The Brooklyn Rail

Palestinian political prisoner Mahmoud Khalil dictated a letter to his lawyers over the phone from an ICE detention center in Louisiana on March 18. It read in part:

If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change—leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.

The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.

Khalili also called out Columbia University for their complicity and double-dealing:

While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns—based on racism and disinformation—to go unchecked.

Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration’s latest threats.¹

On March 21, Columbia’s trustees conceded to Trump’s demands in light of his threat to withhold $400 million in federal funds from the university. They agreed to hire a whole new internal security force with arrest powers, ban the wearing of masks on campus, restructure their Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department, and adopt Trump’s “formal definition of antisemitism,” including “certain double standards applied to Israel.” Basically, Columbia bowed to all of Trump’s demands.

Dr. Sheldon Pollock, retired former chair of Columbia’s Middle Eastern Studies department, told the New York Times, “This is a shameful day in the history of Columbia,” that will “endanger academic freedom, faculty governance, and the excellence of the American university system.”²

The Trump administration has also threatened Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and dozens of other schools with similar penalties and federal inquiries. How many of them will follow Columbia into servitude?

Trump’s attacks on colleges and universities, and his destruction of the US Department of Education, founded by Jimmy Carter in 1979, will certainly weaken education as a whole in the US, but it will especially damage school systems in rural areas with weak property tax bases, low-income students and students with disabilities and special needs, and low-income college students who rely on Pell Grants.

On March 21, Trump’s acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek, threatened to shut the agency down entirely in retaliation for US District Judge Ellen Hollander’s order curtailing DOGE’s illegal access to the personal data of millions of Americans kept by the SSA. Even a brief shutdown of the agency would withhold earned benefits from over 70 million working people and cause widespread suffering. Though Trump has always said he will not go after Social Security, it’s happening under Musk. DOGE’s plan appears to be to damage the agency so badly that they can then close in for the kill. They need to wreck it so they can rob it.

That same day, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick recommended halting all Social Security payments as a way of rooting out fraud, even though all of DOGE’s accusations of widespread fraud in the SSA have been debunked:

Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.³

What does DOGE intend to do with all of the personal information they have collected on Americans? It would certainly be a versatile and potent weapon to use against anyone who disagrees with the actions of Musk and Trump.

Also on March 21, over 34,000 people showed up for the “Fight the Oligarchy” rally in Denver led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This was the biggest political event in Denver, in terms of crowd size, since Obama 2008, and it drew more people than ever came to a Sanders rally when he was actually running for office. ”This nation was built by working people!” said Sanders. “And we’re not gonna let a handful of billionaires run the government.”

It’s both too early and too late to concentrate on elections. If the Musk/Trump juggernaut is successful, there won’t be any more elections. Congress is out of the fight. The courts are on the verge of being rendered irrelevant because of the problem of enforcement. The regime has seized the police and the military. There will soon be no “instrument” of resistance left, except the raw will of the People.

They’ve gone after the very structures of democracy, and those structures were exposed because they needed to be to work. The vulnerability of democracy was its strength.

I’m focusing on the tech billionaires because they are the ones executing the destruction. Trump wouldn’t be going after Social Security and Medicare on his own. The fascist oligarchs are doing it because they don’t care about popular opinion.

People want to fight back. Give them a way to do it, and they will.