The OFFICIAL "This Country Is A Flaming Bag Of Shit And Fuck You Bitches That Voted For Trump" Thread

[Mad Genius]

US stock market loses $4 trillion in value as Trump plows ahead on tariffs​

By Lewis Krauskopf and Saqib Iqbal Ahmed
March 10, 20256:10 PM CDTUpdated 42 min ago






Monday's major selloff followed a weekend interview with President Donald Trump in which he would not rule out the possibility of a U.S. recession.



Wall Street ends sharply lower as recession fears loom

• Summary
• Companies

• S&P 500 down over 8% from Feb 19 all-time high
• Nasdaq confirmed 10% correction from its Dec peak last week
• S&P 500 P/E moderates but still high vs historical average
• Delta Air Lines cuts forecast on growing economic uncertainty
• Tesla loses more than $125 bln in value in one day

NEW YORK, March 10 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s tariffs have spooked investors, with fears of an economic downturn driving a stock market sell-off that has wiped out $4 trillion from the S&P 500’s peak last month, when Wall Street was cheering much of Trump's agenda.
A barrage of new Trump policies has increased uncertainty for businesses, consumers and investors, notably back-and-forth tariff moves against major trading partners like Canada, Mexico and China.
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"We've seen clearly a big sentiment shift," said Ayako Yoshioka, senior investment strategist at Wealth Enhancement. "A lot of what has worked is not working now."
The stock market selloff deepened on Monday. The benchmark S&P 500 (.SPX), opens new tab fell 2.7%, its biggest daily drop of the year. The Nasdaq Composite (.IXIC), opens new tab slid 4%, its largest one-day decline since September 2022.
The S&P 500 on Monday closed down 8.6% from its February 19 record high, shedding over $4 trillion in market value since then and nearing a 10% decline that would represent a correction for the index. The tech-heavy Nasdaq ended Thursday down more than 10% from its December high.
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Trump over the weekend declined to predict whether the U.S. could face a recession as investors worried about the impact of his trade policy.
"The amount of uncertainty that has been created by the tariff wars with regard to Canada, Mexico and Europe, is causing boards and C-suites to reconsider the pathway forward," Peter Orszag, CEO of Lazard, speaking at the CERAWeek conference in Houston.
"People can understand ongoing tensions with China, but the Canada, Mexico, and Europe part is confusing. Unless that gets resolved over the next month or so, this could do real damage to the economic prospects of the US and M&A activity," Orszag said.
Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), opens new tab on Monday slashed its first-quarter profit estimates by half, sending its shares down 14% in aftermarket action. CEO Ed Bastian blamed heightened U.S. economic uncertainty.

Investors are also watching whether lawmakers can pass a funding bill to avert a partial federal government shutdown. A U.S. report on inflation looms on Wednesday.
"The Trump administration seems a little more accepting of the idea that they're OK with the market falling, and they're potentially even OK with a recession in order to exact their broader goals," said Ross Mayfield, investment strategist at Baird. "I think that's a big wake up call for Wall Street."

The percentage of total corporate equities and mutual fund shares that are owned by the bottom 50% of the U.S. population, ranked by wealth, stands at about 1%, while the same measure for the top 10% of the population by wealth stood at 87%, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data as of July 2024.
The S&P 500 tallied back-to-back gains of over 20% in 2023 and 2024, led by megacap technology and tech-related stocks such as Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab and Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab that have struggled so far in 2025, dragging major indexes.
On Monday, the S&P 500's technology sector (.SPLRCT), opens new tab dropped 4.3%, while Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tab and Nvidia both fell about 5%. Tesla tumbled 15%, shedding about $125 billion in value.

Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., February 12, 2025. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
Other risk assets were also punished, with bitcoin dropping 5%.
Some defensive areas of the market held up better, with the utilities sector (.SPLRCU), opens new tab logging a 1% daily gain. Safe-haven U.S. government debt saw more demand, with benchmark 10-year Treasury yields, which move inversely to prices, down to about 4.22%.

INVESTOR UNEASE​

The S&P 500 has given up all gains recorded since Trump's November 5 election, and it is down nearly 3% in that time. Hedge funds reduced exposure to stocks on Friday at the largest amount in more than two years, according to a Goldman Sachs note released on Monday.
Investors had expressed optimism that Trump's expected pro-growth agenda including tax cuts and deregulation would benefit stocks, but uncertainty over tariffs and other changes including federal workforce cuts, has dampened sentiment.
"It was the overwhelming consensus that everything was going to be this great environment once President Trump came into office," said Michael O’Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading.
"Every time you have structural change you're going to have uncertainty and you're going to have friction," O'Rourke said. "It's understandable people are starting to be a little concerned and starting to take profits."
Even with the recent selloff, stock market valuations remain significantly above historic averages. The S&P 500 as of Friday was at just above 21 times earnings estimates for the next year, compared to its long-term average forward P/E of 15.8, according to LSEG Datastream.
"Many people have been worried about elevated valuations among U.S. equities for some time and looking for the catalyst for a market correction," said Dan Coatsworth, investment analyst at AJ Bell. "A combination of concerns about a trade war, geopolitical tensions and an uncertain economic outlook could be that catalyst."

Bar chart showing The percentage of total corporate equities and mutual fund shares that are owned by people of different wealth.
Investors' equity positioning has fallen in recent weeks, dipping to slightly underweight for the first time since briefly hitting that level in August, Deutsche Bank analysts said in a note on Friday.
A further retreat to the bottom of the historic range for equities weighting, as seen during Trump's U.S.-China trade war in 2018-2019, could drag the S&P 500 to as low as 5,300, or down another 5.5% from current levels, they added.
In another sign of growing investor unease, the Cboe Volatility index (.VIX), opens new tab on Monday reached its highest closing level since August.
The administration is "still trying to figure out how to define a win politically, economically, and what is the right timeframe," said Edward Al-Hussainy, senior interest rate and currency analyst at Columbia Threadneedle Investments. "And until they do that, it's going to be like this every week."
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Reporting by Lewis Krauskopf; additional reporting by Saqib Iqbal Ahmed, Davide Barbuscia and Caroline Valetkevitch in New York and Lisa Pauline Mattackal and Manya Saini in Bengaluru; editing by Megan Davies, Christina Fincher, Cynthia Osterman and David Gregorio

 

[Mad Genius]

 

[Mad Genius]

Tulsi Gabbard pulls security clearances for top Biden officials and those who went after Trump​

In addition to former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, clearances were also revoked for the New York AG and the Manhattan DA.

Tulsi Gabbard testifies at her confirmation hearing to be director of national intelligence before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Jan. 30.Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images file

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March 10, 2025, 7:39 PM CDT
By Dan De Luce
National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard said Monday she has stripped security clearances from dozens of former national security officials, the Manhattan district attorney who secured a felony conviction against Donald Trump and a lawyer who represented a government whistleblower who triggered the first impeachment case against Trump.
The decision is the latest example of the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of security clearances to go after perceived political opponents.

Gabbard’s move, announced on X, followed up on an executive order Trump issued shortly after his inauguration to a second term as president in January, which called for security clearances to be revoked for 49 former national security officials. The ex-officials signed a letter more than four years ago suggesting Russia might have played a role in amplifying allegations about Biden’s son Hunter as part of a wider effort to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.
In his executive order, Trump accused the letter’s signers of “misleading and inappropriate political coordination” with Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Trump’s order also called on the director of national intelligence to review the security clearances of others in and outside government who engaged in “inappropriate activity” related to the letter. The former senior officials have repeatedly denied Trump’s claim.
Gabbard said she had revoked security clearances and barred access to classified information for Antony Blinken, the secretary of state in the Biden administration; Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser; and Lisa Monaco, who oversaw prosecutions against Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In keeping with a previous vow by Trump, Gabbard said the daily intelligence briefing for the president would not be shared with Biden.
Traditionally, the presidential daily briefing has been shared with former presidents, but Biden suspended the practice for Trump.
Gabbard also canceled the security clearance for New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a civil fraud judgment against Trump last year. In that case, a judge found that Trump defrauded banks by inflating his net worth in financial statements. Gabbard also revoked the security clearance of Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who secured a conviction against Trump over a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to an adult film actor who said the two had sex.
Under Gabbard’s action, Mark Zaid, a lawyer who has represented whistleblowers in the intelligence community for years, was stripped of his security clearance. Zaid represented an intelligence officer who filed a whistleblower complaint to Congress in 2019 over a phone call during Trump’s first term, in which he appeared to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to take actions to help Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. The complaint prompted an impeachment inquiry in the House. Trump was formally impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate.

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Zaid said that under the law, he was entitled to due process over his security clearance.
“Not surprisingly, as I would expect in an authoritarian state, I have received none. It is patently obvious this action is nothing but petty retaliation because I represent my clients effectively in holding the Trump Administration accountable for its actions,” Zaid said in an email.
Zaid has had a security clearance for nearly 25 years, he said. During Trump’s first term, the Trump administration granted Zaid a higher-level top-secret clearance for a whistleblower case involving a Department of Homeland Security case, he said.
Kevin Carroll, who has represented intelligence officers suing the government, said the move against Zaid could force whistleblowers to look for other, riskier ways to call attention to their concerns.
“We shouldn’t want whistleblowers in the intelligence community going to Julian Assange,” Carroll said, referring to the founder of WikiLeaks. “We should want them going to security cleared lawyers such as Mark Zaid.”
A former national security official said the decision will hamper the Trump administration as it contends with an array of global threats, because it will be deprived of consulting with its predecessors who may have insights to share.
“It doesn’t impact the people who had clearances. It impacts the people in the government who might need to consult with them,” the former official said. “They won’t have the benefit of reaching out to former senior officials who have dealt with serious ongoing threats.”
Trump said last week he is scrapping clearances for attorneys at the prominent Washington law firm of Covington & Burling. The firm, which employs lawyers who worked for previous Democratic presidents, had assisted former special counsel Jack Smith, who led prosecutions against Trump over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
After Trump won re-election last year, both cases were dismissed. The Justice Department’s policy bars prosecuting a sitting president.
Dan De Luce
Dan De Luce is a reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit.
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[Mad Genius]

Republican glee over Musk and DOGE is a smoke screen for failed budget policy | Opinion​

President Donald Trump and the GOP spent much of his speech to Congress singing the praises of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. The applause from Congress makes sense.​

President Donald Trump and the GOP spent much of his speech to Congress last week singing the praises of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. The applause from Congress makes sense. Because while Musk isn't saving taxpayers much money, he is saving our elected leaders from doing their jobs.
I like the idea of DOGE in theory, but theory is quite different from reality. Originally, DOGE was pitched as an advisory council that would recommend spending cuts to Congress, and lawmakers would then actually cut spending within their powers.
The reality is that the commission functions with Musk having full authority to run around flipping switches without making any significant impact on the budget deficit.

But much as the Republican Party wants to claim that Musk is saving the country, DOGE is not the vessel through which America will balance a budget. Congress is – even if its members don't seem to know that yet.

Republicans cheer minor DOGE cuts while they worsen the deficit​

The real beauty of DOGE for congressional Republicans is that they can take credit for “cutting spending” while Congress worsens America’s finances at the same time.
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Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has suggested that DOGE present Congress with a $500 billion spending rescission package. That would require Musk and his advisers to follow the proper blueprint, proposing spending cuts that Congress then reviews and passes.

Opinion: Elon Musk's AI chatbot says a 'Russian asset' delivered the State of the Union
Such a process could be quite helpful for Congress and only requires a majority to pass in a way that cannot be filibustered.
Instead, congressional Republicans seem inclined to keep taking credit for DOGE’s spending cuts without actually putting in any effort to curb spending themselves. The House actually just passed a budget resolution that, despite $2 trillion in spending cuts, increases the budget deficit by as much as $3 trillion over the next decade.

Meanwhile, DOGE claims that $105 billion has been saved so far, but only $8.8 billion accounted for through its “wall of receipts.”
Outside reviews claim the savings is as little as just $2.5 billion.
Even if the DOGE topline number is to be taken at face value, $105 billion marks just 5.7% of 2024’s $1.83 trillion budget deficit.

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The cuts from DOGE won’t come anywhere close to compensating for the decreases in revenue that come as a result of the renewal of Trump’s tax cuts, the key motivation for the GOP spending packages structure. If the Senate passes the budget resolution, which has Trump’s approval, Republicans will have increased the deficit despite the aggressive cuts from Musk.
Opinion: Trump's speech was all about dodging responsibility for the economy he's crashing

Still, the GOP loves these cuts because they grab headlines and distract voters.
The United States spends money on ridiculous things, and those programs should be cut. But Congress cannot pretend that Musk is going to balance the budget himself, especially when lawmakers are making the problem worse.

Republicans love DOGE because they don't have to do their job​

As much as Trump claims he wants to balance the budget, no serious attempt to do so has even begun. Republicans will continue to take credit for Musk slashing spending on admittedly ridiculous but relatively small dollar projects.
All the while, the reality is that Congress stands by idly at times, and at other times makes the federal deficit even worse.
The typical voter doesn’t actually care about runaway spending, so long as it's on programs they approve of. This is why you only hear Republican voters complain about spending when the GOP is not in power or as a justification for spending cuts when Republicans are in power.

The GOP isn’t interested in bettering America’s finances. Republican leaders are only interested in claiming that they’re doing so, and DOGE gives Congress an excuse to continue slacking off.
Republicans can pat themselves on the back as much as they want, but it's all smoke and mirrors. Congress is doing nothing to solve the problem of the budget deficit. In fact, they’re making it worse. Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.

 

[Mad Genius]

Administrative judge who called on colleagues to ‘resist’ Trump’s ‘illegal mandates’ becomes federal worker folk hero​

BYClaire Savage and The Associated Press
March 10, 2025 at 5:29 AM CDT

Karen Ortiz, an administrative judge at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, poses for photos, on Feb. 26, 2025, in New York.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson—AP

To billionaire Elon Musk and his cost-cutting team at the Department of Government Efficiency, Karen Ortiz may just be one of many faceless bureaucrats. But to some of her colleagues, she is giving a voice to those who feel they can’t speak out.

Ortiz is an administrative judge at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — the federal agency in charge of enforcing U.S. workplace anti-discrimination laws that has undergone tumultuous change since President Donald Trump took office. Like millions of other federal employees, Ortiz opened an ominous email on Jan. 28 titled “Fork in the Road” giving them the option to resign from their positions as part of the government’s cost-cutting measures directed by Trump and carried out by DOGE under Musk, an unelected official.

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Her alarm grew when her supervisor directed administrative judges in her New York district office to pause all their current LGBTQ+ cases and send them to Washington for further review in order to comply with Trump’s executive order declaring that the government would recognize only two “immutable” sexes — male and female.
Ortiz decried management’s lack of action in response to the directive, which she said was antithetical to the EEOC’s mission, and called upon some 185 colleagues in an email to “resist” complying with “illegal mandates.” But that email was “mysteriously” deleted, she said.
The next day, after yet another frustrating “Fork in the Road” update, Ortiz decided to go big, emailing the EEOC’s acting chair Andrea Lucas directly and copying more than 1,000 colleagues with the subject line, “A Spoon is Better than a Fork.” In it, Ortiz questioned Lucas’s fitness to serve as acting chair, “much less hold a license to practice law.”
“I know I take a great personal risk in sending out this message. But, at the end of the day, my actions align with what the EEOC was charged with doing under the law,” Ortiz wrote. “I will not compromise my ethics and my duty to uphold the law. I will not cower to bullying and intimidation.”
Ortiz is just one person, but her email represents a larger pushback against the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to federal agencies amid an environment of confusion, anger and chaos. It is also Ortiz’s way of taking a stand against the leadership of a civil rights agency that last month moved to dismiss seven of its own cases representing transgender workers, marking a major departure from its prior interpretation of the law.

Right after sending her mass email, Ortiz said she received a few supportive responses from colleagues — and one calling her unprofessional. Within an hour, though, the message disappeared and she lost her ability to send any further emails.
But it still made it onto the internet. The email was recirculated on Bluesky and it received more than 10,000 “upvotes” on Reddit after someone posted it with the comment, “Wow I wish I had that courage.”
“AN AMERICAN HERO,” one Reddit user deemed Ortiz, a sentiment that was seconded by more than 2,000 upvoters. “Who is this freedom fighter bringing on the fire?” wrote another.
The EEOC did not feel the same way. The agency revoked her email privileges for about a week and issued her a written reprimand for “discourteous conduct.”
Contacted by The AP, a spokesperson for the EEOC said: “We will refrain from commenting on internal communications and personnel matters. However, we would note that the agency has a long-standing policy prohibiting unauthorized all-employee emails, and all employees were reminded of that policy recently.”
A month later, Ortiz has no regrets.

“It was not really planned out, it was just from the heart,” the 53-year-old told The Associated Press in an interview, adding that partisan politics have nothing to do with her objections and that the public deserves the EEOC’s protection, including transgender workers. “This is how I feel and I’m not pulling any punches. And I will stand by what I wrote every day of the week, all day on Sunday.”

Ortiz said she never intended for her email to go beyond the EEOC, describing it as a “love letter” to her colleagues. But, she added, “I hope that it lights a fire under people.”
Ortiz said she has received “a ton” of support privately in the month since sending her email, including a thank-you letter from a California retiree telling her to “keep the faith.” Open support among her EEOC colleagues beyond Reddit and Bluesky, however, has proven more elusive.
“I think people are just really scared,” she said.
William Resh, a University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy professor who studies how administrative structure and political environments affect civil servants, weighed in on why federal workers may choose to say nothing even if they feel their mission is being undermined.
“We can talk pie in the sky, mission orientation and all these other things. But at the end of the day, people have a paycheck to bring home, and food to put on a table and a rent to pay,” Resh said.
The more immediate danger, he said, is the threat to one’s livelihood, or inviting a manager’s ire.
“And so then that’s where you get this kind of muted response on behalf of federal employees, that you don’t see a lot of people speaking out within these positions because they don’t want to lose their job,” Resh said. “Who would?”

Richard LeClear, a U.S. Air Force veteran and EEOC staffer who is retiring early at 64 to avoid serving under the Trump administration, said Ortiz’s email was “spot on,” but added that other colleagues who agreed with her may fear speaking out themselves.
“Retaliation is a very real thing,” LeClear said.
Ortiz, who has been a federal employee for 14 years and at the EEOC for six, said she isn’t naive about the potential fallout. She has hired attorneys, and maintains that her actions are protected whistleblower activity. As of Friday, she still had a job but she is not a lifetime appointee and is aware that her health care, pension and source of income could all be at risk.
Ortiz is nonetheless steadfast: “If they fire me, I’ll find another avenue to do this kind of work, and I’ll be okay. They will have to physically march me out of the office.”
Many of Ortiz’s colleagues have children to support and protect, which puts them in a more difficult position than her to speak out, Ortiz acknowledged. She said her legal education and American citizenship also put her in a position to be able to make change.
Her parents, who came to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1950s with limited English skills, ingrained in her the value of standing up for others. Their firsthand experience with the Civil Rights Movement, and her own experience growing up in mostly white spaces in Garden City on Long Island, primed Ortiz to defend herself and others.
“It’s in my DNA,” she said. “I will use every shred of privilege that I have to lean into this.”

Ortiz received her undergraduate degree at Columbia University, and her law degree at Fordham University. She knew she wanted to become a judge ever since her high school mock trial as a Supreme Court justice.
Civil rights has been a throughline in her career, and Ortiz said she was “super excited” when she landed her job at the EEOC.
“This is how I wanted to finish up my career,” she said. “We’ll see if that happens.”

 

[Mad Genius]

Natasha Lennard
March 10 2025, 10:39 a.m.

If Trump Can Deport Mahmoud Khalil, Freedom of Speech Is Dead​

Student negotiator Mahmoud Khalil on the Columbia University campus in New York at a pro-Palestinian protest encampment on April 29, 2024. Photo: Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo
Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and green card holder, was an active participant in a political movement on his campus. The political movement called for the university to divest from arms companies and from a state deemed by the International Court of Justice to plausibly be committing genocide. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted. His role in the movement was that of negotiator and mediator with the school’s administration — that is, engaging in speech.
But Khalil is Palestinian, and the movement in question is for Palestinian freedom and against Israel’s eliminationist assault on Gaza. So, as of Saturday night, Khalil, a legal permanent resident, is being held without charge at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detention center. His attorney and his wife — a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant — were unable to find Khalil in the sprawling ICE carceral system for over 24 hours.
On Saturday night, Department of Homeland Security agents descended on Khalil’s apartment, a Columbia University-owned property near the school’s Manhattan campus. Khalil called his attorney, Amy Greer, who spoke with the agents on the phone. First, they reportedly said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke the graduate’s student visa. The attorney told them that Khalil has a green card, which Khalil’s wife produced as proof. Then, according to reports, the agent told Greer that they were revoking Khalil’s green card. The agents threatened Khalil’s pregnant wife with arrest too, and then took her husband away.
“We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” wrote U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on X on Sunday, linking to The Associated Press’s coverage of Khalil’s arrest.
There is no going back from this point: President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to deport a man solely for his First Amendment-protected activity, without due process. By all existing legal standards, this is illegal and unconstitutional: a violation of First Amendment protections, and the Fifth Amendment-protected right to due process. If Khalil’s green card is revoked and he is deported, no one can have any confidence in legal and constitutional protections as a line of defense against arbitrary state violence and punishment. Khalil’s arrest marks an extraordinary fascist escalation.

​

It is all the more vile that Khalil has been targeted for engaging in protected protest activity calling for an end to the U.S.-backed slaughter of his people. The Trump administration has consistently framed all pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist activists as Hamas supporters. It is worth stressing, though, that even if a protester did express support or sympathy for Hamas in a public speech, or on social media (and I’m not saying Khalil did), such expression is also protected by the First Amendment, a protection extended to citizens and noncitizens alike. This is settled constitutional law: The Supreme Court’s decision in Texas v. Johnson in 1989, for example, reaffirmed the principle that the First Amendment protects even the most controversial and provocative forms of speech.
Some of the only activity not protected by the First Amendment in this regard is material support for a group designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the government. What counts as “material support” has a strict legal standard — even expressing support or sympathy for a foreign terrorist organization is not included in that standard.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Zeteo’s Prem Thakker that Khalil was arrested because he “led activities aligned to Hamas.” The claim is yet another outrageous affront to First Amendment protections, which robustly include political speech and a whole host of protest activities.
Khalil has not been charged with material support for terrorism, nor any other crime. Under law, green cards cannot be summarily revoked; grounds for removal require criminal convictions for specific crimes including assault or theft, or proof of visa fraud. Green card holders facing removal are, under law, given the chance to appeal. They are not simply removed. I repeat “under law,” because Khalil’s case threatens to make that very designation irrelevant.

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The Columbia Network Pushing Behind the Scenes to Deport and Arrest Student Protesters​

The Trump administration has made a series of threats to revoke the visas of students and others involved in Palestine solidarity protests, which it consistently describes as “pro-Hamas.” Following on from President Joe Biden’s administration, Trump’s regime is committed to the dangerous conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, as a way to demonize — and criminalize — criticism of Israel. In a fact sheet accompanying the president’s executive order mendaciously titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” Trump threatened to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.”
While still a senator, Rubio recommended the use of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the secretary of state the power to revoke visas from foreigners deemed to be a threat. The very same law was used to enact racist immigrant quotas, and as a red scare weapon to deport or refuse entry to leftists like Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, among others. The law has been amended numerous times since, in efforts to limit its authoritarian and racist uses. With the 1990 Immigration Act, for example, Congress prohibited as grounds for excluding immigrants from the U.S. “advocacy or publication of communist or other subversive views or materials.” Stated plainly: It’s illegal under congressional statute and the Constitution to remove someone from the country due to political speech.

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Rubio’s own comments show he seeks to revive the Immigration and Nationality Act’s most harmful form. Just one week after Hamas’s October 7 attack, Rubio invoked the law in a Fox News interview as grounds for deporting pro-Palestine protesters, and posted on X: “Cancel the visa of every foreign national out there supporting Hamas and get them out of America.” Now Rubio is secretary of state and committing in words and deeds to his illegal deportation agenda.
There’s little use in simply pointing to the law, even the Constitution, to oppose these authoritarians. Republicans are well versed in forging new legal realities through force and violence. Legal protections cannot be assumed; they need fighting for, or they simply will not hold. Establishment Democrats and institutions like Columbia University have helped bring us to this grim watershed moment. Every institution that treated support for Palestinian lives and condemnation of Israel’s genocidal war as antisemitic and terroristic laid the ground for Trump’s wholesale attack on basic speech rights.


Read our complete coverage

Israel’s War on Gaza​

Palestine solidarity activists and anti-colonial thinkers have long made clear that a government willing to prosecute a genocidal war abroad, as the U.S. has, has no problem enacting exclusionary, discriminatory violence at home. This is not new; these are the inherent contradictions of a purported democracy engaged in colonial domination. It should not take the illegal detention of another Palestinian to expose this, but here we are.

“Who’s next? Citizens?”

“This is unacceptable. Deporting legal residents solely for expressing their political opinions is a violation of free speech rights,” wrote Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. “Who’s next? Citizens?”
For those of you with any investment in the protection of basic rights and legal protections — in the defense of any shred of democracy against authoritarian rule — the fight to free Khalil and maintain his legal status is your fight too.
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