Mahmoud Kahlil’s arrest and extradition to an immigration prison in Louisiana should be disturbing to anyone capable of understanding the state of the world. The man was a legal permanent resident of the US and because he decided to stand on his principles and advocate for the people of the Gaza Strip along with his colleagues and fellow students at Columbia University through 2024, he has been deemed a “Hamas supporter” and marked for deportation. The government admits he hasn’t committed any actual crimes; he’s just not someone they want living here anymore. Nevermind that he had a partner, a US citizen, who is currently eight months pregnant with their child. Nevermind that he was actively in grad school at Columbia. They just want him gone.
Of course, Kahlil is not the only target of the government’s ire currently: so are protestors of Tesla dealerships and offices. So are trans people in basically any context you want to think about. So are lawyers and law firms who have ever made Donald Trump’s life difficult, journalists who have ever reported on his or the administration’s crimes, so are government employees at varying levels of bureaucracy, so are Ukrainians, so are Gazans, so are fucking Canadians and Greenlanders and Panamanians. Trump and Elon Musk are attempting to smash and consolidate power into their hands exclusively, and they do not care who they have to run over in order to accomplish this.
After Kahlil’s functional disappearing, the dean of the Columbia University journalism program, Jelani Cobb, told international students not to write about or talk about anything that might make them a target of similar action, telling them “Nobody can protect you.”
That part shot through my heart like an icicle.
My stance on protest and organizing since well before November has been “we need to shore up our defenses, organize our communities, focus on mutual aid and creating care ecosystems, and make it as hard as possible for the state to ruin our and our friends’ lives.” I still believe that’s probably the best tack to take, but now I have to add that we all could do with getting maybe just a little spicier.
Right now the government thinks it can do shit like functionally disappear a legal resident or advocate for the annexation of Canada and Greenland because it believes nobody has the gumption to stand up to it outside of a court challenge. I’m reminded every day of Kevin Roberts from the Heritage Foundation claiming last year that the coming “revolution” would be “bloodless if the left wants it to be.” They believe that if blood is to be shed, it won’t be theirs. And look, I’m not advocating for violence or criminal activity. I’m just saying I think we could all stand to make that kind of assessment look less and less certain. I think it might slow these motherfuckers down a little if their lives were made harder in various ways. And I think certain centrists and liberals could do with a little goddamn course correction, just in case their subscriptions to the Atlantic and the New York Times has rotted their perspectives too much.
Again I have to stress how much I am not advocating for violence or any kind of criminal activity. There are plenty of technically pacifist ways to make problems for various people at all sorts of levels of government. I’m just saying I’m getting sick and tired of hearing how miffed democratic congresspeople are about hearing from their constituents that they want them to do something, anything about the fascist dismantling of the state. And I’m just saying folks have addresses. And this information hasn’t yet been scrubbed off Online.
There is of course danger to this approach. And not everyone can afford to simply Get Spicy Like That. But at the same time not everyone can be a bystander. And sometimes it can paradoxically be safer in the front. We have to use the infrastructure we’ve hopefully been creating to make sure that getting spicy at all, to any degree, is not met with full-blown repression, that there is somewhere safe to retreat to if necessary.
We just… we can’t wait for others to save us. Nobody else is coming.
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