ars Technica

• At a Zoom status hearing on Wednesday, the FTC officially asked US District Judge John Chun to delay the trial. According to the FTC's attorney, Jonathan Cohen, the agency needs two months to prepare beyond the September 22 start date, blaming recent "staffing and budgetary shortfalls" stemming from the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), CNBC reported.

• "We have lost employees in the agency, in our division, and on our case team," Cohen said, explaining that "there is an extremely severe resource shortfall in terms of money and personnel," Bloomberg reported. Cuts are apparently so bad, Cohen told Chun that the FTC is stuck with a $1 cap on any government credit card charges and "may not be able to purchase the transcript from Wednesday’s hearing," Bloomberg reported.

• Further threatening to scramble the agency's trial preparation, the FTC anticipates that downsizing may require a move to another office "unexpectedly," Cohen told Chun.