What The Hell America!

Before we start: I’ll be live on Substack with Noah Smith at 1pm to talk about tariffs, economic meltdown, and the future of Taiwan. You’ll get an email from me right before the show gets rolling.

If you want to know what authoritarianism looks like in practice, compare the recent examples of Marko Elez and Mahmoud Khalil.

Elez is a 25-year-old DOGE staffer who briefly resigned from his government post in February after his racist writings were exposed. Among Elez’s statements were:

• “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”

• “Normalize Indian hate.”

• “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”

• “I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask.”

So: Marko Elez is a bigot and yet he held a powerful, unaccountable post within the U.S. government and was paid with U.S. tax dollars.

Who hired Elez? Where/when was his job opening posted? What were his duties? Who was his supervisor? These are questions that literally no one knows the answers to. One day Elez was a SpaceX employee, the next day he was working at Twitter, and then suddenly he turned up inside the U.S. government.

And then, shortly after the media exposed his bigotry, Elez was out of the government. Did he actually resign? Was he told to resign? Again: No one knows because DOGE is not an agency so much as a rogue, unaccountable black box.

Whatever the case, the vice president quickly rallied to Elez’s side and called for him to be rehired. Here was JD Vance’s reasoning:

How admirably broad-minded of the vice president, to give taxpayer dollars to a man who hates Vance’s interracial family. But just two points of clarification:

• Marko Elez is not a “kid.” He’s a 25-year-old man.

• Elez’s life had not been “ruined.” He had resigned (or been fired from?) a government job he’d held for a few weeks.

If losing a government job counts as a life-ruining event, then tens of thousands of government workers are having their lives ruined by Vance’s administration on a weekly basis.

I have not seen much—any?—sympathy from Vance for those people. Then again, your median government employee is not a bigot. So perhaps their claims on the vice president’s sympathy are limited.

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On Saturday Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old, recently graduated Columbia University student, was arrested by ICE agents in New York City and swiftly moved to a detention facility in Louisiana while the government attempts to deport him.

Khalil was one of the leaders of the Columbia Palestinian protest movement that arose after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel. His politics are not my politics, so I want to be careful in how I describe him: In his private behavior and public statements Khalil tried to stay just this side of respectability: He did not participate in the encampments; he dutifully decried antisemitism; he claimed that both Palestinians and Jews were oppressed by the state of Israel.

So perhaps “bigot” is the wrong descriptor.

But it is clear that Khalil carries a deep-seated animus toward Israel and it is easy to understand how his brand of activism would make members of Columbia’s Jewish community uncomfortable. And I am sorry, but despite his careful statements I am picking up what Khalil was laying down. The guy’s entire identity was wrapped up in hating Israel.

But Khalil is a legal permanent resident of the United States and he was forcibly detained and shipped out of New York by the federal government on the grounds of . . . ?

Nothing. Literally no grounds. Here is the president of the United States not even pretending to have a lawful cause:

We are six weeks into Trump 2.0 and we now have federal agents going door to door to illegally arrest people who have taken positions the administration dislikes.

If that isn’t fascism, then I don’t know what else to call it. Maybe you can come up with a better descriptor.

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By the by: You know why Trump arrested Mahmoud Khalil first? Precisely because he’s not the most sympathetic figure. His views are bigoted and extreme. I certainly don’t want to be in the business of defending him.

But that’s the thing about freedom: You have to defend it for everyone, or it applies to no one.

And Trump knows that. The idea is that you go after Mahmoud Khalil today so that you can go after Mark Kelly tomorrow.

That’s what happens in authoritarian states.

If you’re going to resist, you have to defend everyone. Even people whom you disagree with. I don’t like Mahmoud Khalil, but there is no evidence—or even allegation—that he broke any law. The government has announced no legal grounds for detaining him. And if we don’t stand up for his rights, then no one’s rights are safe.

That’s what we do here at The Bulwark. If this is how you see the world, too, I hope you’ll join us.

📺 Speaking of Sen. Mark Kelly: Andrew Egger interviewed him yesterday after his trip to Ukraine. Watch it here on Substack (without ads) or on YouTube.

Let’s sum it up:

If you hate one class of people, then you’re just a kid making a dumb mistake—and losing a government job as a consequence is tantamount to “having your life ruined.” So the government must pay your salary.

But if you hate a different class of people, then the government may go to your home and arrest you without cause and detain you indefinitely.

Over the last several years the right has worried endlessly about “First Amendment” issues. They were deeply upset that privately owned social media platforms might limit the reach of posts deemed contrary to the platform’s business interests. Or that someone on the New York Times’s internal Slack might be mean to one of their colleagues.

But it was never really about the First Amendment, was it? It was just about power.

Because now we have an actual, real-life First Amendment issue where the federal government is arresting people explicitly because of things they said and not even bothering to manufacture legal justifications.

And I do not see a lot of conservatives or Republicans complaining about it, do you?

Not only is this not about free speech—it’s not even about antisemitism. You may recall that a few weeks ago the president of the United States pardoned this gentleman for actually breaking the law:

And however distasteful I might find Mahmoud Khalil, there is no evidence that he’s a proponent of the Holocaust.

One last thing: Look at the asymmetry. When the racism of Marko Elez was revealed, no one on the left asked for him to be arrested or deported. They merely wanted him off the government payroll because giving an unabashed racist unaccountable power over the federal system is dangerous. If SpaceX, or a16z, or Palantir wanted to hire him, so be it. That’s their business.

But the right wants Mahmoud Khalil locked in a cell and then shipped out of the country, even if it means shredding the law to get its way.

Don’t tell me that “both sides” have a free speech problem.

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