Men arrested in raids awaiting deportation hearings on Ellis Island, January 13, 1920 – Public Domain
The new era of Trump authoritarianism is being called by many a new McCarthyism, but that is not a good analogy. It’s looking worse than the McCarthy period. A more accurate analogy is the Red Scare years that followed World War I and the success of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.
That event, and the establishment of a communist state based upon the ideas of Cal Marx and Friedrich Engels, saw the US government under Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and his Attorney General A Mitchelll Palmer and his aide, a young DOJ lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover, begin in 1919 rounding up leftists and anarchist immigrants.
In a strategy that Trump and his gang of Constitution Wreckers are clearly following, Hoover with Palmer’s blessing started initially going after leftists who were immigrants, like noted anarchistEmma Goldman, a Lithuanian Jew who came to the US via Russia. Goldman was arrested ad charged with sedition based upon the argument that she was advocating opposition to conscription.
President Wilson also took an action that was particularly outrageous and surely caught the attention of Trump’s “brain trust,” namely having America’s most successful radical socialist, Eugene Debs, who in 1912 had won 900,000 votes (6.1% of votes cast) running for president on the Sodialist Party ticket, arrested for sedition (under a new law signed into effect by Wilson). Deb’s “crime” was making a campaign speech calling on people to oppose the US entering the European war known as WWI. That even if it were a crime, is vastly less criminal than many of the things Trump called on his supporters to do during his speeches during his two presidential campaigns.
Sentenced to ten years in jail, this founding member of the international Workers of the World (IWW), had his sentence commuted and was released in December 1921 by Wilson’s successor, who then invited The freed Debs to the White House to have a with him!
Much as Trump has chosen Elon Musk to do his unconstitutional dirty work, Palmer had Hoover set up a small group to begin secretly monitoring and spying ln the activies of people like Goldman and Debs. It was later dubbed the Bureau of Investigation — forerunner of thr Federal Bureau of Investigation that Hoover ran until his death in 1972, doing everything from spying on, harassing, and even murdering or stirring up internal internal feuds during the second Red Scare era in the ‘50s-60s among hippies, yippies, student anti-war groups and the Black Panthers Party.
That brings us to Trump’s current second term, where he has installed completely loyal sycophants in office at the FBI, the DOJ and the Department. of a Homeland Security with its immigration goons in the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
It was Homeland Security and ICE thugs who raided a Columbia University-owned apartment building and grabbed graduate Palestinian Green Card holder Mahoud Khalil in front of his 8-month pregnant wife. Here this native-born American citizen recounts the heart-wrenching story of what happened to her husband right in front of her (if this isn’t fascism like what Communists, Jews and Roma people faced in Nazi Germany I don’t know what is):
This last week has been a nightmare: Six days ago, an intense and targeted doxxing campaign against Mahmoud began. Anti-Palestinian organizations were spreading false claims about my husband that were simply not based in reality. They were making threats against Mahmoud and he was so concerned about his safety that he emailed Columbia University on March 7th. In his email, he begged the university for legal support, “I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home. I urgently need legal support and I urge you to intervene,” he said in his email.
Columbia University never responded to that email.
Instead, on March 8th, at around 8:30 pm, as we were returning home from an Iftar dinner, an ICE officer followed us into our building and asked, “Are you Mahmoud Khalil?”
Mahmoud stated, “Yes.”
The officer then proceeded to say, “We are with the police, you have to come with us.”
The officer told Mahmoud to give me the apartment keys and that I could go upstairs. When I refused, afraid to leave my husband, the officer stated, “I will arrest you too.”
The officers later barricaded Mahmoud from me. We were not shown any warrant and the ICE officers hung up the phone on our lawyer. When my husband attempted to give me his phone so I could speak with our lawyer, the officers got increasingly aggressive, despite Mahmoud being fully cooperative.
Everyone who knows Mahmoud knows him to be level-headed even in the most stressful situations. And even in this terrifying situation, he was calm.
Within minutes, they had handcuffed Mahmoud, took him out into the street and forced him into an unmarked car. Watching this play out in front of me was traumatizing: It felt like a scene from a movie I never signed up to watch.
I was born and raised in the Midwest. My parents came here from Syria, carrying their stories of the oppressive regime there that made life unlivable. They believed living in the US would bring a sense of safety and stability. But here I am, 40 years after my parents immigrated here, and just weeks before I’m due to give birth to our first child, and I feel more unsafe and unstable than I have in my entire life.
US immigration ripped my soul from me when they handcuffed my husband and forced him into an unmarked vehicle. Instead of putting together our nursery and washing baby clothes in anticipation of our first child, I am left sitting in our apartment, wondering when Mahmoud will get a chance to call me from a detention center.
I demand the US government release him, reinstate his Green Card, and bring him home.
(Author’s Note: I have to interject here that as someone who spent years at Columbia—three studying Chinese as an undergrad, one earning an MS in Journalism from the Columbia Grad School of Journalism and one as a post-graduate Knight-Bagehot Fellow—I am disgusted at my alma mater’s failure to protect its students from fascist government behavior. Columbia should be putting its Law School to work defending Mahmoud Khalil and other threatened Palestinian and other foreign students who are being attacked or will soon be by Trump’s Gestapo. They should have immediately responded to his letter calling for help and should have had him staying temporarily in the home of a university law professor!)
It’s 1920 all over again a century later, only this time it might be more long-lasting, with the courts, the White House, and both houses of congress in the hands of cult-like Trump Republicans and other Republicans afraid to take a stand against this fascism for fear Musk and other suck-up billionaires backing Trump like Bees’Ass and ZuckerWuss will fund people to challenge them in the next Republican primary, to oust them from Congress.
