This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Across the 2024 election, Donald Trump and the people behind him said again and again that they were here to restore free speech to this country. Then they got power. And his administration came after speech in a way that the left never dared to do — never wanted to do.
You saw it with the hunt to cancel any grant that had the word “diversity” anywhere near it. You saw it as countless organizations that depended on — or feared — the government began reworking their mission statements or censoring their websites to avoid any words that might offend anyone in this administration. You saw it as border agents looked through travelers’ phones to see if they had said anything that the administration wouldn’t like. And you saw it as immigration agents begin yanking people off the streets — for the crime of nothing more than speech.
Among the first of these people was Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia who had been a leader in the school’s anti-Israel protests.
Khalil is a green-card holder. He’s married to a U.S. citizen. His sole offense had been to speak out against Israel in a way this administration did not like. He was detained under the U.S. secretary of state’s authority to cancel the residency of noncitizens who threaten U.S. foreign policy.
Did this grad student at Columbia actually threaten U.S. foreign policy? Is that how fragile our foreign policy is?
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The post The Trump Administration Tried to Silence Mahmoud Khalil, So I Asked Him to Talk appeared first on New York Times.
