This Is What Fascism Looks Like

Government shock troops disappearing a dissident into their gulag network—that's pretty cut and dry.

Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images

Over the weekend, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States who helped lead the student movement for Palestine at Columbia University last year. His wife is eight months pregnant with their child.

As Zeteo’s Prem Thakker reported, the arrest—or, more accurately, kidnapping—had all the hallmarks of the Gestapo-like tactics we’ve come to expect from ICE:

“He has a green card,” an agent apparently said on the phone, confused by the matter. But then after a moment, the agent claimed that the State Department had “revoked that too.”

Meanwhile, Khalil had been on the phone with his attorney, Amy Greer who was trying to intervene, asking why he was being detained, if they had a warrant, and explaining that Khalil was a green card holder. The attorney had circled back to demanding to see a warrant when the agents apparently instead hung up the phone.

There are indications that Khalil is now being held in an ICE prison in Louisiana, though, as of this writing, his lawyer still doesn’t appear to have confirmation of his whereabouts. On Sunday night, the Department of Homeland Security said that Khalil had been arrested because he “led activities aligned to Hamas,” whatever that nonsense means. Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly cheered the arrest and said that Khalil’s green card—and those of anyone else he described as “Hamas supporters”—would be revoked “so they can be deported.”

In theory, you can’t just take someone’s green card away without authorization from a judge, and someone with a green card can’t just be picked up by ICE on a whim. In practice, the Trump administration will probably try to use some potential loopholes to get around these laws, or, as with so much else these days, will just do whatever it wants no matter what the law says.

So that’s the background. Here’s some of what I think about all of this.

• There are a lot of debates these days about whether we’re experiencing fascism in the United States. Brainy people of various stripes go back and forth endlessly about this topic. Wait, this thing is a hallmark of fascism, it’s just like Italy in 1928! Wait, no it’s not, fascism requires this one particular characteristic, and we’re not there yet!
  
  I mostly try to avoid this debate at all costs. Looking out over the crisis we find ourselves in and spending all of your time haggling over the precise way to define that crisis strikes me as a perfect example of intellectualizing yourself into thin air. However. Whether or not you think Fascism with a capital F has fully made its way to these shores, I hope we can all agree that “the administration’s shock troops disappearing their ideological enemies into their gulag network in the middle of the night based on nothing and in flagrant violation of the law” is a pretty cut-and-dry act of fascism. This is what fascism looks like. It’s what fascists do.

• “Abolish ICE” was a key demand of the left just a few years ago. Now, as Democrats and Republicans compete with each other to see who hate immigrants the most, it’s all but disappeared from the agenda. But what happened to Mahmoud Khalil is precisely why the abolition of ICE matters so much.

  The core of the fascist agenda in America revolves around purging this country of as many immigrants as possible—whether or not they have legal status. ICE and the Customs and Border Patrol agency are the main tools that the government has to carry out this agenda. There is no amount of “reform” that will remove that from their DNA. That’s their reason for existing, and any anti-racist, anti-fascist politics worth its salt has to acknowledge that.
  

• There are many, many, many reasons why the fevered, brutal repression of the Palestine movement from all sectors of the establishment—both public and private—is so loathsome and dangerous. The main reason is that Palestine is a righteous cause and the attacks on the Palestine movement violate basic civil liberties and morality. But Khalil’s detention shows another key reason: that the suppression of the Palestine movement is a perfect test case for the embedding of fascism within our society.
  
  For the past year-and-a-half, universities, politicians of all stripes and at every level of government, key parts of the media, corporate America, and a whole host of other institutions have happily moved heaven and earth to annihilate the Palestine movement, to tarnish its activists as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, and generally to use every authoritarian trick in the book to ensure that, once it’s destroyed, it won’t come back.
  
  This is not only wrong on its face; like all partnerships with fascism, it also opens the door to a broader crackdown on civil society and civil rights. These people won’t stop with Palestine activists. They are trying to create a new legal and political reality in which they can just sweep away anyone who challenges their ideology or their mission. And anyone who supports them—like the disgusting collaborators at the ADL, who issued a statement backing Khalil’s kidnapping, or like Columbia itself, which helped create the ludicrous pretext for Khalil’s detention and which appears less than troubled by everything that’s taken place—will have to answer for what comes next.

• This is why you hold the line on not empowering the forces of fascism. The Democratic Party not only led the way in demonizing, criminalizing, and repressing the Palestine movement. It has also enthusiastically joined the Trump administration’s efforts to terrorize immigrants more broadly. Just as with trans rights, Democrats seem to think that they can turn the fascism dial up just a little bit, pick up some swing voters, and call it a day. But there’s no such thing as “just a little bit” when it comes to this stuff. The only thing a little fascism brings you is a lot of fascism. I would like to say that Democrats will rue the day when they signed up to this horror show, but we know they won’t.

• Free Mahmoud Khalil and all political prisoners.

Update, 3:06 pm ET:

Please spend an eternity in hell Donald.