Latest news with #Hamasniks
Epoch Times
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Epoch Times
John Robson: Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program Amounts to Slave Labour
Commentary Politics famously make for strange bedfellows. But what's with the federal government and the temporary foreign worker program? How are these committed progressives working hand-in-glove with big business to exploit foreigners? And why aren't we upset? Arguably I don't get out much. But lately when I do travel, short distances or long, I notice that nearly everyone I deal with in hotels, restaurants, etc., and half at the supermarket checkout, are here as slave labour. How's that woke? Or tolerable? I'm not against people aspiring to a better life, including immigrating to Canada, working hard, and making good. My forebears did. But temporary foreign workers aren't in that category, through no fault of their own. They're here, toiling, and maybe even saving despite the grisly state of our economy. But they can't stay. The whole plan is to sweat them harder than locals for less money, then kick them out. Is it just me, or does that arrangement sound exploitative? To some extent, by design, ineptitude, or designed ineptitude, it might be a back-door way to raise immigration still further by people who despise our traditions. Who really believed Canada could absorb a million people a year, 2.5 percent of our population, year after year, many bringing old-country hatreds? Related Stories 5/19/2025 5/12/2025 Well, the federal government, apparently. Not voters, but they weren't asked. And while giant corporations may not be Hamasniks, they're in it for the money. But what about left-wing politicians? Doesn't it sound like exactly the kind of thing they'd hate? Part of the deal is that they can foul up productivity, tax policy, inflation, etc., without a big-business revolt because the latter stay afloat with cheap labour. It also sticks a finger in the eye of tradition. And it juices GDP numbers because of flaws in that alleged measure of prosperity, which helps them at the polls, a bit. There's also the problem of 'regulatory capture,' a boring name for an alarming process. G.K. Chesterton, who I greatly admire despite his economics, did have a point about Real economists aren't puzzled that a small number of, say, Quebec dairy farmers work far harder to extract tens of thousands of dollars each from the treasury than ordinary people work not to wince at the high price of mediocre butter in the supermarket. Or that it's sold to us by a temporary foreign worker because likewise, a relatively small number of huge companies deploy the best lobbyists and campaign contributions money can buy to lower their salary costs massively. Also, most Canadians don't seem to be very directly affected, or entirely negatively, since grocery and fast-food prices rise more slowly. But Maybe some without kids, grandkids, or compassion don't care. They want their lukewarm sandwich cheap and they want it now, and figure they'll contrive to expire before social cohesion disintegrates sufficiently to impair their 'quality of life.' But I assume most of my readers already care, or are starting to make the connection and care. Even when I was young, pre-internet, summer-job hunting stank. Those government job centres radiated futility. But somehow I found work. Kids today? Not so much. As Hopper observes, summer job listings are down nearly a quarter just since last year, when the unemployment rate for 15–24s was already double the national average. And the adult number is deceptive, driven by feckless, deeply unsustainable public service expansion while the private sector atrophies. Also, Hopper confirms that I'm not imagining things at the coffee counter. 'Between 2016 and 2023, the rate of TFWs working in restaurants increased by 634 per cent' and 456 in retail. So it's unfair to them and hurts us, especially youth. Including in the housing market. The government does its usual job of messing up the supply side, but that flood of cheap-labour foreigners must live somewhere until we boot them out for fresh meat, so demand has gone crazy, and even if young people somehow find work, they can't afford a house. I wonder if they'll become disillusioned, even radicalized? With hard times upon us and our governments, what to do? What to do? Call me crazy, but I suggest we abolish ill-disguised slavery and build community instead. Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Axios
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Axios
Exclusive: Trump's "pro-Hamas" purge could block foreign students from colleges
The Trump administration is discussing plans to try to block certain colleges from having any foreign students if it decides too many are "pro-Hamas," senior Justice and State Department officials tell Axios. Why it matters: The effort — which could include grand jury subpoenas —marks another escalation of Trump's aggressive crackdown on immigration and antisemitism that civil libertarians say stifles campus speech and has led to several lawsuits. Zoom in: The idea of prohibiting colleges from enrolling any student visa-holders grew out of Secretary of State Marco Rubio's " Catch and Revoke" program, which now is focusing on students who protested against the war in Gaza. A senior State Department official called the demonstrators it's targeting "Hamasniks" — people the government claims have shown support for the terror group. More than 300 foreign students have had their student visas revoked in the three weeks "Catch and Revoke" has been in operation, the official said. There are 1.5 million student visa-holders nationwide. "Everyone is fair game," the official said. At the heart of the plan is the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which certifies schools to accept student visa-holders. Institutions have been decertified in the past if the government determines they have too many student-visa holders who are using the education system as a ruse to live and work in the U.S., officials say. Now, the Trump administration is threatening to apply that decertification framework to the post- Oct. 7 demonstrations on college campuses. "Every institution that has foreign students ... will go through some sort of review," the official said. "You can have so many bad apples in one place that it leads to decertification of the school ... I don't think we're at that point yet. But it is not an empty threat." Columbia University and UCLA — both of which had controversial, disruptive pro-Palestinian protests last year — are among the schools mentioned the most often by administration officials. Columbia officials couldn't be reached for comment. "UCLA is committed to eradicating hate," a spokesperson for that university said, pointing to UCLA's new Initiative to Combat Antisemitism. What they're saying: Critics accuse the administration of trampling free speech and due process rights, and of unfairly conflating support for Palestinian rights with backing Hamas, the terror group that rules Gaza. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan free-speech group, said the concept of decertifying entire universities based on who is "pro-Hamas" is "a worrying escalation." "Deemed 'pro-Hamas' by whom? This kind of explicitly viewpoint-driven decision-making is ripe for abuse and risks arbitrary enforcement," FIRE legal director Will Creeley told Axios in a statement. Zoom out: The administration's zero-tolerance immigration enforcement has provoked a spate of lawsuits, some of which are likely headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. That's what the administration wants: to give the high court several opportunities to expand the executive branch's power to deport a noncitizen with little judicial review. A judge Tuesday temporarily blocked federal agents from detaining Yunseo Chung, a Columbia student who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Her lawsuit argues that immigration enforcement can't "be used as a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express political views disfavored by the current administration." The first major case challenging Rubio's right to revoke a green card was brought this month by Mahmoud Khalil, an organizer of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. The big picture: As the political parties realign, the GOP increasingly appeals to non-college voters and has clashed with academics and higher-education experts on cultural issues, including the Gaza war. Student visa holders are a lucrative revenue stream for colleges that can be choked off by the executive branch. "That's one of their biggest cash cows, foreign students. That's a meaningful source of revenue for them," a senior Justice Department official said. "What you're going to see in the not-too-distant future is the universities that we can show that were not doing anything to stop these demonstrations in support of Hamas — or encouraged enrollment by activists — ... we can stop approving student visas for them, and they can no longer admit foreign students," the official said. Catch up quick: The Trump administration's assault on colleges and that had significant pro-Palestine, anti-Israel or antisemitic activism spans both coasts. Last week, to escape losing $400 million in federal money, Columbia caved to administration demands to combat antisemitism and limit protests. On March 5, the DOJ's new antisemitism task force launched a civil rights investigation into the University of California system. On March 10, the Education Department sent letters to 60 universities warning them of possible civil rights enforcement actions concerning antisemitism. And on March 18, the Justice Department filed a statement of interest siding with Jewish students suing over antisemitic activity during protests at UCLA. What's next: The DOJ also is monitoring a new federal lawsuit from Columbia students accusing protest organizers of acting as a "propaganda arm" of Hamas.
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Lesser Evils
From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch I'm embarrassed to say that my first thought when catching up on the Mahmoud Khalil saga that's playing out in New York City and certain undisclosed locations was 'This is great politics.' Khalil is a recent graduate of Columbia University who served as negotiator and spokesman for pro-Palestinian protesters during last year's notorious campus tantrum. He received his master's degree in December but stuck around, turning up last month as a leader of the demonstrations at Columbia-affiliated Barnard College that erupted after two students were expelled for disrupting a class on Israel's history. Importantly, he's not a U.S. citizen. (Although he is married to one.) He's a lawful permanent resident, i.e. a green card holder. On Saturday a group of federal immigration agents showed up at his door and arrested him, allegedly informing his lawyer in a phone call that the State Department had revoked his student visa. He doesn't have a student visa, she told them. He's a legal resident! That's been revoked too, an agent supposedly replied. She claims that when she asked to see the arrest warrant, he hung up. What happened to Khalil after that isn't clear. Although the arrest took place in Manhattan, he wasn't at the detention center in New Jersey when his wife came to visit. As of Sunday his lawyer had lost track of his 'precise whereabouts' but had reason to believe he'd been moved to Louisiana. The next day a federal judge in New York ordered the Trump administration not to deport Khalil pending a hearing in the matter on Wednesday. The president took a victory lap afterward anyway. 'This is the first arrest of many to come,' Donald Trump crowed on Truth Social. 'We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators.' 'Great politics,' I thought, leaning all the way into nihilism. Am I wrong, though? If you're going to ask the public to support you in a matter as dodgy as 'disappearing' an undesirable immigrant, you'll want to find one of the most undesirable immigrants possible. That's Khalil. The movement with which he's associated is rancid with cultural pathologies that most Americans despise—campus radicalism, Hamas hagiography, antisemitic slop. He's exactly the sort of figure you'd target if you were a nationalist demagogue keen to earn a free hand from Americans in removing foreign-born troublemakers with dispatch. At the heart of the Khalil matter is a simple intuition: Guests of the United States should demonstrate respect for our country's values. If you show up here and start running interference for genocidal 'from the river to the sea' Hamasniks, you've failed to show that respect and deserve to be treated the way any unwelcome guest would be. My guess is that a large majority of us, including plenty of Democrats, share that intuition. The Khalil matter is great politics for Trump, then. Or so I assumed until I saw a tweet from, of all people, Ann Coulter. Coulter is very much a restrictionist on immigration but she's also a lawyer by training and broke years ago with the mindless Trump apologists who now dominate the right. 'There's almost no one I don't want to deport,' she wrote as news of Khalil's ordeal circulated, 'but, unless they've committed a crime, isn't this a violation of the First Amendment?' Isn't it? It's a crime under U.S. law to supply terrorist groups like Hamas with material support but supplying them with rhetorical support is just a fancy way of saying 'free speech.' (Khalil 'led activities aligned to Hamas,' in the clumsy phrasing of the Department of Homeland Security.) If the feds are looking to revoke his green card for nothing worse than stating obnoxious political opinions, that's as clear a case of the government targeting someone for wrongthink as we're ever likely to see. And that has to violate the First Amendment. Doesn't it? Actually, no one knows. Various heavy hitters among the legal commentariat have weighed in on Khalil's case in the last 72 hours, including our own Sarah Isgur and David French, and the consensus on whether he can lawfully be expelled for his political views is 'Uh, maybe. Probably?' Two federal statutes arguably provide authority to do so. One says that 'an alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.' The other authorizes the removal of an alien who 'endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.' Put those two together and the feds have a wide berth to oust impolite 'guests.' Pretty simple, no? Well, not really. For one thing, there's wiggle room in that text. Is it 'reasonable' to believe that agitation against Israel by some campus cosplay jihadist is creating 'serious' foreign policy consequences for the United States? Might the answer depend on how much influence Khalil has within the pro-Hamas movement or is merely being part of the movement enough? Should it matter whether he's refrained from violent incitement in his own rhetoric? Does it matter if the war in Gaza is ongoing or over? There's actually a specific exception in the statute (flagged by National Review's Andy McCarthy) that prevents the feds from deporting an immigrant on foreign policy grounds due to his 'past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States, unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien's admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.' In other words, the law errs on the side of not letting the government oust foreigners for their politics. Only a 'compelling' reason will entitle it to do so. The second statute looks like a slam dunk by comparison, as presumably Khalil is guilty of having 'persuaded others to … support a terrorist organization' at some point in his agitation about Israel and Hamas. But here's where we run into Coulter's question: Even if he is, does the First Amendment override that statute and prevent the government from deporting him for what would surely be protected speech if an American citizen engaged in it? Eugene Volokh, an eminent First Amendment scholar, sifted through the case law and concluded, 'Uh, maybe?' The tricky thing about Khalil's case is that, as a green card holder, he's in a legal gray zone. He doesn't enjoy the same privileges as a citizen but he certainly enjoys more than a tourist with a visa. Unlike a foreigner who's seeking entry to the United States, he's already a resident and has built a life here. (His American-citizen wife is pregnant, in fact.) Think of him as a tenant, possessing fewer rights than a landowner but a lot more than a 'guest.' Hence the uncertainty in the case law on non-citizens' speech rights: When exploring a hazy gray zone, different courts are destined to reach different conclusions about its precise constitutional parameters. Without legal clarity to guide one's thinking about Khalil's rights, reactions to his arrest are destined to function like a political Rorschach test. The test is this: Who is the lesser evil at this point, campus Hamasniks—or the president of the United States? Liberals who've spent the past three days screeching about Khalil's First Amendment rights may (or may not!) be wrong on the law but they're right on the politics. The facts of this case feel clammy because they're another reminder of how blatantly Trump's administration discriminates based on viewpoint. If you've criticized the president in the past, he might rescind your federal security detail even if doing so places you at risk of death. If your law firm has opposed him in court, he might yank your security clearances and seek to bar you from federal buildings. If you use colorful rhetoric about him in an interview, one of his attack-dog prosecutors might threaten you with baseless criminal charges to shut you up. If you don't adopt his preferred 'patriotically correct' terminology in your news coverage, your access to the White House might be reduced. Most viewpoint discrimination in Trump 2.0 has happened below the surface of policy, though. After two years of 'retribution' rhetoric from the president on the campaign trail, for instance, America's titans of industry realized early that their businesses would be harassed by the federal government if they took a hostile stance toward him and acted accordingly. In a culture of fear, the state doesn't need to actually discriminate against dissenting viewpoints very often; once everyone understands what's expected of them, most will take care not to dissent in the first place. In isolation, the Khalil case is a bog-standard matter of evicting an apologist for terrorism. But in the wider context of Trump's postliberal project to silence enemies, it's another slip down a slope that he's working day by day to make as slick as possible. In particular, law professor Steve Vladeck noted, the president's warning that Khalil's arrest is the first of many to come 'suggests that the government intends to use these rarely invoked removal authorities in enough cases to seek to deter non-citizens of any immigration status from speaking out about sensitive political issues, even in contexts in which the First Amendment does, or at least should, clearly protect their right to do so.' At the rate we're going, with the second-most powerful man in the government now calling supporters of Ukraine 'traitors,' a green card holder agitating for the Ukrainian military to target Moscow might also potentially be targeted for removal on grounds of 'espousing terrorism.' If you don't think Trump's capable of that, why not? Another clammy aspect of Khalil's case is the procedural irregularity involved. That's been another hallmark of the president's first seven weeks. The bureaucratic upheaval created by DOGE, the on-again off-again trade wars with Canada and Mexico, the weapons and intelligence ebb-and-flow to Ukraine—the chaos seems deliberate, as if to prove that you can do big things if only you're willing to ignore procedural niceties and let Men of Action like Trump and Elon Musk work their will. The detention of Mahmoud Khalil is in line with that attitude. Experts in immigration law told the New York Times that revoking a green card is actually 'quite rare,' involves a lengthy process, and typically only happens when 'the holder has been accused and convicted of criminal offenses,' all of which makes Khalil's case a notable outlier. Another immigration attorney told journalist Jesse Singal that it's unusual for a lawful permanent resident to be placed in detention pending a hearing on rescinding his green card and very unusual for him to be sent from New York to the American South before that hearing occurs. Two days after Khalil was arrested, the specific grounds on which the feds hoped to deport him were still unclear. The whole thing stinks of the White House wanting to make a spectacle of Trump's 'toughness' on Hamasniks by treating Khalil like a terrorist, snatching him without the normal legal process that's due and whisking him off to parts unknown. As if to prove the point, in response to the outcry the official White House Twitter account offered nothing but bravado, posting a stark black-and-white photo of Khalil with the snide caption 'Shalom Mahmoud.' If you weren't worried already about the Trump administration flouting procedural rules to find out what sort of lawbreaking it can get away with, watching them disappear a guy off the street and then taunt him in a public communique should do the trick. A third reason to feel clammy about Khalil's detention, though, is that the Trump administration isn't as serious about antisemitism as it likes to pretend. And it does like to pretend. Sources told the Times that the government's case against Khalil will be based on the fact that the protests he helped lead 'were antisemitic and created a hostile environment for Jewish students at Columbia' and that his continued residency in the U.S. undermines the Trump administration's foreign policy goal of 'combating antisemitism across the globe.' That's a noble policy aim and a smart political justification for picking a fight with campus Hamasniks. And lord knows, it's a real problem. But the White House doesn't care about antisemitism in the abstract. It cares about delegitimizing the left. It cares about animosity toward Jews when doing so focuses public contempt on progressives, as in Khalil's case, and not at all when it comes from the right. Take Andrew Tate. In addition to his many other fine qualities, Tate is a Hamas apologist known to babble about the group's 'masculine spirit of resistance' and the 'heroic' death of its leader. Per the Anti-Defamation League, he's not above using the word 'Jew' as a pejorative, has engaged in some light Holocaust revisionism, and gave the Nazi salute in at least one of his online videos. Why did the White House, given its supposedly very serious concerns about antisemitism, intervene to save Tate from Romanian justice and allow him to return to the United States? Why haven't the president or his aides objected publicly to some of his favorite podcast bros hosting notorious antisemites, taking postliberal contrarian populist media to its logical conclusion? Why is his administration hiring people who are prone to antisemitic rhetoric and known to attend antisemitic events? Why did his clemency for the January 6 defendants not make exceptions for some brazen antisemites? Why did he host two of America's most well-known Jew-haters for dinner at Mar-a-Lago around the time he launched his most recent presidential campaign? If we broaden the question to racism generally, the double standard is even more absurd. It was just a few weeks ago, Jonathan Last remembered, that one of Elon Musk's DOGE apparatchiks briefly left the job after he was found to have posted things on social media like 'Normalize Indian hate' and 'I just want a eugenic immigration policy.' Not only was he quickly rehired, the vice president himself intervened publicly on his behalf by whining about how unfair it seemed to punish a 'kid'—who's in his mid-20s, mind you—for some crass edgelord-ing. Mahmoud Khalil's mistake wasn't agitating against Israel, it was agitating against Israel from the left. If he had framed his critique instead as an 'America First' lament about greedy Jews siphoning off precious U.S. taxpayer dollars to advance globalism, he'd have a successful podcast, a million-plus followers on social media, and possibly a job in the Trump administration. So you see, targeting the pro-Palestinian protest movement for deportations isn't a matter of the White House advancing some high-minded goal. It's an exercise of raw power inflicted by one illiberal entity with an unnervingly high degree of antisemitic support upon another. I can understand being ambivalent in that conflict given the sleaziness of Khalil's cause, but I can't understand concluding that the side with state authority, unlimited resources, and autocratic ambitions is the lesser evil. If you're willing to assume the administration's good intentions in this matter simply because you despise the Hamasniks, you're still missing the forest for the trees.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Where Are the Protests?
From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch An annoying occupational hazard of punditry is stumbling across a news story that perfectly supports the thesis of your column … after you've already published it. Maybe 'annoying' is too much. It's gratifying to see one's opinion vindicated by events! When the New York Times drops this six days after I wrote this, I feel like Dispatch subscribers are getting their money's worth. But it sure would have been nice to have had the Times item in hand a week ago when I was putting that piece together. That's not the only time it happened to me this week. Two days ago I wrote about Donald Trump's habit of 'kidding on the square,' framing outré policy ideas in comic terms to normalize them while granting himself and his supporters plausible deniability about his sincerity. He's only joking about running for a third term in 2028! Although, now that you mention it, it *would* be nice…. Late on Tuesday night, not 48 hours after I posted that newsletter, he dropped the mother of all 'kidding on the square' examples on Truth Social. You can't watch that clip without laughing. There's Elon Musk stuffing his face with hummus. And a pale, husky Trump sunbathing by the pool with Netanyahu. And bearded men, er, belly-dancing in barely-there women's clothing. ('Trump Gaza' will be vastly more 'woke' than the current iteration, it seems.) Even the music is catchy. If you can get past the fact that juvenile trolling of this sort coming from the president is a complete embarrassment to the United States, you'd have to call it one of the more enjoyable pieces of AI slop to reach mass circulation. Buried beneath the absurdity, though, are two semi-serious ideas. One is that Trump earnestly wants the United States to take over Gaza, or so he says. The other is that he foresees the forcible displacement of the Palestinian population as a necessary step in the process. Where are the cries from America's pro-Palestinian left over the president proposing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza? I can't tell you how many times that question has come up this month in conversation. Dispatch colleagues have raised it. Family members have raised it. Strangers on social media have raised it. A year ago, campus Hamasniks were occupying buildings and setting up tent cities to protest Israel's effort to punish the perpetrators of the October 7 pogrom. Today the leader of their own country is suggesting a gratuitous American incursion into Gaza to evict the impoverished locals and convert the land into a playground for the rich—the most grotesque conceivable expression of 'settler-colonialism'—and seemingly no one cares. Where are the protests? They haven't disappeared entirely, contrary to popular belief. Last month, on the day the spring semester began at America's most notorious 'anti-Zionist' campus, the usual suspects bearing 'intifada' signs staged a walkout. According to the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which maintains an updated list of daily agitation across the country, protests are scheduled today in Burbank, California, and Oneonta, New York, and another is set for tomorrow in Dallas, Texas. There'll be some sort of demonstration in Los Angeles on Sunday to coincide with the Oscars and an 'International Day of Action' next Wednesday aimed at convincing businesses to stop supporting Israel's military. Protests are still happening! Just at one-one-thousandth or so of the intensity that we saw last year. In fairness, is that really so strange under the circumstances? The point of the 2023-24 protests was to force the Biden administration to pressure Israel for a ceasefire. Whether you believe those ceasefire demands were primarily motivated by a desire to protect Palestinian civilians or by a desire to protect Hamas' ability to menace Israelis depends on how charitable you feel toward leftists. Either way, we do have a ceasefire at last. Barely. So it makes sense that protests would have fallen off, notwithstanding the obnoxiousness of Trump's interest in redeveloping Gaza. It's hard enough to sustain the intensity of demonstrations when the mission hasn't yet been accomplished. It's really hard when it has. And insofar as it hasn't been completely accomplished, it's been rendered moot. The sort of pro-Hamas degenerate who hoped last year's demonstrations would scare a Democratic president into forcing the Israelis to back off before they weakened the group's capabilities in Gaza has been overtaken by events. Many of Hamas' leaders are dead, its power to wage war is degraded, and its brothers-in-arms across the border in Lebanon have been routed. If the goal was to stop the war before real damage was done to the glorious jihadist cause, there's no point in continuing to protest. That ship has sailed. If, on the other hand, the actual goal of pro-Palestinian activism is something more subversive and closer to home, there's … also no point in continuing to protest. Domestic politics has moved on and has taken the salience of the demonstrations with it. I agree with economist Noah Smith, who alleged earlier this month that 'the purpose of the Palestine movement was (A) to seize power from the establishment wing of the Democratic party, and (B) to reduce the influence of Jews in the American left.' Whether Jewish voters were scared into voting meaningfully more Republican on Election Day is a matter of dispute, but it's always felt like more than coincidence that Kamala Harris bypassed the popular Jewish governor of Pennsylvania as her running mate despite the importance of that swing state. The protests put her on notice that her pro-Palestinian base would tolerate only so much 'Zionism' at the top after Joe Biden and the Democratic establishment backed Israel's war in Gaza. The message was received, apparently. Snubbing Josh Shapiro didn't save Harris, though. It was Trump who won the majority-Arab city of Dearborn, Michigan, a surprise outcome that seemed to confirm a backlash to Democrats among pro-Palestinian voters. That outcome makes no sense as a matter of geopolitics given that Trump's support for Israel is far less conditional than Harris', to the point that he's not above using the word 'Palestinian' as an insult. (Buyer's remorse has already begun in Dearborn.) But it makes sense as a matter of domestic politics, through Smith's frame. If the point of last year's Gaza protests was to warn Democratic leaders that the party can't win by governing from the center, especially but not exclusively with respect to Israel, those protests served their purpose. Harris lost. Dearborn went red. Democratic leaders will think twice next time about telling the left 'no,' supposedly. So why bother continuing with the protests now? The progressive mission was accomplished. That's the optimistic view for Palestinian activists, anyway. The pessimistic view is that not only did the protests not succeed in terms of foreign policy—'Trump Gaza' is certainly not what the 'uncommitted' movement had in mind—but they've backfired domestically as well. A Gallup poll published a few weeks ago asked Democratic voters and 'leaners' whether they want to see the party become more liberal, more moderate, or stay the same on policy. 'More moderate' earned 45 percent, up 11 points from four years ago; 'more liberal' declined to 29 percent, down 5 points over the same period. That jibes with the sense that it wasn't just inflation and immigration that did Harris in, it was working-class voters across the partisan spectrum concluding that Democrats have grown far too fringe-y on cultural matters to be trusted with power. 'Defund the police,' gender weirdness, and an antisemitic streak ugly enough that even progressive stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have gotten nervous about it: The Democratic Party looks so radical to so many swing voters that a proto-fascist convicted felon seemed like a more responsible option in November. The sort of left-wing activist who protests the war in Gaza in hopes of 'seizing power' from Democratic leaders, as Smith imagines, won't care about losing elections. But the sort of activist who prefers government by milquetoast centrist Democrats to government by a proto-fascist convicted felon will. Pro-Palestinian protests that too often played like pro-Hamas protests are, or were, yet another progressive cultural excess that ended up scaring the horses on Election Day. Can you blame those more sensible liberal activists for not wanting to participate anymore? No wonder the number of demonstrations is down. In many ways, the fact that Donald Trump rather than Joe Biden is now president has also undercut the rationale for protests. For starters, it's harder now for activists to get the media's attention. Every day since January 20 the press has been forced to prioritize between covering the end of the American-led world order, the probably illegal subversion of federal agencies by the richest man in the world and his band of twentysomething geeks, the appointment of comically unfit nutjobs to positions of high influence over public health and law enforcement, and more mundane stuff like a new tax-cut bill that's going to blow another sucking wound in America's fiscal stability. The press is a little busy. Who wants to go to the trouble of building a tent city if reporters don't have time to come out and gawk at it? Fear is another consideration for demonstrators in the age of Trump, as it is for all of us. A week after he was sworn in, the president signed an executive order pledging immediate action by the Justice Department to punish unlawful acts of antisemitism on college campuses. The fact sheet that accompanied the order contained a bonus threat for foreign students. 'To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,' it declared, pledging to 'also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.' Is it legal for the government to punish someone who's here lawfully for expressing an opinion with which it disagrees? Probably not. Would you want to be the foreign student who tests that theory in court? Also probably not. The legal cost of protesting has gone up since Trump signed his executive order, and as with any good whose price has risen, demand for it has begun to fall. It's not just Trump whom activists need to worry about, though. Universities have grown bolder about punishing unruly campus demonstrators since Election Day 2024. On Monday Barnard College, affiliated with Columbia University, expelled two students who disrupted a class on the history of Israel last month. Not once since the war in Gaza began in October 2023 had that happened at Columbia—until this week. Another example: In December a student at the University of Chicago was arrested in a dorm by local cops and detained for 30 hours for having grabbed the hand of an officer while he was swinging a baton at a protest in October. The student was designated a 'threat' by the school administration and barred from campus. It's hard to say whether universities are acting out of heartfelt fear of Trump, perhaps fretting that he might meddle in their federal funding if they don't 'monitor' disfavored activism by students, or whether they're using that as a pretext to follow through with a crackdown they've secretly longed to implement. I strongly suspect that the American corporations rushing to jettison their diversity programs were eager to unburden themselves of being ideologically policed by wokesters—and the attendant compliance costs—and viewed Trump's election as a convenient excuse. ('We don't want to to do it but we can't risk angering our vindictive president!') The schools, or at least some of them, might be behaving similarly. Either way, protesting is obviously riskier when you know that people with influence over your career prospects are looking to make an example of those who cross a line. There's a reason some pro-Palestinian activists went anonymous last year when law firms started rescinding job offers from the most obnoxious agitators. Even if the spirit among demonstrators is willing, the financial flesh might be weak. The tents in those tent cities aren't free, you know; left-wing fatcats are already at high enough risk of being persecuted by Trump's administration that they might understandably decline to antagonize the White House by funding a new round of campus chaos. The biggest effect that 'the Trump factor' has had on progressive protesters, though, is also the simplest. What would be the point of demonstrating against his Gaza plan, exactly? Now that he's president, whose opinion would theoretically be moved by a new round of protests? Protests, in theory, are designed to pressure the government into changing its policies. Trump won't do that. Not only won't he do it, he won't even pretend to take the demonstrators seriously, as Biden and Harris were required to do. He'd love to have them as a foil, I'm sure: Nothing would make his insane 'Sandals: Gaza' resort plan seem more appealing than watching pimply teens in Hamas headbands cosplaying as revolutionaries screeching about it at Columbia. 'Forget Trump. Protests might move public opinion,' one might answer. I guess? But how much will public opinion move, realistically, now that the war in Gaza is (sort of) over, Americans are distracted by rising inflation and dozens of daily new Trump insanities, and his 'kidding on the square' shtick has made his plans to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians momentarily seem like just another bit of outrageous comic excess that he doesn't really mean. Can't these protesters take a 'joke'? If and when he alarms Americans by turning serious about bulldozing the Gaza Strip and creating a seaside paradise for hirsute belly-dancers, that might finally trigger another burst of large pro-Palestinian demonstrations. But until then, 'Trump Gaza' will cause precisely as much public anxiety as turning a crazed, possibly high mega-billionaire loose on the federal government and inviting him to shut down whatever he likes. It's the sort of thing that would have shocked the activist class and galvanized a response had a 'normal' president done it. But when Trump does it? Americans knew what they were signing up for and handed him a near-majority in the popular vote anyway. Protests only work when the government's conduct defies popular expectations. How do you build a protest movement in a country that now expects, and accepts, lunacy?
