Saturday, October 11, 2025
America Has Become Too Risky To Visit
It can be a maddening experience, living in America and not supporting Donald J. Trump. In what has been billed as the greatest country on Earth, democracy is being unraveled because a majority of the nation’s white inhabitants voted for a 79-year-old man who is temperamentally unfit for any public office, much less one that comes with nuclear weapons. A once-proud nation of immigrants is being subject to military occupations because a man, in a marriage to an immigrant, says that foreigners are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, and that they are to blame for all that one finds wanting in life.
Perhaps the end of the flawed American project comes as no surprise, but even the most jaded observer — one aware that the land of the free was also the home of the slave — has had to marvel that the collapse could be brought about by this, of all guys; not by some charismatic general, skilled at feigning empathy for the common people, but an elderly conman who’s only selling them crypto. . . . . Those who study and teach about America, abroad, also think the country has become a frightening shell of its past, imperfect glory.
At a packed Oct. 4 forum in Vienna, Austria, academics who have taught thousands of students about the culture and history of the United States expressed shock and dismay at how quickly the liberal future imagined, if not realized, with the election of Barack Obama has given way to the ugliest form of American reaction.
“We’re all also overwhelmed by the situation,” said Alexandra Ganser, a professor of American Studies at the University of Vienna. A former Fulbright Scholar who studied in the U.S., she lamented that the country’s descent into authoritarianism was “all pretty new” and required rethinking how academics approach their work.
Already, she noted, those thinking of heading to Trump’s America are being warned not to bring their own phones and to “get other computers when you travel.” That guidance comes amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on academia and, in particular, foreign-born students.
Rümeysa Öztürk, a Ph.D. student at Tufts University and a former Fulbright Scholar, did nothing more than lend her name to an op-ed urging her school to take seriously students’ concerns about its relations with Israel. For that offense, she was grabbed off the street by a half-dozen plainclothes federal agents and detained for weeks in a decrepit ICE facility, thousands of miles away.
Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident, attended a sit-in at Barnard College over Gaza. For that non-crime, the Trump administration sought to deport her to South Korea, a country that she left at the age of 7.
There are now countless such stories of students and tourists being arrested and detained over perceived slights to MAGA America. And top U.S. officials have promised there will be more.
Now, even academics whose specialty is America — well aware of its virtues and flaws, even before its recent authoritarian turn — are afraid to visit the object of their studies, at least so long as the present regime is in power.
“I thought to myself, If I were 10 years, 15 years younger, and I have no kids, I would absolutely do it, because I want to,” Ganser said of her own security assessment. “I want to feel it. I want to see it — I want to see what’s happening to you… With two kids, I cannot. It’s too risky.”
In November, the American Studies Association is hosting its annual conference. It’s in Puerto Rico, a fact that organizers seem apologetic about. The conference website, seeking to address safety concerns, explains that the organization is contractually bound to host events in the U.S. for the next couple of years.
But it’s not as if the post-war liberal order in Europe can be taken for granted, either. That’s another lesson from developments in American politics, observed Ingrid Gessner, a professor at the University of Education Vorarlberg in Austria.
As president of the European Association for American Studies, she plans on attending that conference in Puerto Rico (this year’s topic: “Late-Stage American Empire?”). But living in Austria, where a far-right party out-polled all its rivals in the last election — and where illiberal hegemons are now to both its East and West — the threat to democracy and intellectual inquiry cannot be dismissed as just an American thing, Gessner noted.
Even so, the MAGA brand is no doubt a contributor to an unsettling trend in politics, everywhere. “I was probably not as much aware as I am now that I do have students, especially young male students, who would actually give anything to attend a Trump rally,” Gessner said. “That is very real in the classroom.”
Most European academics appear less willing to risk a confrontation with its manifestation on American soil. Heike Paul, chair of American Studies at Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, was blunt about whether she planned to attend any more conferences in the land of the free.
“I’m not going to the United States,” Paul said with a laugh. She noted that a conference hosted by the Bavarian American Academy, previously held in Berkeley, California, has now been moved to Montreal. “Thank God for Canada,” she said, “because I think that also many other associations have done the same thing … and [decided] not to come to the United States.”
That the country these academics have devoted their professional careers to studying and teaching about is no longer safe to visit is a sad and unexpected development. In 2015, most European scholars — like most American liberals — could not have imagined a budding dictatorship led by a guy from “The Apprentice.” Since Trump’s rise and return to office, Paul said, the U.S. has fallen into the same category as countries like Russia and China.
“Now, when I think about going to the U.S., I talk to a lot of my colleagues in Sinology. I talk to a lot of my colleagues who travel to Egypt and many other [authoritarian] places,” she said. And she, like others who have witnessed the loss of what was once assumed to be stable democracy, must ask: “What does it mean to travel to a place where certain things can no longer be taken for granted?”
Friday, October 10, 2025
Thursday, October 09, 2025
ICE Seeks to Terrorize Americans Into Acquiescence
Among the earliest signs that the second Trump administration might be precipitously different from the first were the masks. Almost the first thought I had, in watching videos of federal agents snatching campus protesters and opinion writers, among many others seized somewhat violently on camera this year, was about what looked like a new anonymity protocol. There were agents wearing masks and others without visible name tags or badges, many operating in plain clothes. Why were so many of these agents trying to hide their identities?
“ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” a federal judge, William Young, wrote in a blistering 161-page First Amendment ruling handed down last week. “In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police,” he continued. The judge, a Reagan appointee, compared immigration agents to “cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan” and declared that federal efforts to deport outspoken protesters amounted to a “full-throated assault” on freedom of speech. “Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.”
Is this a true secret police? The term is darkly tempting, though much of what we’ve observed from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection this year has fallen distressingly within the bounds of our brutally capacious immigration law. The National Guard deployments, too, have unfolded in public view. The terroristic sweep of President Trump’s mass deportation program will be repeatedly litigated in the years to come, in courts of both law and public opinion — U.S. citizens arrested by agents apparently uninterested in their immigration status, agents drawing guns on civilian bystanders. And to the extent that many of those officers and their superiors have been not just enforcing laws and executive orders but also engaging in a kind of conspicuous and public cosplay, the costumes they have chosen are those of the enforcement arm of an authoritarian regime. When the masks came on, the mask came off.
The cosplay is now bleeding into state violence, and even for those used to pointing fingers and calling out authoritarianism, the past week has been a precipitous escalation: Trump speaking of the “enemy from within” as a national defense strategy waiting for approval proposes focusing the military on domestic threats and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, compares political opposition to terrorism; a military-style raid on a Chicago apartment complex; local police officers hit with tear gas from ICE agents.
Last Friday, the 48-year-old Emmy-winning reporter Mario Guevara was deported to El Salvador from an ICE detention facility in Folkston, Ga. He was held in detention there for over 100 days. The state’s filings concerning his detention seem to largely focus on the crime of committing journalism.
Guevara was arrested in June at a No Kings rally outside Atlanta, where, while filming the protest for his livestreaming platform MG News, he (clearly wearing a press vest and keeping his distance from both protesters and law enforcement) briefly stepped into a roadway. Within days, the charges against him were dropped. But instead of being released, he was transferred to ICE custody. And although an immigration judge granted him bond, finding him neither dangerous nor a flight risk, the government appealed it, arguing that his recording of law enforcement activity itself constituted a danger. And so Guevara — whose work primarily documents immigration enforcement actions, which he often livestreams to hundreds of thousands of followers — was kept in ICE detention. Meanwhile, his immigration case was reopened, and eventually deportation proceedings commenced.
When the Columbia activist and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil was detained in March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that Khalil’s participation in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza amounted to a deportable threat to American foreign policy. The administration appeared to offer a similar argument about Rumeysa Ozturk — seemingly confirming that she had been detained for activism, namely by being a writer of a campus opinion piece criticizing her university for its response to Israel’s war in Gaza, and that she should be deported for that speech crime.
Both of those First Amendment cases still hang in a kind of judicial limbo, though Khalil and Ozturk are — for now, at least — free. Guevara is not, having been sent from the country in which he raised a family and built a news organization for years back to the one he left fearing persecution for his reporting in 2004. “It’s a real frontal attack on journalism and freedom of the press,” said Jose Zamora of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “I think it also shows you how all these democratic institutions that take hundreds of years to build can be dismantled in a year.”
“There’s no real crime here. It’s just pretext,” said Adam Rose, the press rights chair of the Los Angeles Press Club and the deputy director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “That was totally in retaliation for his reporting,” said the A.C.L.U’s Scarlet Kim, one of Guevara’s lawyers in his recent proceedings. “The government has made that explicitly clear.”
Over the past six months, federal officials have again and again declared that documenting immigration enforcement activities by ICE agents is, by definition, a form of doxxing, which they describe not only as a form of harassment or even effectively an incitement to violence but also as the equivalent of violence.
Students of political theory sometimes define the state as the entity that exercises a monopoly on violence; under Trump, the state seems to want to claim a monopoly on anonymity, too. Rose called the logic Orwellian. “It’s almost like doublespeak to say that filming is violence,” he said. “That is absurd. What filming does isn’t violence. It documents violence. It actually proves what really happened.”
Of course, there has been real violence against journalists since Trump returned to office, as well, not just arguments about whether Jimmy Kimmel should be on the air. During the protests against ICE raids in Los Angeles this June, more than 30 incidents of police violence against members of the media were documented by the Los Angeles Press Club, which last month won a remarkable injunction in a Federal District Court in California, in which the judge, Hernán Vera, had to detail that law enforcement could not attack or assault members of the press just for documenting a raid or protest. Vera described the attacks during the protests as “savagery.”
On Sept. 28 an ICE agent fired a pepper ball at the car of a television journalist surveying a detention facility for signs of protest, of which there were none. On Sept. 30 at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, ICE agents shoved journalists to the floor, sending one to the hospital, just a week after a similar episode at the same facility led to the suspension of one agent — and only briefly.
Elsewhere in the city, ICE agents pepper-sprayed a woman who seemed to be filming them on her phone. . . . . A Chicago City Council member was arrested after asking whether the agents had a warrant for someone they’d detained. “If arresting an elected official for peacefully asking questions isn’t a demonstration of authoritarianism, then what is?” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois asked. “They seem to feel they can just willy-nilly shoot tear gas canisters at people and shoot them with foam rounds that can permanently maim people,” said Rose. “They’ve done this over and over.”
At various points over the past decade, nervous Americans sometimes told themselves certain calming stories about the threat of Trumpism — that liberal hysteria was a bigger threat to democracy, that the lesson of his first term was that incompetence stymied ideology, that popularity would be a check and that the courts would be trusted to ultimately hold.
ICE’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year is now set to roughly triple from the year before, as is its number of deportation officers, and Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, does not appear inclined to defer to surveys of public opinion when it comes to deportations and border enforcement.
In certain moments from certain vantages, the proceedings can look like incompetence, with all the Sturm und Drang of Trump’s policies producing far fewer than his desired one million deportations and a high-profile monthlong operation in Chicago yielding just more than 1,000 arrests. . . . But these are not the clips we are meant to see. For that, we have a beautiful, high-production-value hype video full of portentous music, documenting an apartment raid, that Noem posted to social media over the weekend. “Chicago, we’re here for you,” she wrote.
Be very afraid.
Wednesday, October 08, 2025
The Far Right's Obsession With Being A "Heritage American"
In August, a guest on Tucker Carlson’s podcast said something that immediately caught his interest. The United States faces a fundamental rift “between heritage Americans and the new political class,” Auron MacIntyre, a columnist for Blaze Media, argued. “Heritage Americans—what are those?” Carlson asked.
“You could find their last names in the Civil War registry,” MacIntyre explained. This ancestry matters, he said, because America is not “a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract.” It is a specific set of people who embody an “Anglo-Protestant spirit” and “have a tie to history and to the land.” MacIntyre continued: “If you change the people, you change the culture.” “All true,” Carlson replied.
That same phrase—heritage American—has been rippling across the right, particularly on the social web. Politicians have started flirting with the idea as well. During a speech at the Claremont Institute in July, Vice President J. D. Vance said that “people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” referring to those on the “modern left” who conceive of American identity “purely as an idea.” And here’s Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri at the National Conservative Conference last month: “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian Pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.” America, Schmitt said, is “our birthright. It’s our heritage, our destiny.”
The question of who counts as American has been debated for generations, and people have answered it in different ways in various eras—often depending on their own background and ideology. C. Jay Engel, a self-described “heritage American” whom Politico credits as having helped popularize the term, has repeatedly said that he is not a “racial essentialist” and believes that “blacks of the Old South” and “integrated Native Americans” also count as heritage Americans. But he has also argued that “the majority of blacks have demonstrated that they cannot function within the old European cultural standards” and that the concept of heritage Americans affirms “the domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life.”
When I called Engel to ask him about all of this, he told me that he does not believe that genetics are “the chief explanation” for how Anglo-Protestant ideals are transferred from generation to generation—but added that “there is an ethnic or racial correlation” between who embodies such ideals and who doesn’t. Our conversation was polite, but strange at times. . . . . “I’m not contending that you can’t take someone and raise him within a certain cultural environment and he begins to adopt the taste and all that,” Engel responded. “But I do contend that if you bring in massive groups of people over time, it’s going to, in a few generations, be a lot culturally different than it would otherwise have been if you never had done that.”
Speaking with Engel reminded me at times of MacIntyre, Vance, and others who tend to speak in nativist terms. They frequently appeal to an idea that only some Americans are truly legitimate—and often this means Americans of European ancestry—while leaving room for enough plausible deniability to avoid seeming straightforwardly racist. During his conversation with Tucker Carlson, MacIntyre made the point that although one’s Americaness is tied to blood and the land, that “doesn’t mean that other people can’t be grafted in.”
The far-right writer and podcaster Scott Greer said this plainly. “Liberals look stupid when they freak out over such an anodyne term,” he wrote in an August column for The American Conservative endorsing the term. This vagueness is strategically useful, he argued, because “heritage American is more palatable to the public than ‘white.’”
The term also has obvious potency as the Trump administration enacts mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and pursues a project of redefining America more broadly. Immediately upon returning to office, in January, the president signed an executive order to reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment to ban birthright citizenship, the legality of which is still being debated in the courts. Heritage Americans seems engineered to move the goalposts even further.
When Engels and I spoke, he ran through a list of possible immigration restrictions that he would pair with ongoing mass deportations. He seemed to recognize that America can’t deport everyone: “We need to be realistic and can’t turn back the past,” he said. But in politics—especially on the right—new buzzwords can signal what policy goals are coming. Backlash to critical race theory and “groomers” that started online helped galvanize a real-life movement to strip discussions about race and LGBTQ matters from school curricula. The rise of rhetoric about the “Great Replacement”—the conspiracy theory that there is an intentional plot to replace white people with people of color—helped supercharge support for mass deportations among American voters.
Heritage Americans is similarly “a framework that gestures to an intellectual justification for policy,” Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt who studies the right, told me. Taken to the extreme, some of these same ideas lead to remigration, the notion that nonwhite citizens who haven’t properly assimilated should be deported. Remigration has already gained traction among the nativist right in Europe.
Over the summer,
Trump[the Felon] posted a lengthy message on Truth Social about his desire to put the full force of his administration behind his goal to “reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.” The president went on: “Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States.”
Tuesday, October 07, 2025
Monday, October 06, 2025
The Felon Continues to Mimic Hitler's Moves
The burning of the Reichstag, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday, 27 February 1933, was used by Adolph Hitler to pressure the aging and in declining health Paul von Hindenburg, President of Germany, to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties. Once issued, Hitler used the Reichstag Fire Decree and the suspension of civil liberties to pursue a ruthless confrontation with the Communists and opponents of the Nazi Party. Now, many believe starting the Reichstag fire was actually a Nazi plot aimed at using the fire as a pretense to in effect institute martial law to eliminate and/or intimidate and terrorize opponents. Fast forward to 2025 America and we see the Felon using ICE as his Gestapo to commit violent actions against alleged undocumented migrants - e.g., brutally raiding apartment buildings in the middle of the night and zip tying even small children - to provoke civilian protests to the unlawful actions which he seems poised to use as a manufactured excuse for invoking the Insurrection Act and imposing martial law in Chicago, Portland, and other large cities. Indeed, ICE appears to be morphing into the Felon's private army which sees itself as above the law that is deployed to terrorize non-whites and silence critics and opponents of the Felon's increasingly fascist regime. Combine this with the Felon's efforts to censor news outlets and even late night comedians and we Americans find ourselves facing something perhaps even more frightening than the so-called red scare under Joseph McCarthy. A piece in Politico looks at the Felon's dangerous and illegal actions that mirror those seen in Germany ninety years ago:
President Donald Trump[The Felon] on Monday said he would consider using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military if federal courts prevented him from deploying the National Guard to protect federal buildings and conduct law enforcement operations.The comments came a day after a federal judge blocked the president from sending National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, which Trump claims has been taken over by left-wing “domestic terrorists.”
“You look at what’s happening with Portland over the years, it’s a burning hell hole,” Trump added. “And then you have a judge that lost her way that tries to pretend that there’s no problem.”
The Insurrection Act of 1807 is a federal law that allows the president to nationally deploy the U.S. military or federalize state National Guard troops to quell what the president deems an insurrection against the United States.
Earlier Monday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said the administration had been contending with a “legal insurrection” and that rulings stifling the White House’s agenda amounted to “an insurrection against the laws and Constitution of the United States.”
“We need to have district courts in this country that see themselves as being under the laws and Constitution and not being able to take for themselves powers that are reserved solely for the president,” Miller added.
Trump has flirted with invoking the Insurrection Act before. During the 2024 campaign, he said he would use the law to suppress unrest. And at the end of his first term in office, some of his supporters urged him to invoke the law to try to hold onto power after his loss to former President Joe Biden.
In the Felon's mind, anything that questions his cruel and dictatorial agenda is an "insurrection." There is, of course in reality no armed insurrection against the United States, so the Felon's invoking of the Insurrection Act would be illegal under any remotely accurate reading of the law. Equally concerning is the manner in which ICE is becoming a vehicle for a police state. A piece at Mother Jones looks at ICE's frightening growth and growing threat to all immigrants (but especially those of Hispanic ancestry):
When it passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in June, Congress handed nearly $75 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some $30 billion of that money will be spent on enforcement and deportation—hiring spree incoming—and another $45 billion will go toward new detention centers, including 50 by the end of the year.
The OBBB immediately supercharged
President Donald Trump’s[the Felon's] mass deportation campaign, which already had been terrorizing immigrant communities and sending asylum seekers to a hellish prison in El Salvador. But an important part of the detention state ramp-up has flown under the radar: ICE’s increased cooperation with local law enforcement agencies.On Friday, ICE hit a new milestone: The agency has now signed more than 1,000 so-called 287(g) agreements nationwide. These agreements, which deputize local police and jails to perform certain immigration enforcement functions, have exploded under Trump. At the end of the Biden presidency, ICE had just 135 287(g) deals in place; now there are 1,001—a 641 percent increase.
About half of these agreements are what ICE calls task force agreements, which allow state and local cops to essentially act as immigration agents while fulfilling their regular police duties. If these sound familiar—and familiarly problematic—it’s because they were discontinued in 2012, following a Department of Justice investigation the year before that found widespread racial profiling by Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, then led by the notorious Joe Arpaio. The Trump administration brought task forces back this year, and ICE has signed more than 500 of these particular agreements across 33 states.
State cooperation with federal immigration authorities can lead to “rippling harm” on the communities that police are meant to serve and protect, says Shayna Kessler, director of the Advancing Universal Representation Initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice. “It increases distrust in law enforcement. It increases fear in immigrant communities, it decreases the ability of immigrants to take care of their families, to support the economy, and to be strong and stable members of their communities.”
The federal government is already pumping billions of dollars into
Trump’s[the Felon's] anti-immigration crackdown, unleashing masked agents all across America. But in many places, undocumented immigrants will now also have to worry that any encounter with a police officer could lead to their deportation.
The other question some, especially those in the media, don't want to address is what happens when ICE begins apprehending native born citizens who oppose the Felon's cruel and fascist agenda.
Book Bans: The Dumbing Down of America
Amid last week’s parade of proclamations about beardo generals and Navy-vessel aesthetics, there was one announcement that felt wholesomely, uncomplicatedly good: Reading Rainbow is back — at least for a limited time. The award-winning former PBS show, hosted by LeVar Burton from 1983 to 2009, has been rebooted for a four-episode season hosted by California-based librarian Mychal Threets, a Reading Rainbow superfan , , ,
The show’s return feels like a brief respite from the anti-education storm on which the second Trump administration blew in last January. In the 10 months since, the landscape of public education has already felt its effects in actions like the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the nation’s sole federal agency for libraries. Ahead of Banned Book Week (Oct. 5–11), PEN America’s newest report, “Banned in the USA: the normalization of book banning,” confirms that book bans and challenges continue to rise in record numbers — but, more importantly, are coming to feel increasingly inevitable. With a deliberate callback to the era of Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare, PEN America asserts that the coordinated, systematic attack on literacy and critical thinking inherent in book bans under Trump 2.0 can be called the “Ed Scare.”
Unlike the American Library Association, which defines a banned book as one that has been “completely removed from a library or school collection due to objections from a person or group,” PEN America’s definition is broader, with the terms “bans” and “challenges” denoting “any action taken against a book based on its content that leads to a previously accessible book” being restricted or removed. Using this measure, the new report counts 6,870 books that were banned in the 2024–25 school year, in 23 states and 87 public school districts. That’s actually down a couple thousand from the 2023–24 tally of 10,000 — but the report’s overview remains grim regardless:
“Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country. Never before have so many states passed laws or regulations to facilitate the banning of books, including bans on specific titles statewide. Never before have so many politicians sought to bully school leaders into censoring according to their ideological preferences, even threatening public funding to exact compliance. Never before has access to so many stories been stolen from so many children.”
As in previous years, the majority of book bans have been enacted in the ban-happy states of Florida (2,304 instances), Texas (1,781 instances) and Tennessee (1,622 instances). The reasons for challenges and bans, too, remain consistent: Among the most frequently challenged books are those that feature characters of color and explorations of race and racism, and those that foreground LGBTQ characters and representation of same-sex attraction and love.
And the groups catalyzing the bans, despite often identifying as “grassroots,” are still ones like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education, funded by right-wing donors and think tanks wielding copied-and-pasted lists of books to ban in bulk — books that most of their members are unlikely to have actually read, but that they can denounce with hypersensationalized phrases including “pornography” and “critical race theory.”
PEN America’s report doesn’t include the prospective bans of romance novels, fanfiction and stories with LGBTQ characters proposed by an Oklahoma bill that considers it a felony to own, read or write books that fall into a vague and capacious definition of “prurient” and “patently offensive,” with repercussions, including prison sentences, for those who publish or sell such works.
It also doesn’t include rogue instances in which books are stolen and destroyed, like the one that occurred this April when an Ohio man checked out 100 books from a branch of the Cuyahoga County library in Ohio — most of them on subjects like Jewish, African American and LGBTQ+ history — and recorded himself burning them, later uploading the videos to Telegram. Just as attempts to restrict abortion have inspired attacks on women’s clinics and assassinations of providers, increasingly dramatic portrayals of books as dangerous simply for focusing on a wider spectrum of people and histories will undoubtedly inspire more book-adjacent violence.
Efforts to restrict what books are available to public school students have increased dramatically since 2020, yet concern about the reach of virtual spaces where the youth are equally likely — and in fact more likely — to flex their curiosity about lives different from their own seems much more subdued. It feels as though the organized pressure on school boards and elected officials is a kind of censorious Hail Mary, one last, sustained push to control the physical symbols of a world that has otherwise evolved past the need for pious, moralistic guidance on what young people should open their hearts and minds to.
Americans broadly disfavor book bans, in schools or elsewhere; a 2023 survey conducted by Book Riot and the Everylibrary Institute found that 67% of parents think book bans are “a waste of time” and 74% believe they “infringe on parents’ rights.” A 2024 dispatch from the Knight Foundation found that, in a survey of more than 4,500 adults, more Americans said “that it was more concerning to restrict students’ access to books with educational value than it was to provide them with access to books that have inappropriate content.”
The real preoccupation of the groups fomenting these bans is that young people discovering new ideas and possibilities within books will realize the authority figures in their own lives are motivated by fear and bigotry. Project 2025’s plans for remaking the public-education system are almost all written with an eye toward education as indoctrination — more parental and religious involvement, more restrictions on how students can and cannot be taught, more explicitly religious education and homeschooling. . . . . the blueprint for education in Trump 2.0 is more accurately described as tyrants engaged in deliberate dumbing down.
The upside, of course, remains as true as ever: Whatever the subject or author or decade, restricting access to books by deeming them dangerous or subversive only makes them more appealing. A recent study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and George Mason University looked at more than 1,500 titles that appeared on lists of frequently challenged books between 2021 and 2022, looking for patterns in how removal from school libraries impacted them. Many of the results reflect exactly what you might expect, particularly from teens: the circulation of banned books increased 12%, on average . . . .
Which doesn’t mean the normalization of book bans that have become a “routine and expected part of school operations,” per the PEN America report, isn’t a source of dread. As an autocratic dystopia continues to take shape, it’s difficult not to wonder how far this will go. . . . . How will the forces of book banning continue to accuse teachers of “indoctrinating” students in Black and LGBTQ history while simultaneously defending their own agenda of indoctrination? Book banners are waging a fight they know they can’t win — but having nothing to lose might make them more dangerous than ever.
Sunday, October 05, 2025
Trump’s Dangerous Purge of Terrorism Prosecutors
Donald Trump’s Justice Department is firing some of the nation’s most experienced counterterrorism prosecutors and experts, apparently for political reasons. Line prosecutors and terrorism experts across the country are watching with alarm, although many are afraid to say so publicly.
On Wednesday night, the department pushed out Michael Ben’Ary, who was head of national security at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. He lost his job, CNN reported, because a MAGA activist had falsely accused him of resisting the recent indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. (Ben’Ary was not involved in the case, the network found.)
As a prosecutor, Ben’Ary took an oath “that requires you to follow the facts and the law wherever they lead, free from fear or favor, and unhindered by political interference,” he wrote to colleagues on Friday. “In recent months, the political leadership of the Department have violated these principles, jeopardizing our national security and making American citizens less safe.”
His ouster follows that of George Toscas, one of the most experienced anti-terrorist attorneys in the Justice Department. As the deputy assistant attorney general in the National Security Division, Toscas had encouraged the investigation into the inappropriate storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after Trump left office in 2020. Toscas was forced out of his division and sidelined at the DOJ in January.
The United States loses these seasoned prosecutors at its own peril. Bringing terrorists to justice in American courts has become a crucial part of the nation’s self-defense. But this legal work requires judgment and expertise that, once lost, are extraordinarily difficult to replicate.
For the second time ever, the Trump administration is now trying to prosecute in U.S. criminal court a foreign terrorism suspect on charges related to killing American service members in a war zone. Mohammad Sharifullah, a.k.a. Jafar, reputedly a member of an Islamic State offshoot, was charged in March with aiding and abetting a 2021 suicide bombing that killed 13 American service members and more than 160 Afghans.
That case was assigned to the Eastern District of Virginia, which because of its concentration of national-security agencies is a crucial jurisdiction for terrorism cases. But Michael Ben’Ary was a leading prosecutor on the case. In his letter, the 20-year veteran said that his dismissal “will hurt this case” against Jafar: “Justice for Americans killed and injured by our enemies should not be contingent on what someone in the department of Justice sees in their social media feed that day.”
Toscas’s sidelining, from the National Security Division of the Justice Department, means that he will not be of much help either. His last day is coming soon.
Before Ben’Ary was fired, another respected prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert, was forced out by Trump because he wouldn’t support the president’s questionable case against New York Attorney General Letitia James. Siebert’s replacement is the Trump loyalist Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance attorney in Florida. The New York Times reported that when she showed up to indict Comey, she wasn’t sure where to stand in the room.
Siebert, Ben’Ary, Toscas: No one can credibly argue that the Justice Department’s recent personnel decisions are based on a lack of prosecutorial excellence. The political removal of these civil servants makes the United States and the world less safe.
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