The Debate Link

Usually it really is just a little bit. Barely noticeable. But it's present -- like a little Geiger counter that crackles in the background (and periodically spikes with serious danger).

We had our first trip with Nathaniel to urgent care today. That sounds more serious than it is -- his daycare sent him home because he had a rash, and we needed a doctor to check him out before he was cleared to return. Turns out, he has Hand Foot and Mouth Disease (which is what we thought it was) -- perhaps the least serious childhood ailment out there, other than it being extremely contagious. To be honest, Nathaniel barely seemed bothered by it (when is he ever?).

And yet, as we were waiting in the doctor's office and I watched Nathaniel happily crawl and climb about, I looked at the splotchy red marks on his face and thighs and a tiny part of me thought -- could it be measles? Not that I know anything about measles, other than we had eradicated it and thanks to the anti-vaxx conspiracism of the GOP it's back. But that's that little bit of fear lurking in the background.

Meanwhile, also as we were waiting, I was reading about immigration agents shooting two people in Portland, shortly after ICE agents in Minneapolis orphaned a six-year-old boy. On the Portland shooting, someone remarked that the address was right by their own child's daycare, and then glumly remarked that soon all of us will have the story of the ICE shooting or kidnapping or violence that occurred "right by where we do [X]." We always like to talk about those "little bits of human connection" like they're a good thing, but sometimes what they do is emphasize "it could've been us."

I'm not unreasonable; I know the Geiger counter of fear would have always been there; it isn't an artifact of this administration. But it certainly is the case that the counter is crackled louder than it otherwise would, because our own government is intent on terrorizing the citizenry.

For example, few can forget the ADL's fulsome praise when the Trump administration unlawfully seized pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Kahlil and tried to place him in a lawless pit. In terms of values, it was transparently appalling. And yet, as pure, cold-hearted tactical thinking, it was somehow even worse. At a time where antisemitism is at a historic ascendence, the ADL's bold strategic pivot is to cut itself off from its historic allies, abandon its longstanding principles, and proudly declare it's every man for themselves. Can anyone guess why that might not be a winning play for a minority community representing less than 3% of the American population?

The underlying assumption, incredibly, seems to be that the Trump administration will be a reliable and steadfast force against antisemitism (remember: Jonathan Greenblatt fundamentally trusts Donald Trump). Anyone with a pulse could have told you this was a sucker's bet, but somehow the American Jewish community's premier advocacy org went all in on it.

And lo and behold: as explicit right-wing antisemitism continues its rise to dominate mainstream conservative institutions, the brief period where the Trump administration even pretends to care about "fighting antisemitism" is snapping shut in favor of stepping up the xenophobic racism even further. The latest development here is the decision to place travel sanctions on several European-based media monitors combatting hate and misinformation, many of whom cut their teeth fighting antisemitism in cyberspace. Indeed, one of the targets, Imran Ahmed (who actually is an American permanent resident), was most well known for trying to flag instances of left-wing antisemitism. Ironically enough, his lawyers are comparing his case to that of Kahlil -- both unified by the Trump administration targeting immigrants for arbitrary arrest, detention, and deportation on the basis of their speech.

In their complaint, Mr. Ahmed’s lawyers likened his case to those of other foreign nationals who have been targeted, such as Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and legal permanent resident whom the Trump administration has sought to deport over his pro-Palestinian comments and activism that the administration equated with “antisemitic hate.”

For his part, Mr. Ahmed has said his organization was founded to look into the growth of antisemitism on the political left. He was among the activists who spoke about how to combat online antisemitism at a 2020 State Department conference during the first Trump administration. 

Who could have predicted that an administration dedicated to empowering racists and bigots of all stripes would use its claimed powers of arbitrary arrest and detention to help racists and bigots? (Everyone. Everyone could). 

And while there is some irony in Ahmed tying his case to Kahlil, the comparison between the two is an apt one. If nothing else it demonstrates that the bedrock motivator for the Trump administration is clearly and obviously not "fighting antisemitism" (or even a highly stipulated and partial "antisemitism" found only among the political left). The unifying thread is a desire to terrorize immigrants and create an open space for racism and White nationalism to spread. There was a brief window where the administration found "antisemitism" a useful fig leaf for its fascism, but that period is most certainly closed, and anyone who was gullible enough to believe it genuine in the first place should have the dignity to hide in shame forever.

I termed this dynamic "partial racial politics". Far from representing a near per se rule against de jure wielding of race, the actual doctrine is that "government can legislate on race freely, except when it expressly seeks to combat ongoing racial inequality." "Suspect classification doctrine is a vestigial artifact that only comes into play when racial minorities appear to be winning the political game." The government relying on race to cut off Black communities from White neighborhoods, or to decide who to execute? Supposed "strict scrutiny" falls silent. Too many minority students going to college, or voting, or entering into political office? Then strict scrutiny and a commitment to radical colorblindness suddenly comes roaring back.

I wrote that article, again, in 2016, and while living in California. I presented it in Louisiana, where one bit of pushback was basically to argue that the risks of giving up suspect classification for race look different in California versus Louisiana. Just how confident was I, really, that suspect classification doctrine was no longer deterring any sort of racist legislation? Who knows what sorts of White supremacist malice would be unleashed if the "democratic" branches were unshackled once more?

Today, in a typical unreasoned shadow docket opinion, the Supreme Court (by a likely 6-3 vote) cleared the Trump administration to use racial profiling as part of its immigration enforcement raids. Racial background can validly be part of the basis for forming reasonable suspicion that a person is in the United States without legal documentation. The only Justice to write substantively in defense of this atrocity was Justice Kavanaugh, who suggested that undocumented immigrants have no legally protected interest in "evading questioning" and documented immigrants and U.S. citizens suffer no material injury because "the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States." What's a little race-based "stop and show me your papers" in the land of the free?

I look at today's decision, and I can't decide whether the conclusion to my 2016 paper was correct. On the one hand, the Court since then has grown only more aggressive in declaring an implacable commitment to colorblindness in the aforementioned circumstances of too many Black and brown people going to school or voting. The juxtaposition of those commitments, chest-thumpingly backed by an ironclad commitment to "colorblindness", against the willingness to sanction "color-consciousness" when it is deployed as a tool to terrorize immigrants (or those suspected of being immigrants, or those the government simply wants to terrorize under the guise of regulating immigration), seems to be a crystalline manifestation of the "partial racial politics" dynamic I identified in my article.

And yet, my Louisiana interlocutor's critique also feels more salient than ever before. In a 2025 where the government is not even nominally constrained from race-based policymaking, what horrors lie just beneath the surface, waiting to emerge? It somehow seems to simultaneously be true that the Supreme Court is doing nothing to stop (indeed, is the handmaiden of) the tidal wave of White supremacist fury crashing over the polity, and also that if we explicitly told the federal judiciary to butt out things could only get worse -- and worse in ways so terrifying I struggle to name them.

I don't have a resolution to this dilemma. We live in impossible times, where nakedly White Supremacist Senators align with a White Supremacist presidency and a White Supremacist Supreme Court to wage war on American constitutional liberty. Against this onslaught, what doctrine could ever hope to save us?

I've been thinking of antebellum precedents myself recently, albeit in response to a different issue: the new propensity of ICE and other federal police agencies to refuse to clearly identify themselves before purporting to make immigration-related arrests, and the corresponding rise in "ICE impersonator" events where criminals and scammers impersonate the agency to victimize vulnerable communities. What we are seeing, again and again, are police actions that to an immediate observer look indistinguishable from a kidnapping, abduction, or carjacking. On the one hand, this indistinguishability heightens Americans' vulnerability to violent crime; on the other hand, the adoption of these thuggish tactics by the police is itself rightly seen as an attempt to leverage terror against the population. Responsible states and cities should not cooperate in this project, and indeed they should take whatever steps they can to resist it.

In the antebellum era, many northern states passed "Personal Liberty Laws" to blunt the effect of a different exercise of state-sponsored abductions: the Fugitive Slave Act. My proposal is for a new "Personal Liberty Law", that takes the form of directing how state and local police should respond* if they witness what appears to be a kidnapping, abduction, or the like. In essence, the policy should be as follows: 

• Where the police witness what appears to be an abduction, they should assume it is an unlawful abduction and respond accordingly (including with use of appropriate force) unless they have actual knowledge that the detention is occurring under lawful authority (i.e., is an actual police operation).
• "Actual knowledge" can include advance knowledge (in cases of coordination), or conspicuous display of law enforcement identification (such as a badge, or the use of marked police vehicles).
• "Actual knowledge" does not include mere verbal or written declarations (including clothing labels) that the putative kidnapper is a member of any particular police agency, as such declarations are too easily fabricated.

The trip was amazing -- first and foremost because Nathaniel was an absolute rockstar who had no trouble with the nine-hour flight and is apparently immune to jet lag (unlike his parents). Highlights of the trip include going to Tate Modern, doing a gallery walk in Mayfair, and seeing Operation Mincemeat in the West End. It really is the sort of trip that will be a lifelong memory.

But now that I'm back, I do want to temper that happiness with a bit of a dark cloud.

Before I left, I found myself thinking -- seriously -- about information security. Do I bring my normal cellphone? Do I bring my laptop? If so, do I delete any sensitive files, or refrain from posting controversial content while I'm away?

These thoughts, of course, were triggered by the high-profile stories of the USCBP's new MAGA marching orders, which have captured U.S. citizens in their draconian talons. Even among citizens, I certainly knew I wasn't the most likely target, but there were certainly elements of my profile (anti-Trump, academic, Jewish but averse to Trump's putative anti-antisemitism initiatives) that at least mildly elevated my risk factors.

Ultimately, I didn't do much differently -- packed my laptop in my checked bags, turned off my phone on arrival, and mostly refrained from social media posting while I was gone. And, unsurprisingly, my reentry into the U.S. was entirely unremarkable and smooth aside from an annoying long line -- no odd questions (to say nothing of detention).

But even still, I think I can fairly say that it is a bad thing I'm even thinking along those lines -- that my own government might snatch me away for no other reason than my political opinions and drop me off to fester in a lawless pit. And I can honestly say that this is a thought I've never had before in any prior administration, including Trump I (to say nothing of Biden, Obama, or Bush). Of course, there are those who have had these worries with far more grounded basis for far longer than I have; I'm not trying to minimize that. My point is only that we should identify the spread of these sentiments as a klaxon warning sign that the democratic freedoms we take for granted are fading. And even if you don't think of yourself as among the "usual" targets, your mundanity will not save you.

Even in fascist states, for the most part most people aren't being snatched off the street most of the time. When typifies the oppressive regime is not the experience of being snatched, but the constant ambient worry that it's a possibility. That worry is not one I have experienced until now -- indeed, not experiencing it is something I had taken for granted until now -- and it's not a good or healthy sign of the vitality of our democracy that I'm feeling it now.

Nothing came of the article, of course. It was viewed as an amusing exercise and a bit of provocation; a way of seeing how one could play with various legal principles and arguments to reach absurd results while still staying nominally inside the rules of the game. Their follow-up article, "Is West Virginia Unconstitutional", was similarly silly, fun, provocative, and obviously not ever pursued.

I am not here to say those articles should not have been written. To the contrary, I think that in a healthy legal climate, articles like these are fantastic. They're like avant-garde art -- they push boundaries, get readers to think in new ways, and provoke thought and discussion even as they are ultimately recognized as impractical and nonstarters. We should not divvy up Texas, and we should not abolish West Virginia, but those articles still were fun to read and had a lot to teach us.

But in an unhealthy legal climate, where norms are routinely shattered and long-standing legal limits are crumbling at alarming speed, this sort of play must be set aside. What in other times might be playful and provocative takes on a very different tenor when serious (or at least powerful) people are taking everything seriously.

I'm referring, of course, to the spate of right-wing scholars who responded to Donald Trump's attempted suspension of the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship by sprinting as fast as possible to "make the case" for it. The resulting endeavors were an embarrassing display of openly prostituting oneself to their dearest leader: starting with half-cocked tweets before moving to half-baked op-eds and blogposts, and now one of their half-completed essays is apparently being published in the Notre Dame Law Review.

As earnest scholarship, this is all transparent bullshit -- it's blindingly, painfully, shamefully obvious that the whole bit is purely results-oriented, designed to "create a debate" where none actually existed. The "best" category one could slot it into is in the mode of the playful provocations above -- can one, while appearing to stay nominally inside the rules of the game, dislodge a longstanding presumption of constitutional law everyone has taken for granted? If one can pull it off, isn't one roguish and rakish and a dashing flouter of the status quo? 

But in times like these, that "play" -- isn't. It's not charming, or funny, or quirky, or even thought-provoking. We are not in time where we enjoy the luxury of indulging in such play, because it isn't actually play at all -- it is a terrifyingly live possibility that countless American citizens will be summarily denaturalized and placed at the mercy of the state.

A few years ago, I wrote about certain right-wing ideologues who were upset that, as their faction of nationalist-conservatism ascended in power, they were no longer treated with the tolerant patience that they enjoyed in their formative years as plucky little law students. "You’re fine when you’re just a yappy little dog that can’t bite," one said, but "if you grow up to be a big dog that can actually do stuff, then you’re probably going to be put down." They framed this as a story of liberal intolerance. But it's actually exactly how things are supposed to go -- the whole point of liberal tolerance is that we're willing to discuss a lot more than we're willing to endorse as actual lived policy. We can read and consider and have serious debates over the ideas of Lenin in a political theory class precisely because there's a background presumption that Leninism isn't coming back. But

if the Leninists actually start seizing political power and instituting the purges, that would be bad! And if they said, "Oh, it was fine to debate our ideas in the classroom, but now that we're actually in charge and establishing gulags you have a problem with it," well, yeah, I do! Clearly! 

Again, I greatly prefer the days where we could be more indulgent. It's a much more vibrant and enjoyable world to be in. It's fun to play with the avant-garde sometimes. It's much nicer to contemplate "messing with Texas" as a thought experiment when we're all reasonably confident it isn't actually on the table.

But we're not in that world right now. And the "scholars" who are making play with people's lives -- not as a thought experiment, not as a hypothetical, but in a very real way with very real stakes -- don't deserve our respect or indulgence. In these times, we must lay aside our toys.

I know nothing about Kahlil personally or his involvement in the protests (I've seen differing accounts of his role, but I haven't dug deeper because it honestly doesn't matter right now). And on a moral level, so much of what happened here sickens me. It sickens me that a permanent resident could be summarily snatched from his home and detained in clear retaliation for his expression. It sickens me that Jewish organizations putatively "fighting antisemitism" appeared to have played a direct role in his arrest. It sickens me that the ADL has fulsomely praised the operation, tacitly endorsing draconian anti-immigrant legislation that in a prior life it recognized as "the worst kind of legislation, discriminatory and abusive of American concepts and ideals" (I am heartened that other Jewish groups are speaking out against it). It sickens me to see Trump use the word "shalom" as a taunt. It sickens me to witness people trying to argue that this is ultimately Columbia's fault for not cracking down on the protests more aggressively, as if there is some straight line between potential underenforcment of the student codes of conduct and arbitrary arrest and deportation (news flash: university disciplinary issues -- even if you think they're mishandled -- should not be seen as deportable offenses!). 

And finally, it sickens me to see folks trying to finesse the issue by adopting a "well, let's see what the courts say before we rush to judgment" handwash. Partially, that's a problem because the entire seizure of Kahlil is a sterling example of the Queen of Hearts' justice: "sentence first, verdict later." If you've got Kahlil on a deportable offense, go through the legal process and prove it; don't start with the obviously speech-motivated arrest and then after the fact grope around for some figleaf of a legal justification. Everyone and their mother knows that whatever legal argument gets dredged up will be a pretext; the Trump administration is not remotely hiding the fact that it is targeting Kahlil for his speech.

But the bigger problem with waiting for the process of law to take its course is that I don't think people fully realize what a legal blackhole immigration law truly is.

I am not an immigration lawyer. But I do have some experience with immigration law, mostly during my judicial clerkship. My assessment of immigration law following that year can be summarized in two parts: (1) it was some of the most meaningful and impactful work I did, and (2) I never, ever wanted to be involved in it again. The explanation behind both halves of that equation is one and the same: immigration felt like a lawless pit. Our immigration law and doctrine is supersaturated with opportunities for governmental abuse that is largely immunized from any sort of meaningful review. To anyone with a passing familiarity with this system, it is outlandish to assert that our immigration system is too generous to migrants. Our immigration system is cruel, and arbitrary, and unfair, and in many respects essentially lawless. I was involved with it for a very limited amount of time, and to a very limited extent, and it still traumatized me in ways I continue to feel to this day.

So when I read Steve Vladeck's assessment of actual legal questions surrounding Mahmoud Kahlil's detention, I was not surprised, but I was alarmed. Vladeck does not argue that Kahlil's detention is lawful. But he does think it is not as clearly unlawful as is being asserted. The reason why, to be clear, is not that the Trump administration has some secret reasonable argument that's been occluded by the media firestorm. It's that our immigration law is so stacked with vague and abusive rules and dangerously deferential precedents that even misconduct as egregious as this might not be clearly forbidden. The lawless pit holding Mahmoud Kahlil is not something new. The Trump administration might be more brazen in exploiting these opportunities for abuse, but doctrinally speaking it had many tools lying around waiting to be picked up.

Indeed, one interesting thing about Kahlil's case is that it demonstrates a fascinating and underappreciated bivalence in the political salience of pro-Palestinian advocacy. On the one hand, it is very clear that Kahlil was targeted and made vulnerable by virtue of his pro-Palestinian speech. However, it is also clearly true that Kahlil's situation has mobilized and galvanized popular attention also by virtue of the fact that his case involves pro-Palestinian speech. Kahlil's case more clearly demonstrates both the distinct vulnerability but also the distinct power held by pro-Palestinian advocates I can remember in quite some time.

Again, the core problem of abuse in our immigration system -- the ability to arbitrarily and (functionally) lawlessly detain and deport immigrants for any reason or none at all -- is nothing new. I'm sure immigration activists could hand you hundreds or thousands of comparable stories of lawful residents snatched and detained for the most absurd or malicious of reasons. And while I have little doubt that most persons protesting on Kahlil's behalf would, if you gave them those stories, express genuine outrage over them as well, there's little doubt that the reason this abuse and this outrage captured public attention in the way that it did was because it involves an attempt to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, specifically.

This, to be clear, is not a bad thing. It is a good thing -- anything that encourages people to recognize the wild, lawless abuses latent in our immigration system generally and in the Trump administration's enforcement specifically is a good thing. But it is worth noting the more complex relationship with power that is being demonstrated here. Mahmoud Kahlil's story is about how the Trump administration feels empowered to destroy the lives of pro-Palestinian advocates by any means necessary; it also (sickeningly) is a story about how some Jewish organizations are cheering on the project. But it is also a story about how a connection to Israel/Palestine makes people care about things more often and more intensely than they often otherwise would. That is expression of power, and one that has implications that go well beyond this case.

The point of the story is to impress the fundamental impersonality of war. Who lives, who dies -- there's nothing special about it. The bullet or bomb or rocket doesn't care about you; the person firing it doesn't care about you either. In 99.9% of cases, it has nothing to do with you in any meaningful sense. We have for ourselves a thick understanding of our own choices and values and importance, but none of that really plays any role in who gets hurt. The bullet that comes for us almost certainly will not have our "name on it".

At one level, this outlook is a corrective to main character syndrome, where we all imagine ourselves to be very special indeed, and so the reasons good or bad things happen to us relate to our specialness and our special choices. The bullet is inscribed with my name because I made distinctive choices which made someone take notice of me and decide to specifically take me out. 

But at another level, this saying is also about undermining a sense of security based around our own ordinariness. In many respects, most of us I think don't imagine ourselves as "special". We don't stand out, we don't see ourselves as making some sort of radical or impactful choice that would cause someone else to go to the trouble of crafting a bullet specially for us. I'm just a regular guy, doing ordinary things. There's nothing special about me, so why would anyone bother to target me, of all the people in the world? And the answer is that maybe they wouldn't -- but the shrapnel marked "occupant" is distinguished precisely because it doesn't bother to target at all. Your mundanity will not save you.

I've been thinking about all of this in relation to my own coping mechanisms as I envision what the future might hold over the next four years. One mode of "reassurance" is to tell oneself that Trump and Trumpists aren't really going to go after me; they are targeting other, more distinctive communities (such an immigrants, or trans individuals). Of course, this cope might not even be right on its own terms (it's entirely plausible he will target, e.g., Jewish college professors). And to the extent it is right, even thinking this way wracks me with guilt -- "I feel better knowing it's others who will be hurt".

But there's a more fundamental problem at work here. Finding reassurance in terms of who is likely to be "targeted" tries to find security in normalcy and ordinariness. It's that notion of "I'm just a regular guy, I'm doing nothing special or out of the ordinary -- why would anyone bother to come after me?" And again, I think that self-conception is incredibly common. Some of you might have seen interviews with undocumented immigrants who claimed that, if they could vote, they would have backed Trump. This feels inconceivable -- how could they do that, when Trump says he wants to enforce their deportation en masse? The answer they give is basically: "he's not talking about me." Why would he be? I'm just trying to work hard and build a better life for my family. He must be talking about the criminals and the rapists and the predators. I'm just a normal guy, doing normal things. There's no reason why someone would go through so much trouble just to hurt me.

This in-depth story from a few months ago, about a trans girl in Florida who was on her middle school's volleyball team, hits a similar theme. The reassurance her mother tried to draw on was entirely centered around her daughter's ordinary mundaneness -- she's just a regular tween, going through normal adolescent experiences, who wants to play a sport. She's not even an especially good volleyball player! Who could be bothered to care about something so fundamentally normal?

Of course, it doesn't work. Her normalcy doesn't save her. Now certainly, in the Florida case one could say that this kid absolutely was personally targeted (the article suggests there were only two trans female athletes in the entire state at the time). The school board, the police, and so on -- they very much went after her when they found out she was trans and participating in public school athletics. But in a truer sense, I don't think it's accurate to say that what happened had anything to do with "her" at all. She is better described as the victim of the GOP's saturation bombing directed at the trans community, broadly; a campaign that self-consciously does not care about any of its victims as individuals. It's not about her. She's simply the occupant.

If one wants to catastrophize further, I sometimes think about what would happen if our newly-elected overlords got us into a global hot war (Trump's pick for Secretary of Defense is a Fox News personality who openly promoted the idea of a first strike attack on North Korea). It feels, and some sense is, cosmically unfair that such a war would effect me. What do I have to do with anything? I didn't vote for this! I think this whole thing is stupid! But what's true for soldiers is even more true for civilians caught in war zones -- we're all just regular people, and our regularity simply does not matter (this insight applies to other civilians who are actually, and not just hypothetically, stuck in actual war zones right now). If the rockets start raining down on Portland, it will do me no good to call out to them and say "I had nothing to do with us -- go over there!" They in no way will have my name on them, and they will  nonetheless be implacably indifferent to me.

Perhaps the moral of the story, then, is to not be afraid to stand up. Your normalcy, your ordinariness won't save you. Maybe it should, but it won't. It may or may not surprise you to know that this conclusion is very hard for me to grasp onto. I actually don't have any desire to stand out, I'm not looking to present a visage one cannot look away from. I'm fine doing "ordinary" politics and writing and participation, but I have no desire to be special beyond that. My fondest wish is that the world leave me alone and I leave it alone in turn.

But that probably isn't going to be an option. Someone like me may or may not be directly targeted for abuse and oppression -- as a Jew, as an academic, or as a Democrat. But targeted or no, there's always the chance that some shrapnel will find me as an "occupant". I don't think of myself as particularly special or distinct, I have no illusions that I represent some critical node in the Resistance to Trumpist oppression. I'm just a regular, normal guy. But normalcy will not keep me safe.

There has, however, been a modest update to this story, which I found a bit more heartening. The actual Jews in Springfield (it's a small community; this Rabbi commutes from Columbus) made clear that they did not endorse or accept these sentiments. They pushed their Rabbi to do better -- to issue an apology, to acknowledge his lack of knowledge of the actual circumstances of both the community and of their new Haitian neighbors, and to meet with representatives of the Haitian community,

“I was not well-informed on the situation with the Haitian immigrants,” [Rabbi Cary] Kozberg said. “Since the interview, I have learned much more about the immigration situation in Springfield. My opinions have definitely been modified.”

Kozberg made his statement alongside Temple Sholom’s president, Laurie Leventhal, who told the Observer that her rabbi made a “mistake” and would be pursuing teshuvah, or the Jewish process of repentance.

“We are not giving him a pass,” Leventhal said. “He has asked lots of questions and learned lots of stuff about what’s going on in Springfield, and he has changed his views. And that is how human beings grow. And that is what we are about. And I hope that you will not go on a witch-hunt and take a situation in a city that is so hurting and make it worse.”

This was coupled by additional moves by area Jewish organizations to express support for the Haitian community:

Viles Dorsainvil, a local Haitian community leader in Springfield and the executive director of the Haitian Community Health and Support Center, told JTA on Monday he hadn’t been aware of Kozberg’s comments and hasn’t received any communication from the rabbi. But he said he had been glad to receive a letter of support from the Dayton Jewish Federation, which the federation had sent to him on the same day JTA published Kozberg’s interview.

In their letter, the federation heads introduced themselves as “your Jewish neighbors to the west” and added, “It is a core tenet of our faith to ‘welcome the stranger.’ We, along with so many others of different faiths and cultures, whose ancestors made this journey before you over the decades, support your quest, and welcome you. We are sending all our virtual thoughts of goodwill your way, including our prayers for your safety.”

The letter was touching, Dorsainvil said. “We’re so happy that the Jewish community in Dayton reached out to us,” he said, adding that he, too, saw similarities between what Jewish immigrants to the United States experienced in the past and what Haitian migrants are currently experiencing. 

I'm not asking anyone to give Kozberg a prize here. For one, he hasn't really done anything yet. I'd also suggest that "Most people don’t know me as a racist" doesn't quite communicate the sentiment that Kozberg I think is trying to get across. And even amongst his congregants, there is a split between those who think his apology is "genuine", and those who more circumspectly "hope" that it is. The local Jewish news coverage indicates that Kozberg maybe has a bit more of a self-pitying streak than might otherwise be let on, quoting him repeatedly suggesting that the initial interview he did was a "politicized" and "taken out of context." I'd also note the congregation, even as they recoil against his "racist" statements, is standing by him as their Rabbi -- noting that they have a thirty-year history they're looking across whereas all the rest of us are only accounting for this past week. It is a fair note, and one that I hope we can remember with regard to other potential instances where someone imbricated in a particular small community spikes to prominence for acts of (real, genuine) bigotry and is not immediately met with exile.

But on the whole, what I'm really flagging and really heartened by is not Kozberg but the Springfield Jewish community. When someone they loved and who they were close to and who was their leader stepped out, they stepped up. They demanded accountability. They used their own voices to try and set things right. It's never fully possible to make these wounds whole. But I've seen far, far worse attempts than this, and I hope the project of Teshuva and repair continues to make amends and build new bonds in Springfield.

But there is a particular aspect of the racism we're seeing here that particularly resonated with me as a Jew -- the frenetic scouring to find anything and everything that "proves" the conspiracies right, or at least justified. In the Ohio case, this reached a comical (if anything about this could be comical) apex when Christopher Rufo offered a bounty to prove the "Haitians in Springfield are eating cats" conspiracy correct and then started crowing over a video of not-Haitians in Toledo Dayton grilling chicken. But other examples abound (although at least J.D. Vance had the "decency" to admit he was simply making things up). Far, far too many Republicans response to blatant acts of hatred is to cast far and wide for something that makes the hatred feel palatable.

As a reasonably public-facing Jewish professor, I frequently idly wonder if I'll be targeted by some sort of antisemitic attack. Mostly, it doesn't happen. Occasionally, it does; though in my case never in such a fashion that would explode into the public view. But if an "incident" did happen -- someone graffitied my office door, for instance -- I am absolutely sure that a certain cadre of online folk would immediately begin pouring over my collection of writings to find anything they possibly could to explain why I'm a legitimate target. That knowledge -- less that something could happen, and more that if it did I'd be the one scrutinized to hell and back, with the most gimlet eye and uncharitable gaze -- is perhaps what stresses me the most. I do not think I am alone amongst Jews in feeling this way; hyperpoliced at every turn to justify ex post facto a judgment that has been handed down in advance.

By all objective accounts, the Haitian community in Springfield has been a boon to an erstwhile struggling city. But they are not universal saints, any more than anyone else is -- if one places them under a powerful enough lens, one will of course be able to find something or someone butting up against the social compact (though not, I'd wager, stealing and eating pets). No group can maintain a perfect record under that sort of scrutiny. And the knowledge that one is under that microscope is just exhausting. It's exhausting right alongside the more direct anxiety and misery of being directly subjected to acts of hate and bigotry.

The people responsible for this have no shame, so I won't bother to say they should be ashamed. But no good person should feel anything other than contempt for this latest dose of bigotry.

Despite it featuring in Donald Trump's disastrous debate performance on Tuesday, Republicans appear to be committing to "immigrants are eating your pets!" as a central part of their campaign message. What a wild time to live in.

One thing I've heard in response to this is that "cat eating" is just the GOP version of the "J.D. Vance fucks couches" meme that bounced around the liberal blogosphere a few weeks ago. In either case, the argument went, it was a "humorous" falsehood that speaks to an overall decay in our informational climate, and so if you're uncomfortable with the one, you have no grounds to justify the other.

This comparison seems too cute. For starters, as others have noted, one extremely important difference between the two memes is that nobody is worried about extremists deciding to go out and terrorize Ikea shoppers based on misinformation about sofa sex acts occurring therein. That alone is enough to work as a distinction.

But also, the more fundamental difference is that nobody -- left, right, or center -- ever purported to believe J.D. Vance actually had sex with couches. It was self-conscious absurdism from the get-go. If there was a progressive out there who earnestly, genuinely believed J.D. Vance copulated with a couch, that person would be viewed with contempt by everyone else sharing the meme -- it was not meant to be believed, and there was no effort to make it something that would be believed.

By contrast, conservatives can't quite decide whether they believe the "cat eating" stories are real or not. The neo-Nazis who initially promulgated the claim certainly hoped and expected people would believe it. And Vance himself described the potential truth of the claim in deliberately waffling fashion "It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false" -- a formulation which indicates a comparably strong possibility that these "rumors" are in fact true. Comparing the two "stories" is like saying an Onion article and 2024 election trutherism are both examples of "misinformation".

What we're seeing from the right here isn't self-conscious absurdism but rather a sort of empirical edgelording -- dancing around the edge of "do I believe it/am I joking" to try and get the best of all worlds. If the listener is shocked, then they're just messing around; if the listener buys in, well, then they're being totally serious. People often cite Sartre's remarks on the way Nazis like to "play" with words, but the comparison that immediately jumped to my mind is Nelly suggesting to a female friend that he has a "pole in the basement". The shocked "what?" from said friend is met with "I'm just kiddin' ... Unless you're gon' do it." It's not a serious statement, except for those who take it seriously. 

The irony, though, is that precisely because Republicans can't fully commit to "cat eating" being obviously made up, it can't serve the function they want from it -- which is to be the counter to the "Republicans are weird" narrative Democrats have been so effectively impressing upon them (and of which couch fucking was a satirical encapsulation of). They're hoping for "you think we're weird -- well you eat cats!" The problem, though, is that the sort of person who actually thinks (or even is unsure) whether gangs of immigrants are abducting and devouring household pets in Ohio is ... a weird person! That is a weird thing to think, and it comes off as a weird thing to think. When Donald Trump publicly promotes cat-eating conspiracies in a debate, the response isn't "ooh, what a great zinger", it's "what on earth is he babbling about?" If you're not already in the fever swamp, it's a line that just reinforces that Trump is profoundly abnormal. He actually seems to believe too many things that regular Americans, at a gut-level, view as ridiculous.

Today's Republicans may be alarmingly good at stoking hate and fear and xenophobia. But they are very bad at avoiding being weird. Their commitment to spreading absurd nonsense about immigrants eating pets, more than anything else, just accentuates that weirdness.

It's dead-on-arrival in the Senate, and rightfully so, but we need to reiterate just how pathetic and embarrassing this was. It was embarrassing when it failed the first time, and it's embarrassing that it succeeded the second time. The nominal complaint -- that Mayorkas isn't enforcing border policy to Republicans liking -- is not only not an impeachable offense (except insofar as Republicans believe it's unconstitutional for them to lose elections, which appears to be increasingly their consensus view), but it's doubly-embarrassing to blame Mayorkas for inaction on the border given that congressional Republicans can't even pass their own bill on the border because they think doing so will help Biden in the next election (and because actual policymaking, unlike endless stunt investigations, requires actual position-taking). Republicans dealing with the fact that they are too chaotic and incompetent to even have, let alone enact, an agenda on the issue they say is a Crisis Invasion Destroying America!!1!!1! by impeaching a Democrat is the latest example of the crippling infantilization that has completely overtaken the party.

The fiasco did give me a chance to call my Republican congressional representative, Lori Chavez-Deremer (R-OR), and Be Mad At Her, but to by honest my heart wasn't fully in it this time. I genuinely don't understand why Chavez-Deremer even wants to be in Congress at this point. She's not doing anything there -- she's certainly not legislating -- she just mindlessly nods along with whatever ridiculous circus show her more creative MAGA colleagues decide to put forward in any given week. One would think she could do the same thing much more remuneratively as a talk radio host, and with any luck after the next election she'll get that opportunity. 

[Image: NYT]

We've just concluded our semester here at Lewis & Clark -- it's now "reading days" as students prepare for exams. I've already written my exam, so I'm going to use this time to clear some tabs off my browser. It's a roundup!

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My latest article, "Liberal Jews and Religious Liberty," has been published in the N.Y.U. Law Review. It's good -- you should read it!

Standing Together is a joint Jewish-Arab Israeli group with a simple idea: under any future for Israel and Palestine, Jews and Arabs are going to have to live together. So no matter what your plan is for the future of Israel and Palestine, we have to start laying the foundations for mutual co-existence now. In that vein, organizational co-head Sally Abed, a Palestinian feminist socialist, had a message for the way international leftists are talking about current goings-on in Israel and Palestine: "If it's not helping, then shut the fuck up." I already posted a link to this on BlueSky and it basically went viral, but it's worth being memorialized here (and the entire piece is worth reading).

It's not surprising that Arab-Americans are reacting negatively to the Biden administration's policies regarding the Israel/Hamas war, but it may be surprising that more Arab-Americans now identify as Republicans than Democrats. That said, maybe not that surprising -- up through the 1990s, Arab-Americans were a swingy but lean-GOP voting bloc. And that makes sense when you think about it: it's a relatively socially conservative and comparatively affluent community; there's plenty of room for GOP appeal. 9/11 changed things dramatically, and one might think that continued rampant anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia would make the GOP brand toxic today. But between frustration with Democrats' continued pro-Israel stances and a backlash against socially liberal policies, there does seem to be an at least momentary shift back towards the Republican camp. We'll see if it holds through 2024.

I don't speak German so I can't backcheck the cited study, but this post claims that antisemitism is on the rise in Austria's Turkish- and Arabic-speaking communities ... but that rates are actually higher amongst persons who were born in Austria or lived there for some time compared to new immigrant arrivals. So far from validating the "imported antisemitism" narrative, the problem perhaps is that immigrants are assimilating a bit too well into traditional Austrian culture.

A sometimes-overlooked variable in the Israel/Hamas conflict is that most neighboring Arab states are not fans of Hamas either, viewing it as a destabilizing influence. Though Hamas' threat isn't as immediate to them as it is to Israel, it definitely still poses a threat. So there is quiet pressure emerging from Arab nations on Hamas to "disarm before it is destroyed."

Mark Harris is much, much more empathetic towards folks tearing down posters of Israeli hostages than I am, but in some ways that makes this essay -- documenting the sense of abandonment such an act generates amongst the Jews who see it -- even more powerful.

Tom Friedman has a great column from a few weeks ago on the "rescuers" in the Israeli Arab community who helped save their compatriots in the midst of Hamas' 10/7 attack.

I first heard about today's shooting attack in Jerusalem (which killed three civilians) via a social media post which used it to further emphasize the need for a "ceasefire". My first thought was "we're already in a ceasefire"; my second thought was "this demonstrates a problem with a 'ceasefire' -- even if Hamas agrees to it, other armed Palestinian factions won't feel bound." But apparently Hamas actually has claimed responsibility for this attack, so, take from that what you will vis-a-vis the vitality of the ceasefire.

I try not to be an alarmist about campus antisemitism, while simultaneously not being a denialist about its presence. Jews are not perpetually on the verge of mass expulsion, but nor is the entire concept of campus antisemitism a concocted astroturf campaign by bad faith right-wingers. All that said, this account in Rolling Stone (from a current student at Columbia) feels fairly reported and is harrowing.

One of the feature creatures of the alt-center scare machine these days has been the alleged unwillingness of "certain" people (read: progressive Gen Z-ers and millennials) to make or keep friendships with persons they disagree with politically. 

That truly awful JILV poll generated stories breathlessly claiming that "two-thirds of progressives and 54 percent of 'very liberal' respondents said they have effectively 'cancelled' a friend or family member because of their political views" (the poll actually asked whether one had "lost a friend, stopped talking to a relative, or grown distant from a colleague because of political opinions or differences?", which is a rather far cry from "effective cancellation", but no matter) is one good example. This column from Samuel Abrams and Pamela Paresky, bemoaning the oversensitivity of college students who don't want to date peers who voted for the opposing 2020 election candidate, is another.

I have to say, I find this line of concern a bit perplexing. As a general matter, it seems incredibly easy for people to make and keep friendships across political difference. For example: this past election those of us who lived in Portland had quite a few ballot issues to vote on, including things like local bond issues, switching from run-off elections to ranked-choice voting, and altering the structure of our city government from a "commissioner" model to multi-member geographically zoned districts. As in all elections, I did my best to research these issues and come to a conclusion on them. But -- while I haven't asked any of my Portland friends or colleagues how they voted on any of these questions -- I can't imagine the possibility of losing relationships if they voted differently than I did. These political differences, it seems, are rather easily overcome by the bonds of friendship.

Now, the trumpeters of the "cancellation" epidemic narrative will surely cry foul here. The political differences they have in mind are not local Portland ballot initiatives; it's pedantic to use them as a falsifying example of the larger "problem". And I agree that these examples are obviously not the cases that someone like Abrams or Paresky or David Bernstein has in mind.

Which means it'd probably be useful to be specific about the actual cases one has in mind.

Consider, for instance, a trans college student. A live political controversy, right now, is whether or not they should have been legally prohibited from getting necessary health care in their teenage years and whether they should have been forcibly ripped away from their parents (who, in turn, should be imprisoned as child abusers) if they tried to provide such treatment. If such a student finds out that one of their "friends" believes that all of that should have happened; and will vote in order to make it more likely that this would happen, can we really say with a straight face that the student is wrong if they sever the friendship? If the friendship is indeed distanced -- and it won't always be, people are complex -- it would be both factually incorrect and uncharitable to the extreme to say that the student has shown an inability to tolerate "political differences", generally. The student surely would not make a similar judgment regarding political differences about the proper top marginal income tax rate. It is a specific "difference" that is beyond the pale for them, and with respect to that specific difference it's hard to say that their judgment isn't reasonable.

There are many classes of vulnerable individuals who face such questions as pertain to live political controversies. Gay and lesbian individuals, who learn a peer "differs" on the subject of whether their marriage should be forcibly dissolved and their very identity re-criminalized and subjected to prison time (both live subjects of political dispute, given emergent threats to Obergefell and Lawrence). If they distance from that relationship, is that really evidence of a broader failure to respect political difference? Undocumented "Dreamer" immigrants, who must reckon with the reality that "I may be torn from the only home I’ve ever known at any moment and a sizeable portion of what I thought was my community will cheer as they drag me off." If they react poorly to that difference, are they really engaging in cancellation?

We are not talking about "political differences" generally. We're talking about a subset of specific differences that pose deep, arguably existential, threats to individuals' lives and well-being. And to the extent there's asymmetry in how often progressives find a live political difference that fall into that category, that might reflect nothing more than an asymmetry in which political camp is overwhelming responsible for that particular type of existentially-threatening "difference." There is not any sustained progressive campaign to make it illegal for, say, Southern Baptists, to get married (and if you are a progressive who does support such a policy, any resulting loss of Southern Baptist friends would be entirely on your head!).

"Not every point of political disagreement can be treated as an existential threat to one's very existence." I could not agree more. Moreover, it seems blatantly obvious that nobody -- even the dreaded progressive Gen-Zers -- thinks otherwise. People have absolutely no problem making and keeping friendships and relationships across political difference, generally. They have a serious problem with certain specific political differences. Those who think that problem, is a problem, should do the courtesy of naming the issues. Then we can assess whether the young woman who was impregnated by rape is wrong to cut ties with the "friend" who says she should be forced to give birth on pain of a prison sentence.

As the Russian government announced new military mobilization decrees to reverse their faltering Ukraine campaign, the world has witnessed a sharp spike in young Russian men attempting to flee the country and avoid a military call-up. This immediately poses the question: should other countries open their borders to Russians attempting to skirt military service?

One way this question is commonly debated is whether the Russians in question are morally culpable for their nation's actions in Ukraine. A common form of the argument goes something like "many of those trying now to flee Russia are hardly conscientious objectors or paragons of moral virtue. Most Russians support Putin and support the Ukraine war; they just are trying to save their own skin now that the war is going badly." While it might be one thing to give refugee status to those who've genuinely and consistently resisted Russia's war of aggression, it's another entirely to reach out and protect persons who actually support the war but simply don't like the idea of fighting in it.

One response to this argument is to observe that the people now being called up to fight are disproportionately being drawn from historically-oppressed ethnic minority groups in Russia's hinterlands -- an attempt, as one commentator grimly put it, for Russian nationalists to wage "two ethnic cleansings for the price of one."

But I'll go further: when it comes to Russians seeking to evade military mobilization, I'm less concerned about judging any individual's moral character than I am about thwarting and sabotaging the Russian war machine to the greatest degree possible. If the Russian military is feeling starved for manpower right now, I want to burn some of their grain silos to turn the screws even more. The fewer military-aged Russian men the Russian army has available to it to deploy to the front, the happier I am.

I certainly don't want to give sanctuary to out-and-out war criminals. But consider the marginal case -- the Russian man who had no problem with the Ukraine war right up until it became a live prospect that he'd have to fight in it. I wouldn't exactly nominate that man for a Nobel Peace Prize, and no doubt many would say that a trip to the front lines would be nothing more than just deserts. Perhaps they're right -- but I care significantly less about him getting that particular form of comeuppance than I do about Russian having one fewer soldier firing bullets at Ukrainian men, women, and children.

The easier it is for Russian men to choose not to fight in this war, the harder it will be for the Russian government to get them to fight in this war. And that's my lodestar for approaching this question. Every Russian who wants out of Russia right now is another dent in an already battered Russian war machine. So if they want out, I say let them in.

 The GOP response to the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago has been very straightforward:

If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you.

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) August 8, 2022

The immediate response to this was that I never doubted that the FBI was capable of getting a warrant to search my house if they established probable cause that I had committed a crime. Not only was that well within the realm of imagination, it'd be very bad if I couldn't imagine it!

But it when it comes down to "imagine what they can do to you", this isn't the story that is haunting. It was this Atlantic deep dive into how Trump's "family separation" policy was implemented.

Obviously, the basic fact patterns found in that story are terrifying. Imagining your small children ripped away from you, shipped to God knows where, with no guarantee you'll ever see them again -- it beggars belief. But there's a more fundamental horror at work here -- the impunity of power. In contrast to the formal legal process that resulted in the Mar-a-Lago raid, processes which will be challengeable in a courtroom and held to significant judicial scrutiny, the parents and children victimized by Trump's family separation policy were thrust into a chaotic state of legal limbo defined by the fact that nobody would, or could, help them. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine your child gone missing, and your frantic pleas for help just ... ignored? Not even that people try to help and fail -- they won't help at all. You're in the most dire crisis imaginable, and the men and women in uniform who seem like they should be tasked with helping you, who seem like they have the power to end the nightmare, just leave you to twist?

The argument against allowing the Mar-a-Lago raid is little more complex than the belief that if you become powerful enough, the law should no longer apply to you. That form of entitled impunity is not at all unrelated to the administrative lawlessness and abandonment that characterized how the family separation victims were traumatized. In either case, the message is that one's ability to claim the protections of the law is wholly a function of whether you possess the requisite amount of social power. If you're part of the favored in-class -- the Trumps of the world -- then law will bend over backwards to ensure you have your hearing. If you're on the outside looking in, then law will ignore you no matter how loud you scream.

Imagine what that could mean for you.