Speaking your mind shouldn’t cost you your job, your education, or your rights. But right now, that’s exactly what’s happening all across America.
Example One:
President Trump on Thursday renewed a call to defund NPR and PBS a day after top executives from the public broadcasters faced an intense grilling from GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“NPR and PBS, two horrible and completely biased platforms (Networks!), should be DEFUNDED by Congress, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote late Wednesday on Truth Social. “Republicans, don’t miss this opportunity to rid our Country of this giant SCAM, both being arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party. JUST SAY NO AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Example Two:
Students at public colleges and universities are protected by the First Amendment freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition. Private schools do not have that protection.
Columbia University, officially Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private Ivy League research university in New York City.
On 8 March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University, as he was returning from dinner with his wife in New York. The agents said the state department had revoked his student visa and green card, though he had never been accused of, let alone convicted for, a crime. He was held in detention in New Jersey, then transferred to Louisiana. He has still not been accused a crime.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump’s state department, headed by Marco Rubio, seeks to deport him under a provision of federallaw that gives him the power to deport someone if their presence in the country is deemed to “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”. Khalil’s crime? He was a lead organizer of Columbia’s protests for Palestinian rights.
“Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here,” Khalil, a Palestinian raised in exile in a Syrian refugee camp, wrote in a letter proclaiming his status as a “political prisoner”. He is the one of the most prominent targets of a chilling federal crackdown over pro-Palestinian advocacy in the US, particularly on college campuses. And he is one of the most forceful voices in The Encampments, a new documentary on the campus movement for Palestine that has drawn ire from across the US political spectrum, in particular the right.
Example Three:
The nation’s legal profession is being split between those that want to fight back against President Trump’s attacks on the industry and those that prefer to engage in the art of the deal.
Two big firms sued the Trump administration on Friday, seeking to stop executive orders that could impair their ability to represent clients. The lawsuits filed by Jenner & Block and WilmerHale highlight how some elite firms are willing to fight Mr. Trump’s campaign targeting those he doesn’t like, while others, like Paul Weiss and Skadden, have cut deals to appease the president.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has issued similarly styled executive orders against firms that he perceives as enemies and threats to national security. The orders could create an existential crisis for firms because they would strip lawyers of security clearances, bar them from entering federal buildings and discourage federal officials from interacting with the firms.
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