Will the champions of free speech please stand up?

Mahmoud Khalil and the Mass Industrialisation of Cancel Culture

On 8 March 2025, Mahmoud Khalil, a student at Columbia University with a permanent right to remain in the US (a green card), was unceremoniously picked up by ICE in front of his 8-month pregnant wife and taken to federal prison in another state. His lawyers- that much-maligned breed- halted his deportation. Other such enemies of the people have given authoritative legal analyses against it.

As far as we know, Khalil lawfully and peacefully protested at Columbia campus. He has never been charged with a crime, and Marco Rubio did not identify any crime when he told us why he is being deported. He only mentioned speech. There’s zero evidence he’s backed any terrorist outfit. A White House official told the “Free Press” they will use Khalil’s case as a “blueprint” to investigate other students. The same source told them that Khalil was not being deported for breaking the law but because of the threat he posed to the “foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.” This refers to a long-forgotten provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which states that “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 is deportable.” This is the McCarthyite gagging law that was used to persecute Jewish refugees on suspicion of communism¹.

The Musk minions manning the official (lol) White House X account posted “SHALOM, MAHMOUD” with a photograph of Khalil claiming he was leading “activities aligned to Hamas.” What that entails is unclear- all criticism of the government of Israel can be construed to be “alligned to Hamas”.

It is obscene that anybody would think defending the Trump administration’s actions is battling anti-semitism. As much as anti-Semitism exists in the far left, it has been blossoming under the golden dome of the MAGA tent, where no opportunity to dog whistle nazi salutes is left unutilised. Making LARPing nazism tolerant in public life to own the libs.

I will say one thing about the far left: at least they 1) never get elected (not sure they even want to) and 2) do not publicly self-identify as anti-semitic.

This is where it is essential, democratic comrades, that you do what I do, which is go to right-wing spaces and rub shoulders with the troops. Even the fringiest anarcho-communists would protest to being called anti-semitic.

The new crop of Trumpists sees it as a badge of honour to vice-signal.

I meet them all the time but stay quiet because I am a free speech absolutist, and my mission is dragging the salvageable ones back into the fold and inducing shame to those with intact prefrontal cortices, not doxing their schizoposting cartoon accounts. Now, the leader of the Free World is letting the most sociopathic within their ranks rampage the state capacity of the world’s greatest democracy. Curtis Yarvin intellectually defends fascism. Do surface research on the crypto communities Musk has been stewing in, or I don’t know, log on to X from your own account on an untrained algorithm, and don’t avert your eyes when the race war slop comes for your dopamine receptors. It is all there. Questioning the holocaust, rehabilitating Hitler. So, forgive me, but when I despair at the racism rampant across the board, it is not Trump and his accolades that I hold out hope will save us.

This moment is why, during the height of the cancel culture years, I begged those on my own side to temper their vengeance and not to abuse due process to take out their political enemies. The reputation of civil liberties organisations in the past was built on their capacity to defend even the most repugnant voices from expressing their views, like neo-Nazis and the KKK. The new right gained ground over liberals because they forgot what being liberated entailed.

Regardless of what you think about Israel, Palestine, or the pro-Palestine protests, if you regard free speech and the rule of law as worth protecting, you must oppose politically motivated striping of a man’s rights.

If you won’t listen to me because I am a dyed-in-the-wool card-carrying member of the Labour Party, listen to Andrew Sullivan. He is one of my favourite authors, despite being right-wing, because he is a conservative dedicated to conserving the values we hold dear, like free speech and empathy:

I am not defending Mahmoud Khalil’s worldview, but I can note that his grandmother was forced to leave her home near Tiberias during the first wave of Zionist ethnic cleansing in 1948; she walked 40 miles to exile, giving birth along the way; and the family lived in tents in a refugee camp in Syria for decades. Now the grandson watches as Israel obliterates Gaza, with thousands of women and children dead, and the US wants to ship all the Gaza Palestinians elsewhere so Jared Kushner can set up some new White Lotuses.

I’m not asking you to agree with Khalil. I am asking you to extend the same empathy to him as you would a Jewish-American traumatized by the surge in hideous antisemitism. I’m asking you to treat him as a human being: flawed, maybe misguided, but human. Not Jewish not Arab but human. I’m not defending Khalil’s rights because I hate Israel. I am defending him because I love America.

And stop changing the subject. The specific charge matters in a country with the rule of law: this case is not about terrorism even if you want it to be; it’s not about crime, even if you think it should be. It’s about a new McCarthyite apparatus to chill free debate on campus, make criticism of Israel legally hazardous to any noncitizen, and render every noncitizen in this country afraid to speak their mind on a vital matter. It is not a hard case. Rubio has made it a very simple one.

As for all those brave center-right defenders of free speech on campus these last few years? Just see if they are condemning this. And if they aren’t, never take them seriously on this subject again.

True to his promise to move fast and break things, MAGA has industrialised Cancel Culture.

Where Democrats had to fire people on a case-by-case-doxxing basis, and Hollywood could only stop one man of dubious moral standing at a time from assenting to higher fame and net worth, the Trump administration is using the wonders of AI to scrape the social media accounts of thousands of foreign students on visas for evidence of dissent. Millennials have been shitposting for over two decades, and, frankly, for the first 10 we knew little of how many of our contemporaries’ public life careers would come to a screeching end because of teenage thoughtlessness. Compared to what Trump has shown to be capable of, social shunning will feel like a motherly slap on the bottom.

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What, you guys thought accelerationism was just an intellectual curiosity?

When people tell you who they are, believe them the first time.

1. The McCarran-Walter Act’s quota system and ideological criteria were designed during the Cold War to prevent “undesirables” from entering the U.S. In practice, the law imposed stricter limits on immigration from Eastern European countries-where many Jewish refugees had fled Soviet-controlled territories after World War II-while favoring immigrants from Western Europe. The report explains that the quotas effectively made it nearly impossible for many Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from Soviet-occupied regions to obtain visas. Furthermore, the law’s focus on political beliefs meant that refugees suspected of having any leftist ties (even if only for survival) were harshly scrutinized and often rejected.