ATW Livestream Tonight at 8 PM ET/7 PM CT
Tonight, Matt and Walter will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by discussing the latest developments surrounding the Russia-Ukraine ceasefire talks. They will also take a closer look at the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate student and green card holder who was recently detained by the Trump administration. In case you missed it, here’s an excerpt from the piece Matt wrote about the Khalil situation last week:
Forget Khalil. He’s not the issue. The problem is Trump officials pledging to throw masses of people out of the country for offenses not yet committed and on vague pretexts like being “aligned with Hamas.” As [Tyler] Coward put it (see accompanying interview), “What does that mean?” Similarly, what does it mean to be a “Hamas sympathizer,” and what constitutes “aiding and abetting violations [of] immigration laws,” a standard Trump just decided to employ to deny relief to some federal student loan holders?
Matt’s interview with Tyler Coward, the lead government counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), is also worth a read.
Please tune in at 8:00 PM ET on the Substack app, Rumble, YouTube:
Or follow @mtaibbi or @walterkirn on Twitter. See you soon!
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Matt and Walter - please take the sane/investigative journalist position on Khalil’s case, which is: wait to see the evidence presented in the upcoming deportation hearings.
You can still infuse this discussion with civil libertarian values. I.e., if the evidence presented is only “sympathy” with Hamas, then this is bad from a speech perspective. But, if the evidence presented is that he had some organizing role in the known illegal acts at Columbia, then this isn’t even a speech question.
The progressive left’s mad rush to the barricades to declare this guy a speech martyr without seeing hard evidence reminds me uncomfortably much of the George Floyd 2020 events. The actual facts in that case (explained well in the Fall of Minneapolis documentary everyone should watch) were far different than what was blasted out to the mask wearing protesters at fever pitch in that long hot summer.
Getting a visa makes you a guest of the government. Why would any government tolerate guests who rally against them? It really is that simple. You choose your guests, you are stuck with family...