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oligarchy
Mahmoud Khalil Is Not a Threat; the Trump Administration Is
The arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil is part of the Trump administration’s larger project of creating and sustaining the illusion of endless enemies to distract from its oligarchic agenda.
Mar 10, 2025
The evening of the 8th of March, which coincides with the Holy month of Ramadan celebrated by almost 2 billion Muslims worldwide, took an expected turn for Mahmoud Khalil and his wife. Khalil just returned home from iftar—the evening meal Muslims eat to break their day-long fasting during Ramadan. His wife was eight months pregnant. The couple, perhaps, were preparing for the upcoming delivery of the baby and welcoming the new member of the family. Perhaps, they were getting ready to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, one of the two major religious festivals Muslims celebrate at the end of Ramadan.
What was likely not foreseen at all by this family was a raid, arrest, and detention by ICE. Mahmoud, a recent graduate of Columbia University and leading Palestinian solidarity organizer on campus, recently received his green card. A green card is the Permanent Resident Card that allows a person to live and work in the United States permanently. Mahmoud’s wife is a U.S. citizen. If all went well, Mahmoud could have applied for his U.S. citizenship after three to five years, subject to some terms and conditions. Because of being a legal permanent resident—the prior step to receiving U.S. citizenship through naturalization, ICE detention most likely was the last thing on Mahmoud’s mind.
I would argue that we are currently living in a state of exception. Since the Trump administration has assumed power, most of the welfare- and social justice-oriented laws and policies that were historically designed to protect and nurture our humans, environments, and the most vulnerable ones are being gradually replaced by extreme right-wing, hateful, and anti-all-kinds-of-minoritized-communities rules and regulations. To date, a total of 83 executive orders have been signed by President Donald J. Trump, and a significant portion of these orders are aimed at destroying environmental protections, abolishing social security, and cracking down against various marginalized and minoritized communities. If you are not a rich, white, Christian, U.S. citizen, cis-man, you are very likely to be impacted by a good number of these executive orders.
The goal is to remind us that we will be the next if we speak up and challenge oppressive systems.
A notable feature of most of these executive orders is that they appropriate the language of social justice. For example, the executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” is nothing about defending women’s rights but everything about erasing trans- and nonbinary identities and experiences. If President Trump really cared about women’s rights, perhaps he would have allowed federal funding for elective abortion in government programs instead of reinstating the Hyde Amendment. Similarly, the executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism” disproportionately targets Palestinian solidarity organizers in various institutions of higher education—specifically those who are not U.S. citizens.
Let’s not forget the 2017 white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, where marchers displayed swastikas and chanted slogans like “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil”—a Nazi ideological slogan. Trump was heavily criticized for adopting a “both-sides” narrative in response to the violent demonstrations, as he said, “But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” A 2021 New Yorker article by David Remnick dives deeper into inquiring, “Is Donald Trump an Antisemite?” The article features a series of interviews that reveal that Trump was more pro-Israel than pro-Jewish. Some of the voices from the Israeli left criticized Trump for portraying American Jews as betrayers who betrayed Israel by voting for Democrats. The Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland described Trump’s views towards Jews as, “...if American Jews don’t support what he says, they are ungrateful and he can question their loyalty. He sees Jews as foreign and supplicants who should be grateful to him.”
Against this background, when the Trump administration’s executive order to “combat Antisemitism” was enacted by the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by arresting and detaining Mahmoud Khalil, we should look beyond the formal accusation of antisemitism outlined by DHS on X: “Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” We must dive deeper into asking what exactly the series of xenophobic measures, which include but are not limited to travel bans, visa cancellations, crackdowns on immigrants and refugees, terminating the Spanish-language version of the White House website, and trade and diplomatic wars, along with cuts on government spending and reducing the size and scope of the federal government, aim to achieve.
The U.S. has long been transforming into an oligarchy, which has been alarmingly expedited under the leadership of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. An executive order has assigned the White House more power to monitor and vet independent federal regulation agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission, restricting their ability to regulate cryptocurrency trading or curb the monopoly of multinational tech giants like Meta or Amazon. Billionaire elites are engaged in a partnership with the state, where the state is primarily tasked with serving elite corporate interests. Professor Allison Stanger rightfully says, “When we grant tech leaders direct control over government functions, we’re not just streamlining bureaucracy—we’re fundamentally altering the relationship between private power and public governance.”
When the balance of power between private versus public sectors disappears, and the state is no longer aimed at serving the commoners, the state struggles to maintain its relevancy and seeks legitimacy from the common people. Noam Chomsky argues that one of the most effective ways to establish the state legitimacy is the creation of a culture of fear and the construction of endless enemies, which pits vulnerable communities against each other without drawing any attention to intersecting systems of oppression. Since the Trump administration is not going to serve anyone in this country except for its billionaire allies and rich-white-Christian-cis-male supporter base, it needs to give the rest of the people the impression that it is going to save them from some existentialist threats.
I would argue that the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil is part of the Trump administration’s larger project of creating and sustaining the illusion of endless enemies, which include but are not limited to Arabs; Muslims; Palestinians; immigrants; refugees; Indigenous communities; people of color; women; the “undeserving” poor; and trans, queer, and nonbinary communities. Even though the Trump administration must be well aware of the fact that the oversimplistic conflation of all Palestinian solidarity organizers with “Hamas sympathizers” or the attempt to detain and deport noncitizen peaceful student protestors on the false ground of leading “activities aligned to Hamas” will face serious legal challenges in the court and pushback from progressive and social justice organizations, why does it continue to threaten Palestinian solidarity organizers?
I would say the goal is to leave a chilling effect. The goal is to remind us that we will be the next if we speak up and challenge oppressive systems. The goal is to emphasize that even securing a green card will not ensure that the constitutional right of freedom of speech or freedom of peaceful protest would extend to us. The goal is to push us to a state where we would start censoring ourselves in anticipation of being targeted long before the authoritarian state intervenes and starts penalizing us.
As the Trump administration attempts to restrict abortion and gender-affirming care and erase trans and nonbinary experiences in the name of protecting “life,” protecting “America’s children,” and protecting “family values,” Khalil was torn apart from his eight-month pregnant wife. The pregnant U.S. citizen wife was threatened with being arrested by ICE for trying to help her husband. The eighth month of pregnancy could feel debilitating, yet with a heavily pregnant body, Khalil’s wife has been forced to deal with the unbearable psychological and physical stress of spending hours communicating with lawyers and traveling between New York City and New Jersey trying to find the whereabouts of Khalil only to stay in the dark.
Will Khalil be able to be there with his wife on the day of Eid al-Fitr? Will he be able to be there by the side of his wife during the birth of their baby? If not, the United States does not really deserve to claim itself as “the land of the free.”
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10,000+ Turn Out in Warren, Michigan to 'Fight Oligarchy' With Bernie Sanders
"We will not accept oligarchy, we will not accept authoritarianism, we will not accept kleptocracy," the democratic socialist senator said. "We're gonna fight back, and we're gonna win."
Mar 09, 2025
The Democratic Party may have twice stymied Sen. Bernie Sanders' White House ambitions, but the National Tour to Fight Oligarchy launched last month by the democratic socialist has been drawing crowds that would be the envy of any presidential campaign.
On Saturday, more than 10,000 people turned out to see Sanders (I-Vt.) speak in Warren, Michigan. Not only did they pack the main event space—the gymnasium at Lincoln High School—literally to the rafters, they filled two overflow rooms, with hundreds turned away outside, according toMichigan Advance.
"We have an administration that is leading us to oligarchy, an administration that is leading us to an authoritarian form of society, an administration that is leading us towards kleptocracy," Sanders said at the beginning of his speech.
Noting that three of the world's richest men—Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—sat in the front row of President Donald Trump's inauguration, Sander said that "instead of a government of the people, by the people and for the people, we have now become a government of the billionaire class, for the billionaire class."
Sanders also took aim at Trump's false election claims and the wider "post-truth" trend on the right, telling the crowd: "We're up against a phenomenon that we have never seen, and that is the Big Lie. The Big Lie is not just stretching the truth; the Big Lie is not just fibbing. The Big Lie is creating a parallel universe, a set of ideas that have no basis in reality."
The senator also linked past struggles against injustice with the current crisis, arguing that "the change that we have experienced over hundreds of years of our nationhood only occurs when ordinary people stand up against oppression and injustice and fight back."
Sanders was joined on stage by United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who wore a T-shirt reading "Eat the Rich" and told the audience that "billionaires don't have a right to exist."
Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed, who ran for Michigan governor in 2018 and is considering a Senate run, pointed to the size of Saturday's crowd in Warren as proof of the enduring power of progressivism.
"They want us to step back, and today, all of you have said that we are not stepping back, we are stepping forward," El-Sayed told Michigan Advance. "We are recognizing that in one another, we have all we need to build that government for the people and by the people."
In a dig at the unofficial motto of some Silicon Valley startups, El-Sayed said that the Trump administration wants "to move fast and break things."
"But what they're breaking is the government that our hard-earned tax dollars have been funding," he said. "And we're here to say that that is our money, that is our government, take your damn billionaire hands off of it."
The Warren rally was the latest on a tour that's seen overflow crowds at almost every stop. Thousands also turned out in Altoona, Wisconsin on Saturday and Kenosha, Wisconsin on Friday to see Sanders speak.
There's more to Sanders' tour than just raging against Trump and the oligarchy. He chose to visit districts where Republicans narrowly won congressional races, hoping to pressure GOP lawmakers to vote against proposed cuts to programs upon which working-class people rely, in order to pay for the $4.5 trillion cost of extending Trump's first-term "tax scam" that overwhelmingly benefited the ultra-wealthy and corporations.
"Today, the oligarchs and the billionaire class are getting richer and richer and have more and more power," Sanders said in a statement Friday. "Meanwhile, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and most of our people are struggling to pay for healthcare, childcare, and housing. This country belongs to all of us, not just the few. We must fight back."
Correction: This article originally said Sanders held a rally in Altoona, Pennsylvania. The rally was in Altoona, Wisconsin.
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Is It Happening Here?
Two generations of family history has convinced me that a deeply divided Weimer-like democracy can be destroyed from the inside out, even one that has been expanding its franchise of freedom for more than two centuries.
Mar 08, 2025
My mother was interrogated by the Gestapo when she was nine years old. She thought the initials for the Nazi Labor Front (Deutesche Arbeitsfront) stood for German Monkey Front (Deutsche Affefront) and, because she was dyslexic, she sounded it out. Her mother Emmy was not allowed to be with Eva while she was questioned about who had told her to say what she had. Afterwards Emmy was told if the child was not out of the country in 24 hours the entire family would be arrested.
Eva was put on a train and spent the next three years in a boarding school on an Italian mountaintop until finally reuniting with her family in Holland in 1939. There the American Quakers helped get the family, including her father Fritz (who had survived detention and torture at Buchenwald concentration camp), onto the last ship to America before the Nazis invaded.
My mother was a difficult, emotionally fractured person throughout her life in part, I came to believe, because of her childhood trauma and family separation that she unconsciously blamed on herself. I thought of her during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term when his migrant family separation policy left children locked away from their parents, some separated for more than three years.
The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.
I grew up a middle-class American but, given my parents’ backgrounds, believing that history can knock the struts out from under you at any time. While my mother had escaped the Nazis, my father, his sister, and mother had escaped a massacre in their village in Ukraine, 3 of 20 hiding in an attic while hundreds more were slain in the streets and in their homes. Ukraine still bleeds as Donald Trump cozies up to its latest invaders, attacks its leader, and demands its rare minerals.
My mother died in 1974, my father a few years later. In 2016, right after Trump was elected for the first time, my Aunt Renate, 89, was one of those people who actually made plans to move to Canada, to a small town in the province of Saskatchewan. She wasn’t ready to live with the fear she’d experienced as a child. Leukemia caught up with her before she could make the move. She died at 90.
Before the 2016 election I’d convinced Renate to write an article on her childhood memories of the election in which Adolf Hitler came to power, even after his attempt to stage a coup. It read in part:
In 1932, the German people went to the polls to choose between Hitler and President Paul von Hindenburg, the incumbent. My parents were afraid to vote in their small home community where the citizens all knew each other by name. They feared reprisal because they could easily have been identified as anti-Nazi voters. As a family, we drove to a distant, larger town where my mother and father voted.
My two sisters and I waited in the car. We did not speak. We were terrified without knowing why. An atmosphere of danger and secrecy held us in its grip as we watched the Nazi guards in their brown uniforms and swastika armbands march up and down in front of the voting booth. As Jews, this was the last time they voted—to make their voices heard as German citizens.
I vividly remember the first time I voted as an American citizen in 1948—Thomas Dewey versus Harry Truman…After I closed the black curtain of the booth and punched the buttons, I had to pull a lever to record my vote. I was awed by what this simple gesture implied: I was responsible to my country, to the world, for influencing the outcome of the election. In the privacy of the curtained space I burst into tears, grateful that I was permitted to record my opinion without fear of retribution and that my vote would be counted among millions to determine the political future which American citizens would accept.
Until 2020 that is, when many U.S. citizens were convinced not to accept the outcome of a free and fair election. Four years later a slim majority put Donald Trump back in power despite his attempted coup. Today the Quisling-like compliance of a Republican Congress unwilling to assert its constitutional role and the potential remolding of the FBI, CIA, and the military (starting with the unjustified firing of the Coast Guard commandant on Trump’s second day back in power and now a wider purge at the Pentagon) bodes poorly for the so-called “guardrails” of democracy.
In addition, the total amnesty of the rioters who took over the Capitol on January 6, 2021, demonstrating their willingness to use violence on his behalf, gives another clear indication of how things could rapidly devolve under Trump 2.0. Two generations of family history has convinced me that a deeply divided Weimer-like democracy can be destroyed from the inside out, even one that has been expanding its franchise of freedom for more than two centuries.
In 1968 I was in the streets of New York protesting a Madison Square Garden rally for former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who was running for president as an openly racist third-party candidate. It was a wild riot scene that as a 17-year-old had me enthralled. When I confronted my mother’s worried fury later that night, I spoke thoughtlessly. In the 1930s, I said, if young people had gone into the streets of Germany, maybe Hitler wouldn’t have come to power.
Seven years later, when my mother was in the hospital after surgery for lung cancer and knew she was dying, she reminded me of that night, and how I’d hurt her to the bone. “I was only nine. There was nothing I could do,” she said through her tears.
My mother was too young to resist fascism when it enveloped and ultimately destroyed her country and many others. The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.
But America’s last best generation of antifascists—including my parents who both joined the U.S. Army in World War II—defeated a similar though more advanced threat on the beaches of Normandy and beyond. Even if my mom was too young at nine, I’m not too old, even in my 70s, to join with my fellow citizens in mobilizing to again stop the dark threat, if not once-and-for-all, at least this time in America.
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