“I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America”
Donald Trump – 2025
As I choose a subject and begin to write a column, my first task is to spew out all my thoughts into a document. Those thoughts are entered as they occur, and often are just a list of thoughts, facts, quotes, and other data written down in no particular order. I then try my best to turn that jumbled mess into a coherent message. Some may argue that I don’t always meet that goal.
After I jot those thoughts onto an electronic page, I begin to manipulate, eliminate, and coordinate by editing, fact-checking, rewriting, re-editing, re-fact-checking, and then asking Mrs. Mac to read and offer her opinion. I then re-edit again with her suggestions, I look for artwork that supports my message, and then let my work sit for an hour or two before re-reading it one more time to see if any last changes will make it better.
Then, if I don’t just discard the whole effort as unsuccessful, I submit the finished product to be published, and hope that readers will be moved to at least give some thought to what they read.
But, in today’s environment, if the subject happens to be political, the odds are that by the time I publish, there are new events that warrant more examination and perhaps another column. It’s difficult to keep up.
That, I believe, is the intent of our current administration – overwhelm us. I think that Donald Trump is rolling out his shock and awe program of controversial and sometimes crazy executive orders so that we are unable to properly express our rage against the one this morning because there will be three more this afternoon.
Here is one that came up as I was finishing my last column, and is now beginning to be covered.
Mahmoud Khalil, who earned a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December, was a leader of peaceful pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University last year.
He is married to an American citizen, who is currently eight months pregnant, and Khalil has a valid green card.
Immigration agents appeared at his campus apartment building Saturday and told him he was being detained and possibly deported. Khalil did nothing illegal. He has not been charged with a crime. He expressed his political point of view last year, peacefully. That’s American. That’s “free speech.” Isn’t it? Didn’t we used to encourage free speech in our not-so-distant past?
So why has he been sent to a Louisiana detention center?
Donald Trump, who recently boasted that he had “brought back free speech to America,” said in a Truth Social post, that Khalil was detained because of his politics. “This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
Yikes!! As someone who attended college during the Viet Nam war, I can confirm that if protesting were illegal then, I would have had far fewer classmates in Freshman Econ.
And now, as someone who writes op-eds and has the good fortune to have them published without anyone editing their content, being critical may not seem so prudent.
But for Khalil, what exactly happened to his free speech? Where are all the Republicans who have moaned about the opposition “cancelling” their opinions and the voicing of those opinions? After all, this week the White House threatened consumers for boycotting the purchase of Tesla automobiles. I ordered my Tesla Tuesday.
Michelle Goldberg a NY Times columnist, equated this week’s events to McCarthyism and the “red scare” of the 1950s. “If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration,”
Baher Azmy, a lawyer now representing Khalil, called his client’s alleged alignment with Hamas “false and preposterous.”
Azmy told ABC News on Monday, “So setting aside the false and preposterous premise that advocating on behalf of Palestinian human rights and to plead with public officials to stop an ongoing genocide constitutes alignment with Hamas, his speech is absolutely protected by the Constitution, and it should be chilling to everyone that the United States government could punish or try to deport someone because they disapprove of the speech they’re engaged in.”
What’s next? Can we arrest and expel permanent residents who support LGBTQ rights or Ukraine, or are just too darn “woke?” … or anything else that someone in power may deem as “anti-American” or offensive?
How about an American-born writer, who expresses a critical opinion that may offend someone in power? What if that writer were to question specific government actions that may seem less than well-thought-out? Does free speech still count there? I’m hoping.
Curt MacRae, a resident of Coldwater, MI, publishes regular opinion columns
To be notified by email when a column is published, or to offer feedback email rantsbymac@gmail.com
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