Trump’s Threat to Our Basic Civil Liberties is a Real and Present Danger

Well before Mahmoud Khalil, freedom of speech has always been a site of contest

First, they went after the unionized federal workers, and you said nothing. Then, they came for the undocumented immigrants, and you said nothing. After that they went after the Palestinian activists, and you said nothing. This was followed by threats to the universities advocating unapproved ideas, any protesters the President did not like, and a growing number of others advocating for anything not sanctioned by the new regime, and you said nothing.

Perhaps it veers into cliché to mimic the famous poem about the early days of fascist Germany by Pastor Martin Niemoller, “First They Came”, in reference to current events, though it does seem like the past repeating itself. But we don’t need to reach for Nazi Germany for a quick historical reference when a better one might come straight from the annals of American history.

Back in the spring of last year, at the height of the Gaza protests on college campuses, I wrote a couple pieces on Eugene Debs and the first red scare and cited Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis where he outlines the assault on the civil liberties of radicals from the labor, anti-war, and civil rights movements of the time and observes how blithely much of the American public accepted and even applauded the legal and extralegal repression of those deemed to be sufficiently anti-American by the government.

Thus, last week with the arrest and declaration of the U.S. government’s intention to deport Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, I was drawn back to that comparison as the Trump Administration announced plans to go after activists at 60 universities where there were Gaza protests and use the Department of Education to target funding at those same institutions.

Let’s be clear: you don’t need to agree with a word that Khalil has ever uttered to see this action by the Trump administration for what it is—an attack on free speech, pure and simple. If you believe in the First Amendment, you believe in the right of everyone to protest and say things that you either love or hate. If you don’t think that is correct, then you don’t believe in freedom of speech.

That is why not just civil libertarians and those who support the Palestinian cause have raised their voices but even a good number of Jewish organizations, who may not agree with Khalil’s ideas but believe his arrest is an outrage because it undermines civil rights and liberties like free speech, because as one group put it, “societies with those protections are the only ones in which we, as a tiny minority community, can ever be safe.”

Thus, if the Trump administration succeeds in using the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to deport Khalil, it will have the intended effect of restricting free speech and opening the door to ever more aggressive attempts to attack dissent in whatever form Trump disapproves of, whether it be about foreign or domestic policy. Don’t like Tesla? You’re a domestic terrorist. Support DEI or want to research climate change? You are a target for the budget axe. Think that academic freedom is crucial for scholars and educators to question the world we live in or teach critical thinking? Then you’ve been ensnared by leftist ideology. The list is growing by the day, and every time we shrug it off, the administration and Trump’s allies are further emboldened.

What we need now is courage.

In 2022, Adam Hochschild argued in the conclusion of American Midnight that not returning to the dark days of the first Red Scare will require bolder activism and an enduring, deep commitment to democratic principles rather than cautious political calculation:

To keep these dark forces from overwhelming American society once again will require a lot from us. Knowledge of our history, for one thing, so we can better see the danger signals and the first drumbeats of demagoguery. Brave men and women both inside and outside the government, like those who spoke the truth and stuck to their principles more than one hundred years ago. A more equitable distribution of wealth, so that there will not be tens of millions of people economically losing ground and looking for scapegoats to blame. A mass media far less craven toward those in power than it was in 1917-21. And above all, a vigilant respect for civil rights and constitutional safeguards, to save ourselves from ever slipping back into the darkness again.

Free speech and political liberty in the United States have never been things we can take for granted, nor have they ever been given to us freely by the power elite who have all-to-frequently been happy to protect the minority of the opulent against the tyranny of the majority by any means necessary. It is encouraging to see the emerging signs of protest and people beginning to stand up against the onslaught from the right. We need to keep fueling that fire, one act of defiance at a time, until it starts burning bright enough to help us see a way out of the darkness.