I have a guilty secret: I love true crime documentaries.

Last week, I watched The Crash, a Netflix documentary about the 2022 case of 17-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla, who was convicted of double murder for intentionally crashing her car into a brick building at 100 mph, killing her boyfriend Dominic Russo and their friend Davion Flanagan.

As a defense lawyer, I am sympathetic to people who are accused of committing crimes. I believe, like Bryan Stevenson, that each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done; that the sum of our worst days does not define us.

A large part of my job is untangling the narrative of the life that led my clients to the conduct for which they are being judged, to help the court to see not just the full person, but also the particular set of circumstances that led that person to do what they did.

I have represented clients who have experienced trauma, mental illness, deprivation and desperation. And I have seen young people make split-second choices with disastrous consequences.

17-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla is a young person who made such a choice.

Near the start of The Crash, Tim Troup, the Assistant County Prosecutor for Cuyahoga County in Cleveland, Ohio who prosecuted the case againt her, is shown seated at a gleaming desk, a wall of windows framing a cityscape of tall buildings, in the shadows to his left, an American flag hangs limply. He sits back in his chair, his hands clasped in front of him.

“I’ve worked on easily, over a thousand serious felony cases,” he tells us. The prosecution of Ms. Shirilla is “without a doubt the most significant case I ever worked on.” We will never know why he feels this way, or the barometer by which measures the significance of cases he has worked on. If he shared this with the filmmakers, it did not make the final cut.

I am thinking and writing about this because I am tired of dissecting executive orders and court decisions. It has started to feel like a wholly meaningless exercise.

Last week, the case against four peopled indicted in October after protesting outside a suburban Chicago immigration center was dismissed after what might once have passed for shocking prosecutorial conduct during the grand jury process that secured the protesters’ indictment. When the court first requested the grand jury transcripts, the government turned over a heavily redacted set. Only later did the government turn over the unredacted transcripts.

These transcripts made clear that prosecutors had vouched for their own case with the grand jurors, putting their credibility on the line when their proof was insufficient. They had improper conversations with those jurors outside of the grand jury room. They removed jurors who didn’t vote their way. And they concealed what they had done.

Judge April Perry, a United States District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois, who spent twelve years as a prosecutor in the same office as the prosecutors who secured the indictment of the protesters, had this to say:

I am incredibly shocked by the redactions that were made. I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. Attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.

What’s shocking isn’t merely that prosecutors violated rules. It’s the contempt that their violations lay bare—for the grand jury, for the accused, and for the restraints that are supposed to keep state power from becoming brute force.

“Your sole goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself,” Judge Perry reminded Andrew S. Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who appeared in court, ostensibly to apologize for the mistakes of his subordinates.

But these were not mistakes. This was power doing what power does when it believes itself immune from consequence.

Something has cracked, but what has cracked is surface.
What was underneath was always broken.
I know in my heart this is true.

My mentor, Liz Fink, taught me that my job as a federal criminal defense lawyer is to stand between my client and the crushing weight of government power. Not because the courts reliably deliver justice. Because they so often do not.

Liz was fond of quoting the Lenny Bruce line about “the halls of justice, where the only justice is in the halls.” She used to tell me that you could sometimes find justice in the state courthouse across the street, where it was loud and dirty and chaotic, where people talked over one another and it was hard to hear yourself think. But in the federal courts where we practiced — in buildings like 40 Foley Square, with their veined marble, bronze detailing, hushed corridors, and pristine courtrooms, where everyone was polite and everything appeared orderly — justice was far more elusive.

Even when the government follows the rules, or doesn’t get caught breaking them, justice is not their client.
It’s not what they seek.

Winning is.

My father knew this. He started out believing in justice, and the courts as a means to that end, and at some point along the way, he lost that faith.

It began eroding during the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, which, coincidentally, also took place in the very same courthouse in Chicago where Judge Perry sits. And it was eviscerated by the massacre at Attica Correctional Facility.

“I never quite recovered from Attica,” he wrote.

For a long time afterward, I was filled with hate. I hated the public officials who allowed the massacre to happen. I hated their coldness, their inhumanity. What I saw and heard at Attica added to my experiences in Chicago and crystallized my political thinking. While I learned in Chicago that the government is dirty and corrupt and will utilize any means necessary to prevent dissent, Attica showed me that the government call also be heartless and will even sacrifice the lives of its own to save face and protect the status quo.

I write about this a lot because I think about it a lot—how my dad built his belief system, and how he rebuilt it after it shattered. It is part of my inheritance—this broken-and-rebuilt carapace, misshapen and many-sided. At some angles, hard to look at. Beautiful where its edges have been worn down, where the misjoined pieces have healed, where it shines. I keep it in the closet of my mind, but sometimes I take it out and turn it over in my hands, feel its weight, hold it up to the light, try to make sense of it, try to make it mine.

But I can’t.

You can inherit a belief system, but you can’t climb inside it, can’t wear it, can’t make it yours—not completely. These things come from living. They are homes we have to build for ourselves.

At approximately 5:34 in the morning on July 31, 2022, Mackenzie Shirilla turned her black Toyota Camry west onto Progress Drive. Dominic Russo was in the front passenger seat, Davion Flanagan was in the back. Two minutes later, the car veered off Progress, crossed grass, went through the intersection of Alameda Drive, hit a business sign, and crashed into the corner of the building at 11792 Alameda Drive.

Shirilla’s defense was that she suffered a medical emergency and blacked out. But it’s hard to reconcile that with how fast she was driving, navigating the S-curve of Progress Drive at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. According to the car’s data recorder, during the last five seconds before impact, she pressed the gas pedal to the floor.

This is the fact that mattered most to the judge.

“The [crash] video clearly shows purpose and intent,” the court said when rendering its verdict. “[Shirilla] chose a course of death and destruction that day. She morphs from a responsible driver to literal hell on wheels as she makes her way down the street.”

Shirilla was found guilty of two counts of murder and sentenced to 15 years to life on each count, run concurrently.

The focus on intent — on what Shirilla meant to happen — feels like a failure to me. It is one of the many ways the blunt instrument of our justice system fails to reckon with harm. If Shirilla intended to kill Russo and Flanagan, she also intended to kill herself. Driving at top speed into a brick wall is an act of obliteration.

Maybe, on that five-minute early morning drive, as they made their way home, dehydrated and bleary-eyed from an all-night party, Russo tried to end their relationship. Maybe Shirilla saw this as the end of her world and decided to really end it. Or maybe she wanted her passengers to think she was going to crash the car, but did not mean to go through with it, and the gathering speed carried her further than she meant to go. Maybe it came from nowhere at all: an incomprehensible lurch toward oblivion.

I don’t believe that she blacked out and remembers nothing, as she tells us in the documentary, although I guess its possible that the trauma of the crash wiped her memory. I definitely don’t believe that she suffered a medical emergency. I think she made a choice.

But believing that she made a choice is not the same as believing that she understood, in any real way, the finality of what she was doing. Whatever might have been in Shirilla’s mind at that moment, what happened on Progress Drive belongs to the terrible category of decisions young people sometimes make: impulsive, catastrophic, and blind to consequence until the consequence is already here.

At Shirilla’s sentencing, Flanagan’s younger sister asked for the “longest possible sentence.”

Flanagan’s father tells the filmmakers, “I just wanted my son’s life to have concrete value in the term of years. And if that was 15, okay. If that was 30, I would be happier with that.”

This is how our justice system teaches us to measure the value of a life. The length of a sentence becomes a scorecard. Fifteen years means one thing. Thirty years means something more. Life means the loss has been taken seriously.

But Russo and Flanagan’s lives are worth far more than any term of imprisonment could ever capture.

And so is Shirilla’s.

If she had died in the crash, she would be mourned as a victim. Because she lived, she became the person through whom the system tries to balance the books. Her punishment is treated as an accounting for loss.

But it will never be enough.

This is what happens when we expect justice to come from courts. The system gives us the only thing it knows how to give: punishment.

What we want is for the dead to be restored to the people who loved them.

And no sentence can do that.

On September 26, 2025, Kat Abughazaleh, a journalist running for Congress in Illinois’s 9th District, was arrested while protesting the inhumane conditions at the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. Five others were arrested with her, including Michael Rabbitt, the Democratic Committeeperson for Chicago’s 45th Ward, and Catherine Sharp, who is running for the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Charges against two of the six were dropped in March of 2026, leaving the four defendants whose cases were dismissed last week.

The indictment against the “Broadview Six” alleged a conspiracy to impede or injure an officer by surrounding a federal agent’s vehicle and slowing its approach to the building. “It was further part of the conspiracy that the co-conspirators … physically hindered and impeded Agent A and the Government Vehicle such that Agent A was forced to drive at an extremely slow rate of speed to avoid injuring any of the conspirators and in doing so slowly progressed towards the [ICE facility] to discharge the duties of his office,” the indictment reads.

In other words: they forced an ICE van to drive slowly.

It was, apparently, an incredibly difficult indictment for prosecutors to secure—so difficult that they had to dismiss jurors they couldn’t convince, have secret (and highly inappropriate) out-of-court conversations with other jurors, and personally vouch for the strength of their case.

Trust us, we are the government.

I have seen this play out in courtrooms before: when prosecutors don’t have enough evidence, they appeal to public trust.

Over 25 years ago, shortly after I graduated college and before I decided to go to law school, I sat in a courtroom in Tulia, Texas, during the trial of Kareem Abdul Jabbar White. White was one of 46 people ensnared in a 1999 drug sting on the word of undercover officer Tom Coleman, who had left his previous law enforcement position in the middle of a shift without bothering to return his patrol car and had a reputation for untruthfulness. Yet despite the lack of corroborating evidence, more than 10% of Tulia’s tiny Black population was arrested on the strength of his word alone.

At White’s trial, Coleman changed his testimony so many times that the district attorney was left arguing to the jury that, if they let White go free, they were calling their sheriff a liar. White was convicted and sentenced to 60 years.

For his efforts, in 1999, Coleman was named “Texas Law Man of the Year” by the Texas Department of Public Safety. After his fraud came to light, thirty-five of the Tulia defendants, including White, were pardoned.

At the hearing last week in Chicago before Judge Perry, U.S. Attorney Boutros told the court that once he “became aware of the conduct in the grand jury,” the charges were dismissed within 24 hours. But he doubled down on his condemnation of the protesters’ conduct, calling it “unacceptable in a civilized society.”

What is acceptable in a “civilized society”? And who do we want patroling its boundaries?

Certainly not Boutros.

For him, standing up for civilized society apparently means allowing our president to use our “justice” system to intimidate people who dare to stand up to him. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Boutros had opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll focusing on whether she committed perjury in the two civil lawsuits she won against the president: the first for sexual assault and defamation, and the second for continuing to defame her after she won the first one.

It’s unclear what connection such an investigation would have to the Northern District of Chicago. Probably none. Per the New York Times,

The Justice Department’s leadership … has made extensive use of a provision that allows the designation of cases to handpicked prosecutors across the country, regardless of whether possible crimes occurred in their jurisdictions.

This past April, the Illinois Accountability Commission released its report on “Operation Midway Blitz,” the ICE operation underway in Chicago that the Broadview Six were protesting.

Among other things, the Commission found that “Federal immigration agents engaged in dangerous high-speed vehicular pursuits, extreme physical force, indiscriminate use of chemical agents, shootings, beatings, and other violent acts, amounting to unconstitutional uses of force” and that officials from ICE, CPB, DHS and the White House “routinely lied to the public about the motivations and outcomes of Operation Midway Blitz and concealed and distorted key facts about events involving federal immigration agents.”

To obscure the extent of its own depravity, our government is coming after people who stand up for their neighbors and insist that the people it targets still belong.

A civilized society is not threatened by that kind of solidarity.
It is built from it.

My father lost his faith in the law. He came to believe that courts were instruments of an oppressive system.

But it was not the end of his moral life. He kept going. He kept defending people. He kept standing next to the accused, the despised, the condemned.

And he never gave in to pessimism.

That is the part of my inheritance I am trying to make my own.

Not the faith he lost, but what he rebuilt from its wreckage: a refusal to give in to despair, and an insistence that when the law fails, when power lies, when punishment is mistaken for justice, that there is still work to do.

And that we are the ones who must do it.

Last night was the first night of Passover, the Jewish holiday where we celebrate the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt and slavery under Pharaoh. We read from the Haggadah, a traditional Jewish text that sets forth the order of this ritual meal, the Passover Seder, going round the table to tell a story of bondage, liberation, and retribution. We tell ourselves this story. We tell this story to our children.

The version my family reads—the version we have always read—is new revised edition of Rabbi Nathan Goldberg’s Passover Haggadah. The story unfolds as an answer to questions the text bids them ask us.

At the outset, Goldberg’s Haggadah instructs the leader to hold up a piece of matzoh, a large cracker, unleavened bread we eat to remind ourselves that when our ancestors escaped their bondage, there was not enough time for their bread to rise. It is the provision of a people in flight.

Holding the matzoh aloft, my uncle Howard begins:

This is the bread of affliction, which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. All who are hungry—let them come and eat. All who are needy—let them come celebrate the passover with us. Now we are here; next year may we be in the Land of Israel. Now we are slaves; next year may be we be free men.

Israel.

The Israel that the Haggadah speaks of is a dream.

It is not something we possess.
It is something we are taught to long for.

We are free.
We are not free.
We are here.
Next year may we be there.

In the Haggadah, Israel exists in the space between what is and what ought to be, a horizon we move toward, never quite reaching.

Israel is a people.
Israel is a promise.

And yet, as we say these words—next year may we be in the Land of Israel—there is already a place on the map that answers to that name.

Not a horizon. A country.

The Goldberg Haggadah was first published in 1949, a pivotal year in the history of Israel the country. It was the year that the new nation signed its first armistice deal with neighboring countries, agreements that established what came to be known as the Green Line, the borders that would define the state for nearly two decades.

It was the year that Israel first drew a circle around itself, deciding who belonged inside that circle, and who did not. 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes. Over 400 towns were destroyed.

Israel is not just a promise.

Other Haggadahs produced in the 1940s were more explicitly Zionist. What became known as the Shulsinger Haggadah would feature woodcut illustrations glorifying Israel’s new statehood. In one, a soldier holds a rifle while another bows his head in prayer, his arm wrapped in tefillin—the straps that bind the devout to small boxes containing verses of Torah, like those my grandfather once wore. In the distance, workers lay cable and till the soil. A guard tower rises above them, crowned with a fluttering Israeli flag.

But Rabbi Goldberg’s Haggadah is no less certain in what it claims. It tells us that God kept His promise to the people of Israel: that we would be enslaved, that our children would be strangers in a strange land, oppressed for generations, and that, after centuries of suffering, we would be delivered, coming forth with great wealth.

It is an inheritance.

We raise a cup of wine and say:

The is promise made to our forefathers holds true also for
us. For more than once have they risen against us to
destroy us; in every generation they rise against us and
seek our destruction. But the Holy One, blessed be He,
saves us from their hands.

In every generation they rise against us. And in every generation, we are delivered.

Why do we tell this story?
What are our children supposed to take from it?

This year, Netanyahu invoked this very passage of the Haggadah to justify a war that the state of Israel has named “The War of Redemption,” its war with Iran, its continuing destruction of Gaza, a war that can be redirected against any enemy and any threat.

Israel is a country.
And Passover story, the story of our deliverance, becomes, in his telling, the story of why we deserve it.

But it is not just Netanyahu’s telling.

It is in the words themselves.

It is in Goldberg’s Haggadah, the one we read every year, which we never read through to the end. We stop on page 28: The Festival Meal. We close the book before the story finishes.

But Goldberg goes on.

This is how the Seder concludes:

Ended is the Passover Seder
According to custom, statute and law.
As we were worthy to celebrate it this year,
So may we perform it in future years.
O Pure One in heaven above,
Restore the congregation of Israel in Your love.
Speedily lead Your redeemed people
To Zion in joy.

NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM

For much of American Jewish history, the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” did not appear in our Haggadahs. When those words did appear, the sentiment they conveyed sounded differently:

O bring us to Jerusalem.
Grant us to be in Jerusalem.

The longing they expressed remained abstract.
The responsibility of our deliverance was left to God.

Only in the 1940s, in the shadow of catastrophe and the emergence of a Jewish state, did the phrase begin to appear in its now-familiar form:

Next year in Jerusalem.

What had once been a prayer became a possibility.
And what was once possibility became a claim, anchored in both legal authority and divine right.

Where does that leave us?

With a choice about what this story means.
What Israel means.

If Israel is a promise made to us, then the story of Passover becomes a story of entitlement, of suffering redeemed through power, of history used to justify whatever comes next.

But if Israel is a promise we make, then the story becomes something else entirely.

Not a justification.
A responsibility.

To remember what it was to be strangers.
To refuse to become Pharaoh in our own telling.
To insist on a liberation that is not built on the unfreedom of others.

The Haggadah has never been a fixed text. It has always been revised, reinterpreted, rewritten to meet the moral demands of its time.

Ours must be no different.

And if we are to say the words “next year in Jerusalem,” we must understand that this is not a vision of a place we possess
or a land we lay claim to.

It is a world we have yet to build.

Today is Purim, the Jewish holiday commemorating the salvation of the Jewish people by Queen Esther.

According to the Book of Esther, Esther is an orphan who becomes queen after the Persian king Ahasuerus demotes his first wife, Queen Vashti, for refusing to be put on display before a group of drunken men.

Ahasuerus cannot tolerate humiliation in front of his guests. He strips Vashti of her title and sets out to remarry. Of all the women in the land, he chooses Esther, raised by her uncle Mordecai, who does not reveal that she is Jewish.

The king’s chief advisor is Haman, a man, like the king, obsessed with status and obedience. When Mordecai refuses to bow before him, Haman plots revenge. Not only against Mordecai, but against all the Jews in Persia. He secures the king’s approval.

How does he do this? He tells the king that the Jews are a threat.

“There is a certain people,” he says, “whose laws are different from those of every other people. It is not in the king’s interest to tolerate them.”

Armed with royal authority, Haman casts lots—purim—to fix the date of their destruction.

The thirteenth day of the month of Adar is selected. A decree is issued.

This year, the thirteenth of Adar falls on March 2.

As the date approaches, Haman prepares a gallows for Mordecai.

Meanwhile, the king drifts through his palace. Restless. Capricious. Shallow. He issues orders and forgets them. He stays up late having court records read aloud. He throws more banquets.

Esther knows she must do something. She is the only person who can save her people from certain death. So she speaks to the king in his language; she throws a banquet.

The king is pleased. At the banquet, he turns to Esther and promises to grant her any request, a flex of his power.

She has only one.

Esther tells the king that she is Jewish. She begs him to save her life and the lives of her people.

The king is furious. Presumably he already knows what he has authorized; he has approved Haman’s plan. What he has not understood is that Esther herself is among the condemned.

But in ancient Persia, a royal decree cannot be rescinded.
What is done is done.

Instead, the king issues a second decree, granting the Jews permission to defend themselves.

Haman is hanged on the very gallows he built for Mordecai.

This is where the story usually blurs.

On Purim, we celebrate Esther’s courage. We cheer Haman’s death.

We do not dwell on what follows.

The second edict gives the Jews the right to protect themselves, but also to slay their oppressors, including women and children, and to take their possessions as spoils of war.

And so, the Jews become the aggressors and slay their enemies.

These “enemies” are not villains conjured from thin air. They are the people originally commanded by royal edict to kill the Jews, and then, by virtue of that decree, transformed into enemies who must themselves be destroyed.

This is not incidental. It is the logic of unchecked power.

It is not an accident that our president and Prime Minister Netanyahu chose Purim’s eve to launch an attack on Iran. Ancient Persia occupies the land of modern-day Iran.

Netanyahu explicitly invoked Purim in his statement on the invasion:

My brothers and sisters, in two days we will celebrate the holiday of Purim. 2,500 years ago, in ancient Persia, an enemy rose against us with the exact same goal of completely destroying our people. But Mordechai the Jew and Queen Esther, with their courage and resourcefulness, saved our people. In those days of Purim, the lot was cast, and the wicked Haman fell along with it. Even today on the holiday of Purim, the lot was cast, and the end of the evil regime will also come.

Netanyahu sees himself as Mordecai, and Israel as Esther.

But he is not Mordecai.

He is far closer to Haman, weaponizing fear to unlock sovereign force. There is a certain people, he tells the king…

And the king? Our president is Ahasuerus. Bored, distractible, easily flattered and just as easily enraged by our failure to appreciate his self-perceived greatness. An abuser who treats the American people like Queen Vashti, punishing us when we aren’t sufficiently grateful or compliant.

Who uses executive orders to send “law enforcement” into American cities to terrorize—and kill—our people.

Who uses emergency powers to invade other countries.

Who withholds transportation and infrastructure funding to coerce compliance with ICE terror.

Who cannot admit error, and so cannot undo harm.

Yesterday, I went to a Purim celebration with my children. We told Esther’s story, the story of an orphan who is married against her will to a king, and who risks her life to speak for her people. We cheered Haman’s reversal of fortune. We wore masks and costumes and ate hamantaschen, triangle-shaped cookies said to symbolize Haman’s three-cornered hat.

But when I think of Netanyahu’s invocation, the hamantaschen turns to ash in my mouth.

The story of Purim is not a children’s story.
It is not a fairy tale.
It is a political text about power without accountability.

What saves the Jews in Persia is proximity to power, access to the palace, and a willingness to exploit the king’s self-interest to redirect his wrath.

That is not a comforting lesson.

Read honestly, Purim is not a story of salvation. It is a story about how quickly law becomes a weapon; how easily fear becomes policy; how violence, once unleashed, demands justification after justification to sustain itself.

All you have to do is look at our president’s post-hoc justification for his unilateral invasion:

Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people. Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world.

In other words: he had no choice.

But there was no imminent threat.

And when our own president governs by decree, he is not defending democracy. He is hollowing it out.

At least 555 people have been killed since the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran began, including 163 at a girls’ school in Southern Iran, many of them children.

In an attempt to distract us from collapsing domestic legitimacy and a plummeting approval rating, our president is killing people.

Because he cannot tolerate humiliation.
Because we are not sufficiently grateful.
Because we refuse to swallow the lie that he has “solved” affordability or “defeated” inflation.
Because we keep talking about the Epstein files.

There is always a choice. Our president had one. Esther had one. So do we.

Esther resisted.

But she did not overthrow the system that threatened her people. She survived it. She flattered her husband and used his power to redirect the violence he had already decreed. Her actions mattered. She saved lives. But the machinery that made extermination possible remained intact.

That is the hard truth at the heart of Purim: resistance under empire is often partial, compromised, and dangerous. It does not arrive clean. It does not save everyone. And it does not absolve us from reckoning with what follows.

Writing about Purim and its meaning for our times in 2020, Rabbi Cat Zavis described the choice the story presents:

Do we welcome the possibility of a fundamentally different world or do we stick with incremental changes? Are we willing to imagine and fight for a world in which the possibility of healing, repair, and transformation are alive and well or do we settle for what we are told is realistic by those with power and the media that back and are owned by them? Can we embrace hope and love or do we cocoon ourselves in fear and despair?

In 2020, Zavis framed that choice as an internal debate within the Democratic party about the party’s platform and path forward. But 2020 was a lifetime ago. Another universe.

The choice feels starker now.

We are told, again and again, that incremental change is the best we can do. That survival requires alignment with power. That obedience to decrees is realism. That bloodshed is tolerable so long as it is explained, managed, and carried out in our name.

Purim does not command us to cheer this.

If it commands us to do anything, it is to recognize the danger of kings who cannot be contradicted, decrees that cannot be undone, and systems that imagine no solution except more bloodshed.

And to resist them.

Not with myth-making.
Not with blind loyalty.
Not with compromise.
But with refusal.

Refusal to sanctify violence after the fact.
Refusal to confuse power with righteousness.
Refusal to accept that law, once weaponized, must always draw more blood to justify itself.

Purim ends without redemption for a reason. The story does not tell us how to win. It tells us what we are up against.

What we do with that knowledge is the choice that remains.

Lately, I have been thinking—and writing—about love.

I wrote about it in a recent post, sharing a clip from the documentary Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris, in which Baldwin calls love an “unpopular movement,” insisting that it is only through “the love and the passion of a very few” that our world holds itself together.

I’m going to repost the full quote here:

Love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.

I keep coming back to these words, trying to understand what he is telling us. I read them over and over, waiting for them to offer something new. An answer, or an instruction.

What did Baldwin mean by love?

Or rather, in the words of Terry Britten and Graham Lyle, as immortalized by the inimitable Tina Turner, what’s love got to do with it?

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines love as “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties,” “attraction based on sexual desire,” “affection and tenderness felt by lovers,” or affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Its origins are murky. In the late fifth century, Pope Gelasius I replaced the Roman festival of Lupercalia with a feast day for a Christian martyr named Valentine—though no one agrees which one. It wasn’t associated with romantic love until the 14th century, when Chaucer linked it to courtship in a poem celebrating a royal engagement, heralding Saint Valentine’s Day as the time “when every fowl comes there his mate to take.”

The Valentine’s Day we know is a sentimental holiday. Nominally a celebration of love and romance. In practice, an exercise in consumption. We buy chocolate, gifts, and cards. We make dinner reservations. It is also performative. We turn love into gestures that can be displayed, counted, affirmed.

And it asks very little of us.

It’s easy to mistake that sentimentality for love.

Baldwin did not make that mistake. He was not talking about romance, or even affection, but about what sustains a society.

When he says “the world is held together by the love and passion of a very few,” he rejects the idea that institutions hold us together. What sustains us, he suggests, are people who refuse to abandon one another.

Baldwin knew how easy it is to surrender to hopelessness.
Love is resistance to that surrender.

He continues:

What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.

When Baldwin says “what you’re looking at is also you,” he collapses the distance between self and other. When he says “you could be that monster,” he shatters the moral fantasy that evil belongs to someone else. Because the monster is also you, you cannot excuse yourself. You cannot safely condemn without self-examination. You cannot retreat into moral superiority.

But it’s more than that. If “you could be that monster,” then the monster is also human. And if the monster is human, then love cannot exclude him.

This does not mean absolution.
It means resisting dehumanization.
Either humanity is indivisible, or it is an illusion.

This recognition is love.

I have known people who have lived this way.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. The day after, February 15, is the birthday of an old friend, gone too soon. Billy was a criminal defense lawyer who devoted his life to representing people on Louisiana’s death row. He understood that any of us “could be that monster.” He refused to reduce the people he represented to the worst thing they had ever done.

If any of us “could be that monster,” then, as Baldwin says, we “have to decide, in ourselves, not to be.”

Love, then, is not a feeling. It is a choice. A decision not to let fear, hierarchy, or hatred determine who you become or how you view others.

That is why it has never been a popular movement.

Baldwin’s ideas sound religious. They are certainly spiritual.

James Baldwin was born into a devout Christian household and was even a child preacher. You can hear the theology in what he is saying, echoes of the pulpit in his cadence, scripture in the structure of his argument. The insistence on shared humanity. The demand for self-examination. The call to transformation.

But Baldwin left the church.

As he wrote in Down at the Cross, the second essay in The Fire Next Time,

[T]here was no love in the church. It was a mask for hated and self hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the services ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all.

A love that does not apply to everyone, for Baldwin, was not love. He wrote:

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

This definition of love comes at a point in Down at the Cross where Baldwin is thinking through anti-Black racism in the U.S. and how we might liberate ourselves from it. Baldwin understood that white supremacy depends not only on power but on insulation, on the refusal to be seen and judged by those it dehumanizes. The white desire, he writes, is “not to be judged by those who are not white.” The only way to release ourselves from the lie that we are separate is for the white man “to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power.”

Baldwin does not mean costume or performance. To “become black himself” is to shed one’s insulation, enter into the suffering and celebration one has watched from a distance, and accept that one’s own humanity is bound up in it.

Baldwin knows that it is not easy. That is what he means when he says, that “no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free.”

Freedom requires transformation.
Love is the courage to undergo that change.

To say that this courage is absent in our current presidential administration feels like understatement. It is not merely an absence of courage; it is the presence of cowardice.

We see that cowardice in the executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, which treats honest reckoning with our past as a “corrosive ideology.”

We see it in the recent removal of educational panels at the President’s House site in Philadelphia that detailed the lives of the people George Washington enslaved.

And we see it in the rhetoric of “toxic” or “suicidal empathy,” the claim, popular among certain influencers and aligned movements, that caring too much about others exploits our compassion, erodes our values, and weakens our nation.

Baldwin would have recognized this instinct immediately. The insistence that empathy is dangerous is simply another way of insisting on insulation, to cling to the mask he urges us to remove.

When we call truth corrosive, when we insist on our right not to be bound up in the suffering of others, we are accepting the false premise that acknowledging our shared humanity threatens our nation more than denying it.

And yet, every day, people refuse this lie.

On February 10, The New York Times published an article by Sabrina Tavernise titled “‘We’ve Found Our Voice’: Many in Twin Cities Emerge With a Sense of Power.” After four days interviewing Minneapolis residents, Tavernise described what they had learned about themselves during two months of “Operation Metro Surge.” She wrote:

They learned that they are willing to be outdoors for hours on one of the coldest days of the past 25 years to march in protest. They learned they will deliver food to complete strangers after long days at work, so families who need meals don’t have to risk a trip to the store, where immigration agents may be waiting.

And they learned that these efforts bring a new sense of their own power, that they have come together, made themselves heard and, if they have not prevailed against what they see as unjust federal action in their cities, then at least they have held their ground.

This is Baldwin’s love.

A love that deepens our sense of belonging, but also expands our understanding of who belongs alongside us.

We see it in classrooms, in courtrooms, on city streets and at kitchen tables, wherever people refuse the safety of distance.

Love is not sentimental.

It is a quest.

And it is the only thing that has ever held this world together.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Happy birthday, old friend.

On January 26, Ava DuVernay published an excellent essay on this platform titled The Narrative War.

DuVernay was thinking about “the moment when language breaks eye contact with truth.” She asked herself how much she, without realizing, was enabling power by being imprecise with language. When we use words like “law enforcement” to describe the actions of the agents who murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last weekend, Ms. DuVernay reasoned, we become complicit in legitimizing state terror. The language we use is “less of a description and more of some kind of moral shield.”

She wrote:

[W]hen precision disappears, any idea of accountability goes out the window with it. Everything flattens. When we’ve accepted their words, now we’re speaking their language. We’ve accepted their ground rules, their foundational ideas and assumptions. And on their turf, they win.

I think about DuVernay’s words as I read the recent motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) filed in the District of Oregon by the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the administration that was brought in November by Jack Dickinson, also known as “the Portland Chicken,” and other peaceful protesters in Portland, Oregon, who have been gathering outside an ICE facility, where they have been met with unrelenting violence.

In the motion, filed on January 27, 2026, Dickinson and other plaintiffs sought to prevent the Department of Homeland Security, “from using excessive force on peaceful protesters at and around the ICE Building.”

This is something people who call themselves “law enforcement” are already prohibited from doing.

By law.

Yet 84-year-old Laurie Eckman, who attended a peaceful protest outside the Portland ICE facility on October 4, 2025, was shot in the head by a DHS officer with some type of munition and walked home “soaked in blood.”

Her husband, Richard, an 83-year-old who walks with the assistance of a walker, was overcome by a blast that “detonated near him and left residue on the walker’s frame, leaving Mr. Eckman feeling targeted, struggling to breathe, and disoriented.”

The Eckmans live in an apartment overlooking Elizabeth Carruthers Park, a few blocks from the ICE building. They have lived in Portland since 1976. They are parents, grandparents, and church members. In her youth, Laurie protested the Vietnam War. Richard joined the Navy and served actively in that same war.

I wonder about how they met, two young people on opposite sides of a conflict that deeply divided our country, how they fell in love. How they ended up moving to Portland. But their sworn declarations, submitted in support of the motion for the TRO, do not detail this past.

They do tell us, however, what motivated them to attend the October 4 protest. Their decision was “spur of the moment.” Looking out their apartment windows at Carruthers Park, they saw a gathering of people with signs supporting immigrants and protesting the administration’s threats to deploy the military in Portland. Richard was especially struck by the visible presence of veterans. He decided to wear a U.S. Navy hat, navy blue with gold lettering. After listening to speeches and chanting, they marched with the assembled crowd to the ICE building, a few short blocks away.

The Eckmans no longer feel safe attending protests at the ICE building or anywhere else federal officers may be present. Laurie worries that the same thing may happen to her again. Richard writes: “I still struggle to understand how officers are able to use guns on peaceful protesters. Guns require people to aim them, and one officer’s aim was directed at my wife’s head.”

The Eckmans and other plaintiffs filed their lawsuit on November 21, 2025. The violence perpetrated by agents against peaceful protesters assembled outside of the Portland ICE Building continues.

The lead plaintiff, Jack Dickinson, a/k/a “the Portland Chicken,” attends protests wearing “a yellow fleece chicken costume with an American flag draped over his shoulders like a cape.” He keeps showing up, despite the fact that federal agents continue to deploy pepper balls, flashbangs, and gas canisters.

Another plaintiff who attended a Martin Luther King Jr. Day sit-in was “maced to the point she could not open her eyes.” Still another was shot in the back with pepper balls that ripped through her jacket. And at peaceful protests in the days following Alex Pretti’s killing, agents aimed their munitions at protesters’ heads and bodies.

The escalating violence by agents at the Portland ICE building was the basis for the plaintiffs’ request for a TRO. They asked the district court to issue an order stopping agents “from using non-trivial amounts of force on people engaged in passive resistance” and “from using crowd-control weapons in dangerous ways that violate their own policies and jeopardize peaceful protesters.”

In support of that request, the plaintiffs submitted the declaration of former CBP Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske, a 52-year law enforcement veteran who has overseen the policing of hundreds of protests, including many far larger and more volatile than those in Portland.

Kerlikowske’s conclusions were unambiguous.

DHS, he found, had exhibited “a consistent pattern of deploying excessive force,” including against people “who pose no threat to law enforcement.” Less-lethal munitions were being used indiscriminately. Tear gas was being deployed without warning. Crowd-control weapons were being misused in ways that were “highly dangerous to everyone present.”

Kerlikowske explained what actual law enforcement looks like in this context: establishing a perimeter, issuing warnings, making targeted arrests when necessary. Less-lethal force, he wrote, is reserved for imminent threats. Such weapons, he noted, are “capable of killing people” and should only be used when “other lesser levels of force have failed or are unavailable”—not fired indiscriminately into crowds.

Nothing he reviewed reflected those standards.

What Kerlikowske described was not merely a failure of tactics, but a distortion of language itself.

Violence against peaceful protesters at the Portland ICE Building is not law enforcement.

The permission that ICE has given itself to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant is not law enforcement.

The murders of Keith Porter, Jr. in Los Angeles and Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, are not law enforcement.

The deaths of 32 people in ICE custody in 2025 are not law enforcement.

Despite their fear, after receiving an invitation from their church to “a family-friendly event committed to nonviolence,” the Eckmans recently decided to risk protesting again, attending an interfaith gathering at Carruthers Park on January 31. After assembling in the park, the crowd walked toward the ICE building. The Eckmans were separated from one another. Laurie and a group of fellow church members stopped half a block from the ICE building, fearful of getting too close. Tear gas was deployed repeatedly, filling the air and overcoming them both. Laurie described walking through multiple tear gas clouds as she tried to get away:

I held on to a person next to me as I walked and held a tissue over my nose. I could not keep my eyes open, my face stung, and it was hard to breathe. People were retching, vomiting, and crying.

The Eckmans filed supplementary declarations detailing these experiences. And yesterday, February 3, District Judge Michael H. Simon granted the plaintiffs a 14-day TRO, setting a March 2 hearing on their motion to make the TRO permanent.

“The Court finds that the repeated shooting and teargassing of nonviolent protesters at the Portland ICE Building will likely keep recurring,” Judge Simon wrote in a 22-page opinion.

Under the TRO, no officer may direct or use chemical or projectile munitions, including pepper-ball or paintball guns, pepper or oleoresin capsicum spray, tear gas, flash-bang grenades or other chemical irritants, rubber bullets or other less-lethal weapons against a person unless that individual poses an “imminent threat of physical harm” to a law enforcement officer or someone else.

It took a federal court order to say what should have been obvious: that firing chemical weapons into peaceful crowds is not “crowd control,” that shooting an 84-year-old woman in the head is not “public safety,” that violence does not become legitimate because the people inflicting it wear uniforms.

Ava DuVernay warned that when language breaks eye contact with truth, accountability disappears with it.

For months outside the Portland ICE Building, that break has been literal.

The Eckmans know this now. Laurie lives with a scar where a projectile struck her skull. Richard wonders how what led people who have taken the same oath he did as a young sailor to defend the Constitution to open fire on his neighborhood.

Their declarations, sworn under penalty of perjury, forced language back into alignment with reality.

Only then did the law speak clearly enough to restrain power.

Only then did language make eye contact with truth.

On Tuesday, Judge David J. Novak issued an order striking Ms. Halligan’s use of the title U.S. Attorney in past filings, barring its future use, and making explicit that she never lawfully held the office at all. “In short,” Judge Novak wrote, “this charade of Ms. Halligan masquerading as the United States Attorney for this District in direct defiance of binding court orders must come to an end.”

The same day, the Chief Judge for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia issued an order seeking “expressions of interest” for the position that Halligan never lawfully held, and a job posting appeared on the court’s website.

So the administration’s defiance in the E.D.V.A. comes to a momentary stop.

And the world spins madly on.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that “federal immigration officers are asserting sweeping power to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant,” leaking an internal ICE memo and whistleblower complaint shared with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D, Connecticut), a Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

And our president spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in what Heather Cox Richardson called “a virulently racist, insulting, rambling speech,” mistaking Iceland for Greenland, and complaining that NATO members used to refer to him as “our daddy” because he was “running it,” and explaining that “sometimes you need a dictator.”

Our president wants the world to think he is powerful and brave.

He certainly holds power, a power that he asserts is only limited by his “own morality.”

But he is not brave.

Our president does not know what bravery is.

In How We Learn to Be Brave, Bishop Mariann Budde writes that “the courage to be brave when it matters most requires a lifetime of small decisions that set us on a path of self-awareness, attentiveness, and willingness to risk failure for what we believe is right.”

Bravery isn’t about might. It isn’t about exercising power. It is about standing up when you don’t know whether choosing to do so will make any difference at all.

Budde is an American Episcopal prelate who has served as Bishop of Washington D.C. since 2011. You may remember her as the bishop who confronted the president during a sermon shortly after his second inauguration, asking him to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now," including LGBTQ+ people and undocumented immigrants.

The courage that Budde lives, the courage she writes about, is rooted in love.

James Baldwin speaks to this in Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris, a documentary in which a British film crew unsuccessfully triesd to get him to separate his politics from his art.

Baldwin does not use the word courage. He speaks about love. But it’s a courageous love, an “unpopular movement,” “the love and the passion of a very few,” that Baldwin insists holds our world together:

Love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.

We are all one, Baldwin says.
Any of us could be the monster.
We are all capable of great evil.
But we are also capable of great love.

And that, Baldwin reminds us, is a choice.

It is Bishop Budde’s choice to address the president directly when he sits in a pew at her church.

It is the people of Minnesota choosing to stand up to I.C.E.

It is Jack Smith choosing to testify publicly before Congress.

It is Judge Novak’s choice to stand up to Lindsey Halligan’s lawless assertion of power.

Those who choose to stand up make it possible for more of us to stand up.

Love, as Baldwin and Budde understand it, is not softness or abstraction. It is a “lifetime of small decisions.” It is the refusal to dehumanize. It is the willingness to recognize yourself in others, even when doing so is uncomfortable, costly, or dangerous. Love is what makes courage possible, because it binds us to one another and makes indifference impossible.

Power wants to divide us because it makes us weaker.

We are stronger together.

When my children were small, we had a book called “One” by Kathryn Otoshi.

It’s a book about bullying. But it is also a handbook on how to stand up to power. Red bullies Blue, and gets progressively larger as the bullying continues, unchecked, filling more and more of the page. Yellow, Orange, Green, and Purple don't like it, but feel powerless. “One” comes along and teaches them that “everybody counts”—that all of their voices matter—and that in the face of power, they can stand up together.

“Sometimes,” the book ends, “it just takes one.”

We are one.
We are many.

And we are tiny beings hurtling through space.

Yesterday, at the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, I saw “Encounters in the Milky Way,” narrated by Pedro Pascal.

“We are a product of cosmic encounters,” Pascal tells us.

“From Earth, it looks like we are at the center and all these stars revolve around us,” Pascal says, but we orbit around our Sun, which in turn, travels “through the Milky at 500,000 miles an hour,” taking a year and a half to reach the end of our solar system.

“Encounters” was made possible by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, dubbed the "billion-star survey" for mapping the precise positions, distances, and motions of nearly 2 billion stars in our galaxy.

Nearly 2 billion stars.
And our Sun is just one of them.

I am visiting Philly with a friend and our 16-year-old sons, looking at colleges.

Standing with my son in New York’s Penn Station waiting for the train that would take us down here, my husband and I exchange frightened texts about the midterm elections.

What will happen.
What will we do.

We are living with the trauma that all of us are living with, the unraveling uncertainty of existing in a time of great political change when you don’t know what is on the other side. We make plans for the future and wonder what our country will look like when it is time for those plans to happen. We wonder if we are foolish to make those plans or whether we should be making different ones.

I ask my son, “if your dad and I were to leave the U.S., would you come with us?”
“No,” he responds.

And I know in that moment, that I’m speaking foolishly.
That my son understands something I do not.

This is something Baldwin understood, too.

In Meeting the Man, the director, Terrence Dixon, asks Baldwin:

“Why didn’t you just want to get away somewhere and sit down and write your book, why didn’t you want to do that?”

“Because I’m better than that,” Baldwin responds.

“So you don’t agree, then," Dixon presses, "when people say, ‘Oh, it’s okay for him. He’s escaped.’”

“What have I escaped?” Baldwin asks. “Where, anyway, would I go to escape?”

We sit in darkness, looking up at nearly 2 billion stars as they move across the planetarium ceiling. Watching our solar system’s journey through the galaxy, it is easy to understand why astronauts looking down at Earth from space experience begin to think of humanity not as competing groups, but as a single, interdependent species.

It’s called the “overview effect,” a moment at which the idea that we are all in this together stops being a slogan and becomes an observable fact. Divisions that once felt natural—national, racial, ideological—begin to feel artificial or even absurd. Environmental destruction, war, and inequality appear not as abstractions but as self-inflicted wounds on a shared body.

Authoritarian power depends on a series of lies: that we are separate. That some people matter more. That cruelty is strength.

The overview effect exposes those lies.

From far enough away, borders disappear.
Hierarchies collapse.
There is only a fragile planet and the beings that live on it.

There is no escape.
There is nowhere to go.

Even if my family left the U.S., we are stuck here, captives on this madly spinning planet.

The only thing we get to do is choose what kinds of humans we want to be.

Whether we will choose love.

Whether we will choose courage.

Whether we will choose each other.

In Alice in Wonderland, there is a famous riddle. When Alice meets the Mad Hatter and the March Hare at their tea party, the Hatter asks: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” When Alice gives up and asks the answer, the Hatter tells her that he hasn’t “the slightest idea.” Neither does the Hare.

“I think you might do something better with the time,” Alice responds, “than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.”

Alice’s response captures something essential about what it feels like to live in the United States right now.

On Tuesday, Lindsey Halligan, the U.S. Attorney-in-name-only for the Eastern District of Virginia, told U.S. District Judge David J. Novak that she had the authority to continue using the title, despite the fact that another federal district judge, Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, dismissed the indictments of New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI-director James Comey on the grounds that Halligan’s appointment violated both 28 U.S.C. § 546 and the Constitution’s Appointments Clause.

You can read the decisions in full, but here is the essence of Judge Currie’s reasoning from the Comey decision:

In sum, the text, structure, and history of section 546 point to one conclusion: the Attorney General’s authority to appoint an interim U.S. Attorney lasts for a total of 120 days from the date she first invokes section 546 after the departure of a Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney. If the position remains vacant at the end of the 120-day period, the exclusive authority to make further interim appointments under the statute shifts to the district court, where it remains until the President’s nominee is confirmed by the Senate.

Ms. Halligan was not appointed in a manner consistent with this framework. The 120-day clock began running with Mr. Siebert’s appointment on January 21, 2025. When that clock expired on May 21, 2025, so too did the Attorney General’s appointment authority. Consequently, I conclude that the Attorney General’s attempt to install Ms. Halligan as Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was invalid and that Ms. Halligan has been unlawfully serving in that role since September 22, 2025.

Because Halligan was appointed in violation of the statutory scheme set out in § 546, Judge Currie further found that her appointment violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution.

Judge Currie also found that “all actions flowing from [her] defective appointment, including securing and signing Mr. Comey’s indictment, were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside.” The decision ends with a declaration of what must happen for an interim U.S. Attorney to be lawfully appointed:

The power to appoint an interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 546 during the current vacancy lies with the district court until a U.S. Attorney is nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate under 28 U.S.C. § 541.

Judge Currie could not have been clearer: Halligan was unlawfully appointed, and her actions as U.S. Attorney were unlawful exercises of executive power. The position of U.S. Attorney is currently vacant, and the only way to fill it (other than a president nomination and a confirmation) is for the district court to appoint someone.

Yet despite this ruling, Halligan has continued to identify herself as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in indictments returned in the district. And on January 6, 2026, Judge Novak ordered her to explain in writing why her decision to continue signing court papers as the district’s top prosecutor was not “a false or misleading statement.”

In her response to Judge Novak’s order, Halligan accused the court of having “a fundamental misunderstanding” of Judge Currie’s orders dismissing the James and Comey indictments. While Judge Currie concluded that Halligan was unlawfully appointed, Halligan argued, nothing in the court’s orders explicitly prohibited her “from performing the functions of or holding herself out as the United States Attorney.” In other words, the decision only affected the James and Comey indictments, and did not require Ms. Halligan “to acquiesce to that rationale in all other cases.”

This is not a dispute about statutory interpretation or the scope of a remedy. It is a dispute about whether judicial determinations bind anyone at all.

Let’s sit with this a moment and consider how nihilistic Halligan’s response is.

Halligan is not arguing that she was lawfully appointed. She is arguing that a judicial finding that she was not lawfully appointed does not strip her of power unless the court expressly orders her to stop. Even Judge Currie’s explicit conclusion that the appointment violated the statute and the Constitution, Halligan insists, was merely an explanation for dismissing two indictments—not a determination with consequences beyond those cases.

Read the filing this way, and the riddle she is asking becomes unmistakable:

When a court rules that a government action is unlawful, who decides whether that ruling has consequences?

Halligan’s answer, repeated throughout the filing, is that power does.

She says this almost verbatim at the end:

“The basis for Ms. Halligan’s identification of herself as the United States Attorney…is that, in the Government’s view, Ms. Halligan is the United States Attorney.”

Her argument never engages the actual question—whether she is lawfully the U.S. Attorney. It simply asserts the conclusion as a premise.

Riddles work by reversing the ordinary direction of explanation. A metaphor begins with something known and uses it to illuminate something unfamiliar; it offers clarity by comparison. A riddle does the opposite. It takes something that already has a stable meaning and disguises it, forcing the listener to work backward toward recognition. In doing so, a riddle transfers the burden of clarity from the speaker to the audience.

A riddle with no answer does not test intelligence; it tests endurance. It asks the listener to sit with nonsense and pretend it is meaningful, to keep searching for coherence where none exists. Over time, the listener begins to doubt not the riddle, but their own insistence that an answer should exist at all.

Stripped of its jargon, Halligan’s position amounts to the claim that a court may declare an appointment unlawful, but that unlawfulness has no consequence unless the executive branch chooses to recognize it.

But this is not a riddle.

When a court determines that an appointment is unlawful, that determination is not a suggestion, a thought experiment, or an invitation to debate meaning. It is a declaration of legal reality.

The danger is not that Halligan offers no answer.
The danger is that she insists there is a question at all.

This is the pattern of this administration. I wrote about it in my last essay. In hindsight, I have been writing about it in every essay since I started posting them here.

How it uses power.
How it demands acquiescence.
How it makes itself feel inevitable.

How it upends the processes by which things are supposed to work, the checks put in place to moderate it and make it answerable to us, the people living in what is supposed to be a democracy.

The way this administration operates is designed to make us feel hopeless, resigned. As a lawyer, when I try to use my words to put a spotlight on what is happening to our systems and processes, to contrast that with how those systems and processes were designed to work, I find myself getting discouraged.

Is there a point to trying to do this when it’s hard to tell if those processes will hold, or if we will be able to wrest our government from those who would destroy it completely for their own ends? When it is impossible to know what will come next?

We aren’t just living through a paradigm shift. We are living through what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called an epistemological crisis: a moment when inherited frameworks for making sense of events stop working, when the concepts we rely on to distinguish truth from falsehood no longer hold.

MacIntyre first used the term to describe moments in science, when accumulated anomalies expose deep contradictions in a field’s foundational assumptions. But the same phenomenon occurs in politics and public life. When legal determinations are treated not as binding statements of reality but as optional interpretations; when power insists that meaning exists only if it consents to it; when the conditions that allow a public to distinguish fact from fiction collapse.

We do not agree on what is true. We do not agree on who can be trusted to say so. And we have an administration that exploits that uncertainty, not by refuting facts, but by treating them as optional.

And it’s easy to give into the despair that this dislocation brings.

To watch the videos of the murder of Renée Good and wonder why we can’t agree on what happened. To hear reports of the administration’s stepped-up terrorization of Minneapolis and wonder when that terror is going to come here. To watch this administration deny not just responsibility, but reality itself—and feel language begin to fail.

But we can’t let it.

MacIntyre first wrote about this in a 1977 essay, Epistemological Crises, Narrative, and Philosophy of Science. He describes the moment when the stories we rely on to make sense of the world collapse under their own contradictions. To explain what that feels like, he turns not to science but to literature. To Hamlet, returning home to Elsinore after his father’s death, unable to understand who he is or what loyalty, truth, and duty now mean:

Hamlet's problems arise because the dramatic narrative of his family and of the kingdom of Denmark through which he identified his own place in society and his relationships to others has been disrupted by radical interpretative doubts.

What is Hamlet to do?
And what, for that matter, are any of us?

MacIntyre’s answer comes a few years later, in After Virtue. When a moral and epistemic order collapses, he argues, the task is not to restore it by force or nostalgia. What survives are practices: truth-telling practices, legal practices, traditions of reasoning and accountability that persist even when the institutions meant to uphold them decay.

That is what Halligan (and this administration) would have us forget. The insistence that nothing binds, nothing means, nothing compels is not realism. It is a bid for unaccountable power.

But practices do not disappear simply because those in power deny them. They persist because people continue to inhabit them.

As MacIntyre famously put it:

I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’

We are not spectators to this moment. We are actors living through it. The law, the courts, and the language of truth and accountability are not abstractions. They are practices sustained only if people continue to act as though they matter.

The “logic” this administration offers is meant to exhaust us, to make us doubt whether reality itself can still be named.

The answer is not to solve the riddle. The answer is to refuse it, and to keep telling the truth, insisting on law, and inhabiting the practices that make meaning and accountability possible.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that this is the story I am choosing to be part of.

Happy New Year. I am writing because I resolved to keep at it, and because I miss it. It’s been a while since I wrote anything. That’s not strictly true, because as a lawyer and a documentary filmmaker, I write for a living. But it has been awhile since I wrote to write down my thoughts, to make sense of what is happening in our country, which feels increasingly senseless.

There has never, of course, been any more or any less sense. Sense is the order or logic we superimpose onto what has always been illogical: a way of understanding our mortality and purpose as we hurtle through space on a swiftly tilting planet. But that order or logic feels increasingly like a mask that no longer fits.

Interestingly, Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Swiftly Tilting Planet, from which I borrowed that turn of phrase, captures a bit of what it feels like to live through this particular moment in time. In the book, Meg Murry, the protagonist from A Wrinkle in Time, is all grown up and expecting a child. “Mad Dog Branzillo,” ruler of the fictional South American country of Vespugia, is threatening nuclear war. The enemy are the Echthroi: an army of destroyers who are everywhere in the universe. And Charles Wallace, Meg’s fifteen-year-old brother, is perhaps the only person on earth who can save it—and us—from annihilation.

It’s not L’Engle’s best book, and some of its tropes (a Cold War-era South American dictator, and elements of biological determinism) have aged particularly poorly. But it captures something true about the times we are living through: the sense of being pulled through a tear in the fabric, one where familiar coordinates no longer hold; where the rules that once oriented us begin to warp; where power discovers it can bend reality simply by insisting that it has.

I woke up on Saturday morning, as I expect many of you did, to the news that the United States had invaded Venezuela, kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and flown them to New York to face criminal charges.

On Monday, I went to a protest outside the Southern District courthouse in lower Manhattan, timed to coincide with Maduro’s arraignment. There were people holding signs calling for the U.S. to “Free Nicolas Maduro,” others demanding “No U.S. War on Venezuela” and “No Blood for Oil,” as well as Venezuelan refugees celebrating Maduro’s capture. Most chilling was a large, apparently unironic banner showing our president smiling, a gold crown perched atop his head, urging a return to monarchy.

There are a lot of people arguing about the legality of what our government did, and relatedly, whether it was good or bad, right or wrong. Is it legal for the United States to invade another country and take its leader to face an indictment in ours? No. And most of the time, it is not how our government does things.

I started writing about my own experience, as a federal criminal defense lawyer, with the extradition process, contrasting this invasion and seizure with the arrest and prosecution of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. That case followed a recognizable legal pathway: local arrest, judicial review, extradition.

But I don’t know how valuable those discussions are right now. Talking about “how it’s supposed to work” can feel like talking about how things work in another universe, or how they worked in another time. Because whether it was legal or illegal, good or bad, right or wrong, it has happened. Maduro is here. The world has adjusted around the fact of it.

And that is the deeper story.

The New York Times did not report that the United States kidnapped the president of another country. It reported that he was “captured.” It did not describe an illegal invasion; it described an “operation.” These are not neutral choices. “Capture” suggests legitimacy—something orderly, even professional. “Operation” implies planning, necessity, control. Illegality disappears behind competence. Violence is softened by process.

The only time the New York Times saw fit to use the word kidnapped was when it was quoting Maduro.

What we are witnessing is not only the blunt force of executive power. It is the slow, daily adjustment to it. The steady lowering of the bar for what we will accept. The way the extraordinary is made to feel ordinary.

It feels like the work of the Echthroi. Not because we are living in a science-fiction or fantasy novel, but because the mechanism is familiar. Destruction arrives not only as violence, but as inevitability; not only as rupture, but as normalization. The tilt does not happen all at once. It happens one day at a time, until you wake up and discover your body has learned how to walk on a slope.

And we have woken up in a country where the only check on our president’s power is whatever limits he chooses to put on himself.

In a recent interview with the New York Times, the president said as much. Asked whether there were any limits at all on his global powers, he answered:

“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” “I don’t need international law,” he added. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”

This is not an unfamiliar idea. It is one that humankind has long known does not work.

In 1748, Montesquieu put it plainly:

Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it…To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

James Madison understood the same truth when he argued for a system of separated powers:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary…In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

They understood that power, left to itself, does not moderate. It expands, until it becomes a single, unanswerable will.

Despite the president’s stated intentions, his policies are killing people. More than 100 people were killed during Maduro’s capture. Since September, at least 115 people have been killed on strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats.

And within our own borders, ICE agents have fired on civilians fifteen times, killing four people, including, on January 7, 37-year-old Renée Nicole Good. On social media, Good described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.” She had just dropped off her six-year-old child at school, when she was shot while attempting to drive away from agents. She leaves behind a wife and three children.

After murdering Ms. Good, the administration moved quickly to justify it, casting her as a “domestic terrorist” and “anti-ICE rioter” who had “weaponized her vehicle.” An officer, we were told, “relied on his training” and “saved his own life.”

This is how power protects itself when it operates without restraint. It does not merely act; it seeks to control how we understand its actions, what they mean, and how we are meant to feel about them. And when the press adopts that framing, it invites us to acclimate. To accept. To move on.

If we call kidnapping a capture, we participate in the fiction that law is intact. If we call execution a justified shooting, we help erase the human cost of unchecked authority. This is not about semantics. It is about whether we allow power to normalize itself through our mouths, our screens, our shared vocabulary.

The slope does not announce itself.
It teaches your body how to stand on it.

In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Charles Wallace carries a poem with him that he commits to memory. Not a weapon, not a strategy, but a verse he returns to again and again as the world tilts. A reminder of what must not be surrendered.

In this fateful hour, the poem begins,

I place all Heaven with its power
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
and the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness,
All these I place
By God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness!

I am not a religious person, but this concept of placing something between us and the powers of darkness resonates for me. As a young criminal defense lawyer, I was taught that we were what belonged in that space—that our bodies, our labor, our judgment, and our voices were often the only thing standing between our clients and the crushing weight of government power.

Language is part of that work. It is one of the things we place in the gap.

When power moves quickly, when it insists on inevitability, when it demands acquiescence, language can either clear the path or slow it down. It can launder violence into process, or it can insist on accuracy. It can normalize what is being done or or refuse to let it pass unnamed.

We are living through a moment when language is doing real work in the world. It either braces us against the slope, or helps us slide.

Resistance begins there. In speaking carefully. In naming honestly. In refusing the vocabulary that power uses to make itself feel inevitable.

The world tilts.
What matters is how we choose to stand.

Dr. Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, the deputy medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Gaza, is starving to death.

In a video posted yesterday on MSF’s Instagram account, he describes what is happening—to him, and to Gaza’s children. I had planned to incorporate his testimony into a larger essay, but this cannot wait.

It must be shared now.

You’ll find the link to the video below, along with a full transcript of Dr. Abu Mughaisib’s words.

This is a moment for moral clarity.
We cannot look away.

We must bear witness.
Raise our voices.
Share his words.
Stand together.
Stand with Gaza’s children.

We must contact our elected officials.
Call for an immediate ceasefire.
Demand the unrestricted entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

The children are too hungry to cry.

It is up to us to be their voice.

For the past few months, I have been surviving on one meal per day. And in the last few days, I have even had only one meal every two days, not because I cannot afford it, but there is nothing to buy, and the markets are empty. And I’m not the only one. We care for patients dying of hunger while we ourselves are starting to starve. Ambulance drivers who transport the wounded and patients as well are starving. We are expected to save lives while our own are slowly being consumed. This is not just about hunger, but about the slow destruction of dignity and humanity.

Here's how starvation destroys your body: in the first 6 to 24 hours, blood sugar drops. The body burns stored glycogen to stay alive. In 1 to 3 days, there is no more glycogen and fat is turned into ketones to fuel your brain. The body enters "survival mode" and in the next 3 to 5 days, the muscles start breaking down and the body sacrifices its own tissue - even the heart - just to survive. This is when children stop crying.

This has to stop. I mean to use food water, aid, as a weapon in this war. That’s not acceptable at all.

Since I published a letter entitled To My Jewish Friend Who Has Not Yet Rejected Zionism, some people in my life with connections to Israel have quietly reached out. If you have reached out to me, thank you. I will honor your decision to engage with me and listen to everything you share, and I will try to answer any questions you send my way. If you haven’t reached out, but want to, please do.

One of the questions that has surfaced in these communications is this;
Do you believe in Israel’s right to exist?

The short answer—though it’s hardly sufficient—is this: No.

No country has a “right to exist.”

Edward Said made this point in The End of the Peace Process, where he observed that the “right to exist” claimed by Israel is “a formula hitherto unknown in international or customary law.”

It’s also unknown in U.S. law. Our own country does not possess an inherent or eternal right to exist. In fact, our foundational document says the opposite:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence affirms the rights of people—not states. Governments, the framers argued, are not divine or permanent. They are legitimate only so long as they serve the people justly. When they fail to do so, they may be changed or dismantled.

So my answer is the same as that offered by the founders of this country: states are not sacred. They do not possess inherent legitimacy. They are not entitled to exist. Their legitimacy must be earned through justice.

And yet, that’s not the whole answer.
Because this is not a neutral question.

And I don’t say that to disparage the people who have asked it of me.

It is a question that is being asked, loudly and often. It is in the ether. Moderators posed the question to Zohran Mamdani during a debate among New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidates, before he won the primary, and Stephen Colbert asked it of both Mamdani and Brad Lander on The Late Show. In Washington, it’s a rare point of bipartisan agreement. As Peter Beinart noted in an essay on this question back in January, the House affirmed Israel’s “right to exist” by a vote of 412-1.

But this question is not really a question.
It is a test.
A trap.
A demand for allegiance disguised as dialogue.
A way to divide Jews from other Jews.

Ezra Klein’s recent column captures this deepening divide. On one side are Jews who fear that criticism of Israel threatens Jewish survival. On the other are Jews who fear that Israel’s actions are making Jews less safe while destroying the moral core of Jewish identity. I belong to the second group. Most of the people who have reached out to ask whether I believe in Israel’s right to exist belong to the first.

On the question of Israel’s “right to exist,” Klein writes:

The question is engineered to trap the conversation in the past rather than capture the urgency of the present…Israel has more than the right to exist. It has the strength to exist.

Beinhart, however, proposes a better question: Does Israel, as a Jewish state, adequately protect the rights of all the individuals under its dominion?

His answer, like mine, is no.

So perhaps the question that logically follows Beinhart’s question is this: If a state fails to protect the rights of the people it governs—if it grants rights based on ethnicity or religion rather than shared humanity—should it be altered or abolished, and replaced with a state that offers equality, dignity, and belonging to all?

It’s a question that must be asked. But it still feels too abstract for the present moment.

Because while we debate whether or not states have any inherent rights, people are starving to death.

Earlier today, 100 humanitarian organizations working in Gaza signed a joint letter stating that their food supplies are “totally depleted” and that they are “witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.”

And in my inbox yesterday morning, a dispatch from Ahmad Ibsais, a Palestinian immigrant in law school in the U.S., Ibsais shares his grief over the death of Razan Abu Zaher, a 4-year-old in Gaza who died from hunger this past Sunday. Razan is one of many. On Tuesday, the head of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City said that 21 children had died over the previous 72 hours in Gaza hospitals “due to malnutrition and starvation.”

Ibsais writes:

Starvation kills children first. Their smaller bodies succumb faster to dehydration, their organs shut down sooner, their cries grow silent before anyone else’s. At least 18,000 children have already been killed by bombs, but thousands are at risk of wasting away, dying hungry. To withhold food from children is not just to kill them, it is to end the future they represent. It is to deny Palestine its continuity. No society can rebuild when its youngest are buried before they learn to walk.

Gazans are also being shot to death as they attempt to access food at aid centers. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reports that 1,054 Palestinian aid seekers were killed between May 27, when Israel began operating its controversial private aid hubs run by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), and July 21.

These deaths are no accidents. Haaretz reports1 that IDF soldiers are being ordered to shoot people seeking aid. One soldier called the aid sites a “killing field.” He told Haaretz:

Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force—no crowd-control measures, no tear gas—just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.

Among those on the receiving end of this "form of communication," Jamal Abu Luli, age 17, who was shot and killed at the GHF Aid site in Rafah. “He went to get food so we don’t die of hunger,” his grandmother says in a video posted by Al Jazeera. “They’ve created a trap. A trap to kill them. They say come get aid, but they are lying. They choose young boys, and they shoot and kill them.”

This past Sunday, July 20, the Israeli military killed at least 94 Palestinians who were trying to access food. 81 of them were killed at a distribution of sacks of flour from U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) trucks. This is how the WFP described what took place:

Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza, the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies. As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire.

This is not a metaphor.
This is not a philosophical crisis.
This is a moral emergency.

So the real question—the urgent question—is not whether Israel has a right to exist.

It is whether Palestinians do.

And this time, unlike states, the answer under international law is clear. Every human being has the right to life. The right to dignity. The right to self-determination. The right to exist in safety. These rights are protected under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and the core treaties of international law.

This was the focus of the answer UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese gave when she was asked if she believes that Israel has the right to exist:

Israel does exist. Israel is a recognized member of the United Nations. Besides this, there is not such a thing in international law like “the right of a state to exist.” Does Italy have a right to exist? Italy exists. Now, if tomorrow, Italy and France want to merge and become Ita-France, fine, this is not up to us. What is enshrined in international law is the right of a people to exist. So, the state of Israel is there, it is protected as a member of the United Nations. Does this justify the erasure of another people? Hell no. Not 75 years ago. Not 57 years ago. Surely not today. Where is the protection of the Palestinian people from erasure, from annexation, from illegal annexation, from apartheid?

Palestinians are a people.
Their rights are not conditional.
Their lives are not negotiable.
And their existence is not a question.

But here in the United States, acknowledging this fact comes at a cost.

When our young people stand up for Palestinian lives on college campuses, they are punished. Columbia University has suspended or expelled 80 students who participated in a pro-Palestinian demonstration inside the school’s main library in May of 2024. And in May of 2025, when an NYU student used the platform of a commencement stage to condemn the “genocide currently occurring” in Gaza, the University withheld his diploma, and apologized that the audience was “subjected to these remarks.”

And when non-citizen college students speak out, our government arrests them and puts them in deportation proceedings, labeling pro-Palestinian voices antisemitic, and arguing that they threaten “the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”

And to further chill speech, our president is withholding university funding, and our legislators continue to haul university presidents into sham hearings to interrogate them about what they are doing to root out antisemitism in their schools. And universities continue to capitulate.

But we can’t let ourselves be chilled.

Talking about Palestinian lives is one of the main things we can do, here in the U.S., to break the silence that enables the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians to continue.

Yesterday in Tel Aviv, protesters took to the streets carrying flour bags and pictures of malnourished Palestinian children.

In Australia, protesters staged a 24-hour vigil in front of Parliament to read the names of the over 17,000 Palestinian children who have been killed by Israeli bombs and lack of food.

In New York City, in D.C., in San Francisco, in Chicago, protesters took to the streets to stop the starvation of Gaza.

And in Gaza, Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda put out a call asking people all over the globe to bang pots for Gaza in front of embassies, Parliaments, and the offices of complicit companies, and government officials on July 24. She writes:

You are not helpless.
This is a call for action.
Bang the pots.
Because the sound of our empty stomachs
and the voice of humanity must be louder than their inhumanity.

We are not helpless.
We must talk about Palestinian lives.
March for Palestinian lives.
Bang pots for Palestinian lives.
Contribute to mutual aid funds that bring food and water into Gaza.

We must support the living.
We must name the dead.

We must say the names of the children whose lives were taken.
Razan Abu Zaher, age four.
Jamal Abu Luli, age seventeen.
The thousands of others who will never learn to read,
never grow into their voices,
never have the chance to live the futures they deserved.

Here in the U.S., our voices matter.
Our taxes fund this genocide.
Our leaders justify it in our name.

So speak.
Say their names.
Say the word Palestine.
Say: Palestinian lives matter.
Say it without apology.
Say it until the killing stops.
Say it because it is true:

Palestinians have a right to exist.

This past March, in Westminster, Maryland, 52-year-old Elsy Noemi Berrios, a Venezuelan immigrant with a pending asylum case, was driving to work with her daughter, Karen Cruz Berrios, when federal agents surrounded them. Karen filmed what happened next.

In the video, the agents tell Elsy to step out. She refuses, calmly asking to see a detention order. A masked agent smashes her driver’s side window. Elsy wipes the glass from her clothes before stepping out. An agent slams her against the car and handcuffs her.

Karen cries out, “You guys cannot take her just because you want to!”

Elsy tries to soothe her. “Don’t worry, my love,” she says in Spanish. “Everything is going to be okay.”

In April, one month later, and 400 miles south in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Marilu Domingo Ortiz noticed the unmarked SUVs first. They followed her and her husband, Juan Francisco Mendez, for several blocks before pulling in front of them and blocking their car.

Juan, a Guatemalan immigrant with no criminal record, was in the process of regularizing his status. Marilu is an asylum seeker. When ICE stopped them, they did what they had been told to do: They called their lawyer. They stayed put. They waited.

But they could not keep themselves safe.

“We also have rights, sir,” Marilu says to one of the agents in Spanish in a video she recorded on her cellphone. She continues filming as an agent swings a large mallet into the back passenger window, sending shards across the seat. ICE is looking for someone else: a man named Antonio, who lives in the same building as Marilu and Juan. The agents call Juan “Antonio” as they drag him away.

In New York City, where I live, ICE has arrested at least three public high school students in recent months. Among them was 20-year-old asylum seeker Dylan Josue Lopez Contreras, who was attending high school at Ellis Prep Academy in the Bronx when he was detained in May following a routine immigration hearing.

Dylan fled persecution in his home country of Venezuela and entered the U.S. legally with his mother and two elementary-school-aged siblings. In addition to attending high school, Dylan was working part-time as a delivery driver. He was learning to play guitar and ukulele. He dreamed of going to college.

These are the small details that make up a life. But none of it matters to this administration, which doesn’t care about the humanity, hopes, or future of those it has labeled “illegal.”

The bet that the current presidential administration is making is that “we”—the U.S. citizenry—do not care about Elsy, Juan, and Dylan. That doing violence to them, ripping them from the fabric of their lives, families, and communities, does not upset us because it is not being done to us. That we will let our government tell us who matters and who does not.

But it is even more than that: They are betting that we will applaud this violence, that we accept that Elsy, Juan, and Dylan are dangerous, and that their arrest, detention, and removal are being done to keep us safe.

And to ensure that we accept this violence, our government does not simply act—it works to shape how its actions are perceived. Press release after press release, public statement after public statement, their goal is to train us to accept cruelty as necessary, to see violence as safety, and to believe that people labeled “illegal” are not people at all.

After ICE agents grabbed Dylan following his court appearance at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, DHS posted a statement on X, calling him “an illegal alien from Venezuela who illegally entered the U.S. more than one year ago.”

When the New Bedford Light, a local New Bedford, Massachusetts news site, asked ICE if it had a warrant to arrest Juan, the ICE spokesperson refused to answer the question, calling Juan an “illegally present Guatemalan alien” who “refused to comply with officers’ instructions and resisted apprehension” and supporting the actions of the agents who arrested him. The spokesperson said:

ICE concurs with the actions deemed appropriate by the officers on the scene who are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve the situation in a manner that ensures the success of the operation and prioritizes the safety of our officers.

And when asked about Elsy’s arrest, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin labeled her—without offering a shred of evidence—“an associate of MS-13.” She followed with this statement:

Americans can rest assured that she is off our streets and locked up. I hope the media will stop doing the bidding of these gangs that murder, maim, rape, and terrorize Americans, while ignoring the innocent victims.

This is not law enforcement.
It is propaganda.
This is not safety.
It is fear, manufactured and deployed as policy.

In Westminster. In New Bedford. In New York City. In cities and towns across this country, federal enforcement agents are violently assaulting immigrants and ripping them from their families and communities under the guise of public safety.

From January 20 to June 11, ICE made over 273,000 arrests, averaging about 1,000/day. The latest ICE statistics show that the majority of these arrests are of people without criminal records. More than 50% of its arrests since January involve individuals without criminal convictions. In June, over 70% of those arrested had no criminal history.

This bears repeating: over 70% of the people taken by ICE in June had no criminal records. Our government’s focus on the volume of arrests and deportations over all else has led at least one ICE lawyer to quit. Adam Boyd, a 33-year-old attorney, said he felt he "had to make a moral decision" to leave after watching the agency's priorities change under mounting political pressure.

"It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to [White House Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller by December," Boyd said. Miller recently told Fox’s Sean Hannity that the administration is “looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day.”

And with the recent passage of the president’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (the “BBB”), which directs about $170 billion towards immigration enforcement through 2029, it’s all about to get so much worse.

This windfall will no doubt help the administration pursue its 3,000-arrest-per-day goal. But the only way to meet that target is to turn ICE into an unregulated force operating with near-total impunity—if it hasn’t become that already.

As Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, recently told Talking Points Memo, the “heart” of the BBB is the “militarization of ICE.”

Skocpol explains that she initially thought that our federal structure protected us from an authoritarian takeover; she now understands that this administration had found a “workaround”—using immigration enforcement to create an enforcement regime that can be used against anyone our government feels like putting in its crosshairs.

She writes:

Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice. Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources – much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots of to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens. The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants. They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements use to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.

This is the key story unfolding right now. Governors and civic groups and media outlets need to get clear on this imminent threat and work together across the board to reveal and push back against the emerging ICE police state.

This past weekend, the president threatened to strip comedian Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship. Her offense? Criticizing him.

“Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country,” the president posted on Truth Social,

I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!

O’Donnell, who moved to Ireland shortly before the president’s inauguration, had posted a TikTok criticizing the administration’s response to the Texas floods. She blamed the president for gutting early warning systems and weather forecasting infrastructure.

If it wasn’t clear before, it could not be any clearer now.

This is not just about immigration.

It is about power: unchecked, unaccountable, and expanding. It is about who this government believes it can disappear without consequence. It is about the creation of a domestic enforcement army, loyal not to law but to the will of the executive.

And it is about us.
Whether we will accept this, normalize it, and look away.
Or whether we will resist.

A lot of us are resisting already. Across the country, people are showing up for their immigrant neighbors. Accompanying them to ICE check-ins and court dates. Handing out know-your-rights information and organizing rapid-response teams. Showing up at protests and vigils. Holding teach-ins. Filing lawsuits. Documenting arrests. Refusing to be silent.

These actions may seem small, even futile, against the scale of what we’re facing.
But they are not.
This is how we push back.
This is how we hold the line.

For Elsy.
For Juan.
For Dylan.
For the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country.
And for ourselves.

I don’t usually turn to science fiction for guidance, but in dreaming up Karis Nemik, the creators of Andor gave us a tremendous gift. Nemik, a young rebel philosopher (spoiler alert: he doesn’t survive the first season), leaves behind a manifesto that reverberates through the second. It speaks not only to a fictional Empire, but to our very real and present danger:

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this: Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this: The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance, will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority, and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this: Try.

The frontier of the rebellion is everywhere.
So is the frontier of care, of courage, of refusal.
We cannot all do everything, but we can all do something.
And right now, that’s what freedom demands.

Ways to Get Involved

I have started collecting immigrant defense resources, toolkits, and volunteer opportunities in New York City and beyond. They are listed below, and in this spreadsheet. If you know of something that should be added, please add it to this form.

Resources and Toolkits

• Resources for Communities from the Immigrant Defense Project

• Know-Your-Rights Materials from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center

• Guide to Changing Your Immigration Hearing from In-Person to Online from the National Immigration Project (they have a number of pro se guides)

• Justice Power Resources on Accompaniment

• Unitarian Resources on Accompaniment

• Resources from NYC City Councilperson Shahana Hanif

Nationwide Volunteer Opportunities

• American Bar Association Court Observation and Awareness Project (not just for lawyers)

Volunteer Opportunities in New York

• Immigrant ARC Friend of the Court Program (NYC)

• New York Immigration Coalition (All over New York State)

• New Sanctuary Coalition (faith-based, founded by Quakers, Brooklyn)

• Catholic Charities Community Legal Clinics (not just for lawyers, NYC)

• Westchester Children’s Association (Westchester, New York)

• Riverside Church Sojourners Ministry (NYC)

• List of Opportunities from the Interfaith Center of New York (NYC)

Volunteer Opportunities Elsewhere

• Jewish Coalition for Immigrant Justice NW (Seattle, Washington)

• Interfaith Movement for Immigrant Justice (Portland, Oregon)

• Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity (Oakland, California)

• Advocates for Human Rights (Minneapolis, Minnesota)

I was going to write about something else this week—was writing about something else. But that will have to wait.

Yesterday, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was the featured guest on Brian Lehrer’s “Call Your Senator” segment on WNYC. She came to talk about the president’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—which she’s been calling the “Big Beautiful Betrayal”—and its devastating impact on health care and food assistance.

But that’s not what the callers wanted to talk about.

They wanted to talk about the historic victory of Zohran Mamdani, poised to become the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City, and whether Senator Gillibrand would endorse him.

Lehrer asked first. Gillibrand said, “Not today.” She explained that she had congratulated Mamdani and discussed working together, but also raised “some concerns.” When pressed, she cited public safety and Mamdani’s “statements about Israel.” She wouldn’t elaborate, calling the conversation “personal,” but said she raised the issues “on behalf of constituents.”

Another caller asked again: Would she support Mamdani in the general election? Lehrer let her pass.

Then came a call from Jersey City. The caller claimed that Mamdani planned to “target synagogues and Jewish institutions,” that donated to medical nonprofits, glorified Hamas, and had “revisionist Holocaust knowledge.” Lehrer warned that much of what was said “may be inaccurate”—but still asked Gillibrand to respond.

Gillibrand said Mamdani’s “past positions” had alarmed her constituents, especially references to “global jihad.” Then she said this:

The Global Intifada is a statement that means destroy Israel and kill all the Jews.

Lehrer didn’t challenge her immediately—and he never challenged her definition of “global intifada.” But later in the show, he clarified: Mamdani has never supported Hamas. In an appearance on Lehrer’s show, Mamdani had explained that the term intifada refers to a broad tradition of resistance, and made clear that he does not support violence.

Gillibrand responded:

If I was speaking to him directly, I would simply say that is not how the words are received. And it doesn't matter what meaning you have in your brain. It is not how the word is received. And when you use a word like Intifada to many Jewish Americans and Jewish New Yorkers, that means you are permissive for violence against Jews. It is a serious word. It is a word that has deep meaning. It has been used for wars across time and violence and destruction and slaughter and murder against the Jews. It is a harmful, hurtful, inappropriate word for anyone who wants to represent a city as diverse as New York City with 8 million people. And I would be very specific in these words, and I would say you may not use them again if you expect to represent everyone ever again because they're received as hateful and divisive and harmful, and that's it.

Lehrer further clarified: Mamdani never said “globalize the intifada.” He was asked, during an interview, whether he would denounce others who use the phrase. Gillibrand said:

Well, as a leader of a city, as diverse as New York City with 8 million people as the largest Jewish population in the country, he should denounce it and that's it, period.

It takes time to understand what Mamdani said, and the context in which he said it.

Time that Gillibrand apparently doesn’t have.

Lehrer himself wasn’t 100% correct. The phrase “globalize the intifada” came up during a June 17 interview of Mamdani on The Bulwark. One of the program’s hosts asked Mamdani what he thought of it as a protest slogan. He responded:

Antisemitism is a real issue in our city. And it’s one that can be captured in statistics… It’s also one that you will feel in conversations you have with Jewish New Yorkers across the city.

Mamdani went on to recall the very real fear of the Jewish New Yorkers he’d spoken with—who, after October 7, were afraid in their synagogues and in their homes. “This is something that has to be the focus of the next mayoral administration,” he said, and “these are the conversations that have informed our commitment” to increase funding for anti-hate-crime programming by 800 percent.

But he also said he was not comfortable with “banning the use of certain words.”

The host pressed further: did “globalize the intifada” or “from the river to the sea” make him uncomfortable?

Mamdani replied: “I know people for whom those things mean very different things,” and said, “what I hear is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He added that, as a Muslim man raised post-9/11, he knows how Arabic terms can be distorted and weaponized. The focus, he said, needs to be on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe—not on policing the permissibility of language.

But I’m not writing this because of what Mamdani said.
I’m writing this because of how Gillibrand responded.

She said the phrase globalize the intifada cannot be said, not because of what it means, but because of how it’s received. She called it “hateful, divisive, and harmful” and shared an inflammatory and inaccurate definition of the word intifada that obfuscates its history and its meaning to Palestinians and their supporters around the world.

As the Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi has said:

[T]he attempt to argue that using a term like “intifada” is antisemitic is simply absurd…Intifada simply means “uprising.”

Besides stoking fear and division, what Senator Gillibrand is saying when she defines intifada as “destroy Israel and kill all the Jews,” is that how Palestinians experience occupation, or how they name their resistance to it, is irrelevant.

That Jewish discomfort deserves public apology, but Palestinian grief doesn’t even deserve recognition.

She’s asking us to accept that only one side’s pain matters.
That only one people’s memory is politically legitimate.
And that Palestinian language must be denounced before it can even be heard.

But language does not only belong to those who fear it.
It belongs, too, to those who need it.

For Palestinians and many others around the world, intifada is not a call to kill.
It is a refusal to die quietly.
It is a word of survival, of agency, of collective dignity.

It says: we are not passive subjects of empire.
We resist.
We rise.

To treat that word as inherently violent, as something that must be disavowed in order to be eligible for leadership, is to erase its meaning for those who have the least power to shape public discourse.

This is asymmetrical empathy.
And it is not justice. It is a form of domination.

As I write this, I am reading Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Justice. The book is a collection of essays written in the aftermath of 9/11, when the U.S. government was rewriting the terms of public grief and political loyalty. In the first essay, Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear, Butler writes about a post-9/11 “hegemony” of language, one that worked by “producing a consensus on what certain terms will mean, how they will be used, and [where] lines of solidarity are implicitly drawn.”

Butler explains that after 9/11,

a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experience, and that the frame works to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation. It seems crucial to attend to this frame, since it decides, in a forceful way, what we can hear.

What we are witnessing now is the same kind of effort to narrow the framing, a political consensus around what words must mean, and who must denounce them to prove they belong.

We must resist the frame.

Because empathy that only flows in one direction is not empathy—it’s hierarchy.

It says: your pain matters more than theirs.
Your fear counts.
Their grief does not.

But we don’t need more selective empathy.
We need solidarity.

Solidarity does not require shared experience.
It requires moral clarity.

It requires listening to words we don’t immediately understand, without demanding that they be translated into the language of our own comfort.
It requires that we refuse to make our feelings the limit of someone else’s freedom.

To show solidarity is not to say “I feel your pain.”
It is to say: Your struggle is mine. Your liberation is bound up with mine.

That’s what Mamdani tried to do. To acknowledge antisemitism and Jewish pain, while also acknowledging Palestinian pain.

If Gillibrand wanted to show real leadership, she could have said: “I hear that this phrase holds different meanings. I want to understand why it resonates with those calling for Palestinian freedom. I reject antisemitism. I also refuse to weaponize it to silence others.”

Instead, she demanded that an elected official denounce not violence, but a word.
She chose empathy for some, and silence for others.

What Senator Gillibrand says matters. When a sitting U.S. senator claims that a word rooted in struggle and survival is synonymous with extermination, she is not just expressing concern. She is redefining resistance as violence, and speech as threat.

That redefinition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in the shadow of a government that is already criminalizing dissent, already detaining and deporting people for what they say, already erasing the possibility of solidarity by framing it as extremism.

Already, there are Republicans demanding that the president revoke Mamdani’s citizenship and deport him—calls that are both unconstitutional and chilling. The president himself went further, calling Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic.”

This is not just rhetoric. It is a warning shot, a test balloon for how far the state can go in punishing those whose views fall outside the dominant narrative, especially when they come from Muslims, immigrants, Palestinians, or anyone who refuses to fall in line.

When Democrats echo that logic, they legitimize its goals.
They help build the case for repression, one word at a time.

We cannot accept this from our elected officials.
We cannot let our language, our thoughtfulness, or our care for one another be hijacked by a news cycle, or by a presidential administration that thrives on fear and feeds off division.

Because what we’re watching is not just a political disagreement.
It is a deliberate attempt to narrow the bounds of moral imagination.
To punish those who try to hold multiple truths.

To turn words like “intifada” into weapons, not because of what they mean, but because of who is speaking them.

It’s an elegant meditation on what freedom really means, and what it demands of us.

For Snyder, freedom requires five things:

• Personal sovereignty — the ability to make choices;

• Unpredictability — the capacity to innovate, to create, to act outside expectation;

• Mobility — the power to go our own way in the world;

• Factuality — access to truth and knowledge;

• Solidarity — the recognition that freedom means nothing unless it belongs to everyone.

If we do not have these things, Snyder argues, we are not free. So as much as it is about what it means to be free, Snyder’s book is also about what it means not to be.

He writes about a condition he calls “unfreedom,” in which people have been stripped of their political agency, civic autonomy, and the ability to shape their own futures, even if they still appear to live in a formally democratic society.

This is the condition under which we live here in the United States.

I started a list of things that make us unfree, and soon realized that there would be no way for me to do it comprehensively. There are just too many impediments to our freedom.

Here are some of the big ones.

We are not free because we live in a country where:

1. Our access to medical care depends on employment, income, or geography.

2. Childcare is unaffordable, and the labor of care is structurally devalued.

3. Rent consumes more than half our income, and home ownership is out of reach for most.

4. Student debt shapes every major life decision.

5. The threat of unemployment (or losing health coverage) keeps us silent in the face of exploitation.

6. More than 8 million immigrants contribute to our economy without legal status, and therefore without the protection of their rights.

7. Over 77% of American households are in debt.

8. Black, Brown, and poor communities are over-policed and criminalized.

9. Over 1.2 million people are incarcerated in U.S. prisons.

10. Gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, and voter suppression shape the outcome of elections before a single vote is cast.

11. Billionaires own the platforms through which we understand the world, and the algorithms that shape our perceptions are designed to keep us scrolling instead of informed.

There is nothing new here.

All of these things were true before the election of the current U.S. president, although under this administration, we are less free by the minute.

Everything on this list impacts our personal sovereignty and mobility—our ability to make choices and to move unimpeded through the world.

But when I think about Snyder’s five preconditions for freedom, it is the other three that I find myself coming back to: factuality, solidarity, and unpredictability.

Because these are the ones that might actually help us break free.

Factuality, solidarity, and unpredictability are not three separate things. They are different facets of the same thing.

Our access to truth and our solidarity with one another expand our capacity for unpredictability.

The more we learn, the more we care.
The more we care, the more we can imagine.
And the more we imagine, the closer we come to unchaining ourselves.

This week, I, like many of you, read Alistair Kitchen’s essay in the New Yorker about how his reporting on his Substack blog in 2024 led to him being denied entry, detained, and deported from the U.S. earlier this month after a planned trip to spend a few weeks here visiting friends.

Kitchen attended Columbia for an M.F.A. program on a student visa, and when Columbia students set up a Gaza Solidarity Encampment on campus in April of 2024, he began publishing daily “dispatches,” seven of them in all.

Kitchen has thousands of subscribers now, no doubt due to the wide reach of the New Yorker piece. But at the time he wrote these seven dispatches, I don’t think many people read them. As a new Substack essayist, I can relate.

In Kitchen’s posts on the Columbia protests, most of which were written in April of 2024, his writing is nuanced and thoughtful. He reckons with the contradictions and complexities surrounding the pro-Palestinian student protests at Columbia University, particularly as they intersect with antisemitism, solidarity, power, and institutional repression.

Kitchen is an observer, someone watching from the sidelines and considering the actions of others. Through his eyes, we see the encampment take shape, and witness the tension between Jewish protesters and charges of antisemitism. Kitchen writes about protest, freedom of expression, history, bravery, and hope. He describes Shabbat services held by Jewish protesters and Muslim students engaged in prayer, and shares his disappointment with University faculty and leadership. He recounts the experience of being mistaken as Jewish and facing antisemitism from a fellow protester while marching in a pro-Palestinian protest, and “the need for the students to aggressively disavow antisemites on the perimeter of the University.” He considers anti-protest backlash, and how reporting around the protest had “coalesced to push a narrative to the effect that Columbia is now controlled by a mob of violent antisemites”, ignoring the participation of large-numbers of anti-Zionist Jews in the encampment, a distortion which, in Kitchen’s view, was “actively and atrociously antisemitic.”

The nuance of these posts was lost on Homeland Security. Kitchen is an Australian national, a foreigner who had the audacity to write about the Columbia protests while studying as a guest of our country. This is enough to deny him further entry.

He was told as much after his plane touched down on U.S. soil. The Customs and Border Patrol agent who was waiting for him when he arrived told him that he was being pulled from the customs line for interrogation “because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University.”

But what was most shocking to me about Kitchen’s New Yorker essay isn’t any of the above. It’s the sheer ignorance of the representatives of our government who interrogated him. Kitchen writes:

At one point, when I told [the agent] that the demonstrations at Columbia were “pro-peace” protests, he looked at me with real surprise. “I thought they were pro-Hamas protests?” he asked, quite genuinely. I was stunned by the innocence he brought to a question I found violently absurd. He couldn’t seem to bear the look I gave him then, a look somewhere between horror, exasperation, and fury, and, in embarrassment, he started to laugh.

I feel the “horror, exasperation and fury” in the look Kitchen gave the CPB agent who asked this question.

It’s clear the agent hadn’t read Kitchen’s reporting.
It’s clear the agent didn’t know anything about the protests themselves.
And none of that matters.

Because it’s enough that Kitchen was writing about them.

That’s what makes this moment feel so Orwellian. Not just the government’s desire to control the narrative—but its attempt to criminalize deviation from it. The CPB agent wasn’t interested in what Kitchen actually said or wrote. He had already absorbed a version of reality in which the protests were “pro-Hamas” by definition. Kitchen’s attempt to describe what he had seen—peaceful, prayerful, multifaith, Jewish-led—was incomprehensible within that frame.

As Orwell wrote in 1984:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

What happened to Kitchen is that command in action. A system in which the facts don’t matter. Where truth is not only irrelevant but punishable. Where nuance is erased, dissent pathologized, and memory rewritten in real time by the state.

This is xenophobia.
This is thought policing.
This is the machinery of unfreedom at work.

And at the center of it all is a war on factuality, on the idea that truth exists independent of power.

1984 also contains this oft-quoted line:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
If that is granted, all else follows.

But in this country, right now, saying four is enough to get you deported.

Even when Kitchen was writing his posts on the Columbia protests, he sensed that at least a portion of his small readership was not comfortable with his subject matter. Even though he didn’t express “a particular view on the substantive question of Palestine,” he noticed a “significant drop in subscribers” when he wrote about the protests. But Kitchen was undeterred:

I think what is happening at Columbia right now deserves to be reported and discussed, and the demands on the students taken seriously. I am of the view that if a situation is hard to discuss, that is good evidence that discussion is needed. What is called for now is not silence but clarity of thought.

Writing to an audience of what was then likely under 100 people, Kitchen dared to try to think clearly about a subject most Americans learn to avoid. His insistence on “clarity of thought” was itself an act of intellectual freedom. And, in an unfree society, an act of resistance.

Kitchen also condemned Columbia’s moral cowardice in refusing to defend its students’ right to speak about Israel-Palestine:

The subject at our hands is perhaps the most sensitive subject in our culture. That makes it very scary for many of us to express an opinion. Many powers-that-be depend on that discomfort to ensure silence; they depend on that silence to maintain the status quo.

Kitchen wasn’t even offering an opinion. He was naming what he saw. Yet the fear he describes—of naming, of knowing, of saying something “wrong”—is the very texture of unfreedom. And it is not confined to Columbia. It permeates our universities, our newsrooms, our courtrooms, our dinner tables.

I feel it.
You feel it.

Alistair Kitchen reported what he witnessed and reflected on how it made him feel.

He told the truth, and our government deported him for it.

Officially, DHS denies that his reporting was the reason. A spokesperson told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that “The individual in question was denied entry because he gave false information on his ESTA application regarding drug use.” Given what Kitchen was told at the airport, and the substance of his interrogation, that post-hoc story is absurd.

As a criminal-defense lawyer I must add: it is never in your interest to be “helpful” by answering questions or surrendering your phone. The border is not a zone of constitutional safety. The same government that punishes truth-telling relies on your cooperation to make it easier.

And yet, I am chilled by what happened to Alistair Kitchen.

You are likely reading this on my Substack blog, where I also try to engage difficult ideas, name harm, and tell the truth.

Unlike Kitchen, I am a U.S. citizen. But I wonder if that protects me.

Because it is now clear, if it wasn’t already, that there is no safety in being thoughtful. No safety in nuance, in research, in careful speech, in trying to tell the truth.

That’s not how unfreedom works.
That’s not how tyranny works.

To maintain its power, our government must punish truth that threatens it.

Because truth-telling cracks the surface of inevitability. It creates the possibility of surprise—of solidarity, of change. It reminds us that what is happening now is not natural, not eternal, not beyond our power to name or resist.

It reclaims the freedom to say that two plus two equals four.

Without access to truth, we cannot act unpredictably.
Without unpredictability, we cannot begin to imagine a different future.

We are not free if we are not permitted to name what we see.

A personal letter to someone I love—and maybe to you, too—about Zionism, fear, justice, and what it means to be Jewish in this moment.

To begin with love

I want to start off by telling you that I love you. I know you know that already. But it feels important to say at the outset, before I start talking about matters on which I know we disagree.

I also want to acknowledge that I don’t have all the answers, or even most of them. I get things wrong. Like all of us, I can only see a small part of a much larger whole.

So I know I’ll make mistakes. But please know that I come to this with my whole heart—and because I believe that to be Jewish is to wrestle with our history, with our responsibilities, and with each other.

Fear is not a compass

I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to speak to you about Zionism—how to find the right words, in the right order, to break the spell of what Israel means to you, what Jews have been taught it means for us.

I imagine you might be wondering: Of all the times I could choose to write this, why now?

I hear that. I feel it. Even to me, the present moment feels like an especially hard time to hear any of this.

I am writing you this letter just a few weeks after two Israeli embassy staffers were murdered in Washington, D.C.—shot by a man who reportedly shouted “Free Palestine”—and only days after at least twelve people were injured in Boulder, Colorado, when someone threw a Molotov cocktail at a gathering in support of Israeli hostages, echoing that same phrase. And of course, it has also been less than two years since October 7, when Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israel—killing over 1,200 people, wounding many more, and taking hostages, some of whom still have not been released.

I know this violence has deepened the fear and grief many Jews are already carrying. I understand the fear that comes with being Jewish. I carry it, too. The fear that antisemitism is always just below the surface, waiting to rise. That this moment—like so many before—will end with Jews alone and hunted.

But I also know that this fear cannot be our moral compass.

After the D.C. shooting, a friend of ours wrote on Facebook: “One person’s horrific act does not transform those words into a call to violence when spoken by others.” And I agree with the sentiment that isolated acts of violence do not erase the legitimacy of a broader struggle for justice.

But that is not the first thing I thought when I heard about the attack in D.C., or the one in Boulder.

What I thought was this: The Israeli government is making me unsafe.

Make no mistake: I am not saying, by any measure, that either attack was justified. And I agree with you that attacks on Jewish people to protest the actions of the Israeli government are antisemitism. This is the nature of collective punishment—when individuals are held responsible not for what they have done, but for what they represent.

We, of all people, know where that road leads.

Israel’s end game

But collective punishment is not something that happens only to us.

As of May 27, 2025, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that at least 54,056 people, including at least 17,400 children, have been confirmed as killed in Gaza since October 2023. Due to Israel’s total blockade on international humanitarian aid to Gaza since early March, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification platform, an international famine tracker governed by a global partnership of the U.N. and human rights organizations, has found Gaza to be at “critical risk of famine,” with 22 percent of the population at Phase 5, the worst of the five phases, which means that one in five people “have an extreme lack of food and/or other basic needs even after full employment of coping strategies” and that “starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident.”

Israel is executing its end game.

At a meeting on May 4, 2025, the Israeli security cabinet approved a new large-scale ground operation in Gaza. Its name: Operation Gideon’s Chariots. An IDF spokesperson announced that the operation would entail a “broad attack that includes the displacement of most of the population of the Gaza Strip.”

At a May 11, 2025, meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset, Netanyahu confirmed that this plan was working:

We are demolishing more and more homes, they have nowhere to return . The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip. Our main problem is in the receiving countries.

Netanyahu and his cabinet have been very clear about the operation’s goal: to force everyone out, resettle the population in whatever country will take them, and let the U.S. president turn Gaza into a vacation destination.

This is Zionism

I know you are horrified by Netanyahu.
I know you support Palestinian rights.
I know you condemn the destruction of Gaza.

And I know you feel unsettled by a movement that calls itself anti-Zionist.

But what has happened to Israel’s government, and what is happening in Israel, is not a betrayal of Zionism’s purpose.

It is its fulfillment.

I know that Zionism did not begin as a single nationalist idea. It once encompassed many visions of what a return to the “land of Israel” might mean for the Jewish people. But in practice, Zionism has become a project of statehood rooted in demographic control. To maintain Jewish majority rule, Israel has killed, displaced, disenfranchised, and fragmented the Palestinian people. It has built walls, passed laws, and unleashed state violence on civilians. And now it is committing genocide.

It is precisely because we know what it is to be targeted, expelled, and exterminated that we must reject any politics built on domination and dispossession. It is because we carry generational trauma that we cannot accept the idea that someone else must be made unsafe so that we can feel secure.

We have been sold a dangerous idea: that Jewish safety required a Jewish state—a state sustained by killing, displacing, and controlling another people, by denying their rights, and by erasing their history.

It was never true.

The truth is both simple and difficult: no state can truly uphold equality if it is organized around one religion, race, or ethnicity. Not without subjugating those who fall outside that identity.

This is not unique to Israel. It holds whether a state explicitly defines itself by a dominant identity—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu—or embeds that identity more subtly in its laws, institutions, or founding myths. When citizenship is tiered, when access to land, resources, movement, and protection is conditioned on belonging to the dominant group, equality is impossible.

The truth is that a “Jewish and democratic state” was always a contradiction in terms. A democracy requires equal rights for all who live under its rule. But a state defined first and foremost by Jewish identity cannot offer equal citizenship to those who are not Jewish—especially not to the millions of Palestinians who live in Israel/Palestine.

This is not a theoretical problem. It plays out in every facet of Israeli policy: in the Law of Return, which gives Jews automatic citizenship but denies the same right to Palestinians expelled from their homes; in the Nation-State Law, which enshrines Jewish supremacy as the basis of the state; in military checkpoints, segregated roads, and unequal access to water, healthcare, and legal protections.

This is Zionism.

When one group subjugates another, the prospect of justice can feel like a threat. The fear is: What if they do to us what we’ve done to them? In the United States, that fear was laid bare in the Declarations of Secession issued by Southern states before the Civil War, which warned that emancipation would lead to retaliation and bloodshed. That fear persists today in the backlash to affirmative action and reparations, in the panic around "replacement," and in the refusal to reckon with what we owe to the people we once enslaved.

I can hear you asking me, as you have asked before, if I’ve read the Hamas’s 1988 Covenant.

I have. I know what it says. It contains antisemitic language and speaks in absolutist, theocratic terms about the destruction of Israel. I understand why that document haunts you, and why it shapes the way so many Jews view this conflict. I’m not asking you to set your fear aside or pretend that it doesn’t matter. But I am asking you to hold it alongside everything else. To widen the lens.

The violence we’re witnessing today is not new. It’s part of a long story—and where we choose to start that story informs how we view it. The Jews of Europe dreamed of the holy land as refuge from thousands of years of antisemitic violence. Many arrived as refugees, survivors of pogroms and concentration camps, of ghettos and expulsions. But that refuge was made possible through violence. In 1948, over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. More than 400 villages were destroyed. Families were scattered. This is what Palestinians call the Nakba—the catastrophe. And it didn’t end there. It continued through occupation, settlement expansion, military control, mass imprisonment, and the denial of return. Generations of Palestinians have lived—and died—under a regime that sees their very existence as a threat to be managed or erased.

This is Zionism.

The language of the Hamas Covenant is horrifying. But not so different than the language employed by Netanyahu and his cabinet, who have invoked divine entitlement and called for “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth” after the attacks of October 7. And we cannot keep using condemnation of Hamas to deflect from the reality of what Israel is doing, right now, with our tax dollars and our political cover.

This is Zionism.
And we must reject it.

The alternative is silence in the face of genocide. The alternative is a gilded future built on the rubble of Gaza, on mass graves and unmarked histories, on a lie that claims to protect us while demanding we forfeit our souls.

What justice demands

In a recent guest essay in the New York Times titled “Jews Are Afraid Right Now”, Sheila Katz, the chief executive of the National Council of Jewish Women wrote that it was unreasonable to ask American Jews to condemn Israel:

We have been pressured to denounce a foreign government we do not vote for, as if our participation in domestic conversations about justice and equity depends on it.

Ms. Katz’s words made me think of Greta Thunberg, who, as I write this, is aboard a boat in the Mediterranean, attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza in defiance of the blockade. When asked how support for Gaza connected with her climate activism, she said:

For me, there is no way of distinguishing the two. We cannot have climate justice without social justice. The reason why I am a climate activist is not because I want to protect trees. I’m a climate activist because I care about human and planetary well-being, and those are extremely interlinked….No matter what the cause of the suffering is, whether that is CO₂, whether that is bombs, whether that is state repression or other forms of violence, we have to stand up against that source of suffering.

Ms. Thunberg’s image of interlinked struggles channels the moral philosophy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who famously wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Dr. King’s letter continues:

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

The distinction Ms. Katz draws between injustice here and injustice in Israel/Palestine is artificial. She doesn’t want her Jewishness to require her or other Jews to see struggles for justice as interconnected. But in the Jewish tradition, the pursuit of justice is not optional. It is commanded. The Torah’s call—“Tzedek, tzedek tirdof” (Justice, justice you shall pursue) — is one of the clearest ethical imperatives in all of scripture. The repetition of the word “justice” underscores its urgency and centrality. It means justice not only in ends, but in means; not only for ourselves, but for others. And when it comes to the unjust actions of the Israeli government, Jews all over the world bear a special responsibility, because Netanyahu holds himself out as “a representative of the entire Jewish people,” and what his government does, it does in our name.

And what Netanyahu’s government does, it also does with the full support of our own. If that was ever in doubt, it could not have been clearer than it was yesterday, when the U.S. vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution “demanding an immediate and unconditional cease-fire in Gaza, the release of all hostages and the resumption of full-scale humanitarian aid deliveries to the enclave.” Of the 15 countries on the Council, ours was the only vote in opposition.

The governments of Israel and the U.S. rely on the illusion that struggles for justice are separate—that we can care about some and ignore others. But as Greta Thunberg and Dr. King have shown us, these connections exist whether or not we are prepared to see them. And once we do, they widen the breadth of the struggle we are called to join. Just as power isolates, solidarity connects—and it is in that connectedness that we find not only greater moral clarity, but a deeper capacity for fellowship, community, and joy.

This is anti-Zionism.

Let’s write a new story

The movement for Palestinian liberation is not a monolith. It does not speak with one voice, and you will not agree with everyone in it. It is messy and imperfect because everything that humans do is messy and imperfect. But there is space for you in this movement, which is also the movement for Jewish liberation, because our liberations are bound together.

I don’t pretend to know the form the future will take.
But the present is untenable.
And we have to figure out how to let it go.

More to the point, we must rise up against it—
even though it unsettles everything many of us were taught,
even though it challenges the stories many of us have been told about who we are.

It is time to write ourselves a new story.

The future of what it means to be Jewish is ours to imagine.
This is the beautiful legacy we get to pass on.
This is the sacred task we get to embody.

We just have to choose it.

To choose the prophets who demanded justice, the sages who said all human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. To stand, with open hearts and unwavering clarity, on the side of the oppressed.

Let’s do it together.

Your friend,
Sarah

They don’t want to be called antisemitic.

They don’t want to be called terrorist sympathizers.

They don’t want to make a mistake and sound uninformed.

A friend says to me: It is easier for you to talk about this. You are a Jew.

What I think she means is that because I am a Jew, I am less likely to be accused of antisemitism if I speak out. That because I am a Jew, I am permitted to talk about violence committed in the name of Jewish safety.

And I think: It is because I am a Jew that I must talk about it.

Last Friday, an Israeli airstrike destroyed the home of a Palestinian pediatrician in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, killing nine of the doctor’s ten children, who were between the ages of six months and 12 years. Her eleven-year-old son and her husband, who is also a doctor, survived.

At the time, Dr. Alaa al-Najjar was at work at nearby Nasser hospital, taking care of other people’s children.

In a written response to a New York Times request for confirmation of the strike, a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) stated that civilians should not have been in the area:

The Khan Younis area is a dangerous war zone. Before beginning operations there, the I.D.F. evacuated civilians from this area for their own safety.

The implication here is that Dr. al-Najjar and her family put themselves at risk when they decided not to leave their home. But it is not clear that there is anyplace safer they could have gone.

Over this past weekend, 15 miles away from Khan Younis in Gaza City, the BBC reports that at least 35 Palestinians were killed, many of them children, at a school building housing hundreds of displaced families.

Dr. al-Najjar is one person. Her family is one family.

One of tens of thousands, each a universe of grief.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 53,939 people, including at least 16,500 children, have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

How many deaths are too many?

And how will this end?

On May 21, 2025, at his first press conference in five months, Netanyahu announced that the only way he would agree to end the war is if “we carry out the Trump plan. A plan that is so correct and so revolutionary.”

What exactly is this Plan?

The Plan laid out by our president and endorsed by Netanyahu follows a chilling, familiar logic: erase the people, erase their history, and then take the land.

It unfolds in four phases.

Phase One: Force Them Out

First, the Palestinian people will be forced from Gaza.

On February 4, 2025, 15 days after assuming the presidency, our president held a press conference with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.1

The president called upon “other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts” to “build various domains that will be ultimately occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza” where they “will be able to live in comfort and peace.” He maintained that “the only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative.”

Phase Two: Take the Land

Next, the U.S. would take over Gaza. The president explained:

The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area … do a real job, do something different.

NBC News’ Kelly O’Donnell asked the president:

You are talking tonight about the United States taking over a sovereign territory. What authority would allow you to do that? Are you talking about a permanent occupation there, redevelopment?

The president’s response:

I do see a long-term ownership position, and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East and maybe the entire Middle East…This was not a decision made lightly, everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs in a magnificent area that no one would have known.

Near the end of the press conference, CNN’s Katia Collins asked where the Gazans fit into the president’s vision:

Where exactly are you suggesting that they should go? And two, are you saying they should return after it’s rebuilt? And if not, who do you envision living there?

This exchange followed:

THE PRESIDENT: I envision a world, people living there, the world’s people. I think you’ll make that into an international, unbelievable place. I think the potential in the Gaza Strip is unbelievable. And I think the entire world, representatives from all over the world will be there–

COLLINS: [INAUDIBLE] Palestinians.

THE PRESIDENT: Palestinians also. Palestinians will live there. Many people will live there. But they’ve tried the other and they’ve tried it for decades and decades and decades. It’s not gonna work. It didn’t work. It will never work. And you have to learn from history. History has, you know, you just can’t let it keep repeating itself. We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal. And I don’t wanna be cute. I don’t wanna be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so–magnificent.

On February 6, 2025, the president made the following post on Truth Social:

The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting. The Palestinians, people like Chuck Schumer, would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free. The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth. No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!

Speaking with Fox News’ Brett Baier in an interview that aired on February 10, 2025, the president confirmed that Palestinians would not have a right to return to Gaza.

THE PRESIDENT: …Now it’s essentially a demolition site, there’s practically no building that’s livable in the whole thing, in the whole Gaza strip. I say, we go in, we knock ‘em all down…We move [the Gazans] into beautiful areas of the Middle East…And we’ll build beautiful communities for the 1.9 million people…safe communities…a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is. In the meantime, I would own this. Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land—

BAIER: —Would the Palestinians have the right to return?

THE PRESIDENT: No, they wouldn’t, because they’re gonna have much better housing. Much better—in other words, I’m talking about building a permanent place for them.

Phase Three: Rewrite the Story

On February 25, 2025, the president released an AI-generated video on Truth Social and other social media platforms.

It opens on bombed-out, rubble-strewn streets. The words “Gaza 2025” and “What’s Next?” fade up on the screen. Then, over a pulsing dance beat, the landscape transforms into a beachfront paradise with turquoise water and luxury yachts dotting the shoreline.

A voice begins to sing:

Donald’s coming to set you free,
bringing the light for all to see.
No more tunnels, no more fear,
Trump Gaza is finally here.
Trump Gaza is shining bright,
a golden future, a brand new light,
feast and dance the deed is done.
Trump Gaza, number one!

Children jump up and down as U.S. dollars rain from the sky. A Trump Gaza hotel and casino fills the frame one moment; a giant golden statue of the president looms over a palm-tree-lined town square the next.

It is a dystopian fever dream crossed with a marketing pitch, a ghastly synthesis of authoritarian spectacle, settler fantasy, and techno-propaganda.

I cannot believe that the president posted this video on February 25.
And I cannot believe that in the three months since,
no one has convinced him to take it down.

Edward Said, the Palestinian-American scholar and activist who died in 2003, once wrote: “Every empire… tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.”

But this president doesn’t bother with that lie.
He doesn’t have to.
No one is making him hide his intentions.

Phase One—the forced removal of Palestinians from Gaza—has been Israel’s objective since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7.2

Shortly after the attack, Israeli President Isaac Herzog, declared, “an entire nation out there is responsible.”

Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Israel’s Parliament, posted on X: “Now we all have one common goal - erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.”

Defense Minister Israel Katz wrote: “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: “We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.”

And in late October 2023, Prime Minister Netanyahu invoked scripture in a televised address, urging Israelis to “remember what Amalek has done to you”—a reference to Deuteronomy, in which God commands the Jews to destroy their enemies, the Amalekites, while giving them land “as an inheritance to possess” and promising them “rest from surrounding enemies.”

This idea, that God has anointed a righteous people with a divine inheritance, is a theocratic justification for genocide.

It says:
This is not just what we want.
This is what God wants.

If there was any doubt that the annihilation of Gaza was an intended outcome, it was laid to rest on October 30, 2023, when Local Call and +972 Magazine published a leaked document from Israel’s Intelligence Ministry, dated October 13. The document recommends the permanent, forcible transfer of Gaza’s entire civilian population.

Forced migration is listed as “Option C,” beneath Option A (Gaza remaining under Palestinian Authority control) and Option B (governance by a new Arab local authority). Of the three, Option C is described as the most advantageous—likely to produce “positive, long-term strategic outcomes for Israel”—but also the most dependent on “harnessing the support of the United States and additional pro-Israel countries.”

The document acknowledges that this option requires a collapse of hope. It proposes hiring advertising agencies to “resolve the crisis in a way that does not vilify Israel,” and recommends “campaigns for Gaza residents themselves to motivate them to accept this plan,” making clear that “there is no hope of returning to the territories Israel will soon occupy, whether or not that is true.”

One suggested narrative reads:

“Allah made sure you lose this land because of Hamas’ leadership—there is no choice but to move to another place with the assistance of your Muslim brothers.”

In other words: to carry out Option C, Israel must extinguish hope among the Gazan people—and to persuade them that their dispossession is not only permanent, but divinely ordained.

The Plan is working.

At a May 11, 2025 meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset, Netanyahu confirmed it:

We are demolishing more and more homes, they have nowhere to return . The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip. Our main problem is in the receiving countries.

I have been thinking a lot about the above statement. Netanyahu says “The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate…” He frames forced displacement as a voluntary act. People lose their homes, and so, they want to leave. The violence becomes invisible. The victims become agents of their own erasure.

But there is a “problem”—there is nowhere for the Gazans to go.

To solve this, Israel has established the so-called Assisted Voluntary Return Department. Even the name is a lie. It continues the same rhetorical strategy Netanyahu employs above. Gazans want to leave. We are simply helping them.

This kind of rhetorical inversion reminds me of the ministries in George Orwell’s 1984, each named for the opposite of what it actually does.

The Ministry of Truth spreads lies.
The Ministry of Peace wages war.
The Ministry of Love inflicts torture.
The Ministry of Plenty manages starvation.

And the Assisted Voluntary Return Department? It forces people from the only home they have ever known into exile—if any country will even take them.

If Netanyahu was being honest, this is what he would have said:

We are intentionally destroying more and more Palestinian homes in Gaza to ensure that the people who live there cannot return. By erasing their neighborhoods and basic infrastructure, we are making life so unlivable that they will have no choice but to leave. That is our goal. The only obstacle now is finding other countries willing to absorb the population we have forcibly displaced.

And Israel is doing this to implement the U.S. president’s plan for Gaza.

In a March 22, 2025 statement announcing the formation of the Assisted Voluntary Return Department, Defense Minister Israel Katz made this abundantly clear:

“We are working with all means to implement the U.S. president’s vision, and we will allow any Gaza resident who wants to move to a third state to do so.”

He added that this relocation effort would be carried out “subject to Israeli and international law, and in accordance with the vision of U.S. President Donald Trump.”

Phase One also involves weaponizing hunger.

Since March 2, 2025, Israel has imposed a full blockade on humanitarian aid entering Gaza. No food, no fuel, no medicine.

As a result, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has now shaded its map of Gaza completely red. According to the IPC, 925,000 people—44% of Gaza’s population—are now experiencing “Level 4 Emergency” food insecurity. That means nearly half of Gaza’s households face large food consumption gaps, dangerously high levels of acute malnutrition, and rising excess mortality.

The IPC warns:

With the announced expansion of military operations throughout the Gaza Strip, the persistent inability of humanitarian agencies to access populations in dire need, an anticipated escalation in hostilities, and the continued mass displacement of people, the risk of famine in the Gaza Strip is not just possible—it is increasingly likely.

At this moment of manufactured desperation, Israel and the United States finally announced they would allow food into Gaza.

But only through a single source: The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—a shadowy, U.S.-backed group that bypasses the U.N. and established humanitarian organizations, has refused to disclose its funders, and has drawn widespread international criticism.

Hours before GHF began delivering food to Gaza, Jake Wood, the organization’s executive director, resigned. “It is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon,” he said.

GHF is not bringing enough food into Gaza to feed the entire population. That was never the plan. Food is being concentrated at four “Secure Distribution Sites” in Southern Gaza, each with the capacity to serve 300,000 people—a capacity of 1.2 million, or half of Gaza’s pre-war population—forcing Gazans to travel long distances to avoid starving to death.

This is not an accident.

At the same May 11, 2025 Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting where Netanyahu praised the demolition of homes, he also admitted that “receiving the aid would be conditional on the Gazans who receive it not returning to the places from which they arrive at the aid distribution sites.”

This is not a humanitarian effort.
It is coercion disguised as compassion.

And the United States is complicit.

This is the Plan.

Phase Four: Silence the Witnesses

Another part of the Plan is to silence us. I call this Phase Four, but it is really a precondition of the entire enterprise, and must be maintained throughout.

The success of the Plan depends on it.

In addition to aiding in the murder, starvation, and displacement of the over 2 million people who call Gaza home, our president and his administration are actively punishing those who speak out against it.

In this country, the work of being our moral compass, of speaking truth to power, of naming the genocidal land grab taking place in Gaza, and our country’s complicity in it, has largely fallen to our college students.

And it is these students who are being punished.

Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Yunseo Chung, and Mohsen Mahdawi and many other non-citizen students who have dared to stand up for Palestinian lives have been arrested, stripped of their legal status, and currently face deportation.

And our institutions of higher learning have failed to stand up for them. Through executive orders, congressional hearings, and threats, the administration has beaten colleges and universities across the country into submission.

So much so that these institutions are now doing the administration’s work for it.

On May 12, Logan Rozos dared to mention Gaza in his commencement address before NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. This is what Rozos said:

As I search my heart today in addressing you all, my moral and political commitments guide me to say that the only thing that is appropriate to say in this time and to a group this large is a recognition of the atrocities currently happening in Palestine. I want to say that the genocide currently occurring is supported politically and militarily by the United States, is paid for by our tax dollars, and has been livestreamed to our phones for the past 18 months. I do not wish only to speak to my own politics today but to speak for all people of conscience who feel the moral injury of this atrocity, and I want to say that I condemn this genocide and complicity in this genocide.

In response, NYU released a statement from NYU spokesperson John Beckman apologizing to the audience for being “subjected to these remarks,” and criticizing Rozos for “misus[ing] his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views.” The school is withholding Rozos’ diploma while it pursues disciplinary actions against him.

The school’s concern for the audience’s feelings, and its claim that Rozos’ speech was flawed for not giving equal weight to opposing views, is a grotesque inversion of values—a university punishing speech while people are being silenced by bombs. It is also a stunning abdication of the university’s duty, not just to academic freedom, but to truth, to justice, and to the moral imagination of the very students it claims to educate.

I take courage from Logan Rozos and the other students who have dared to speak out.

And I take courage from Ms. Rachel, the Youtube megastar who has surprisingly—and unhesitatingly—used her platform to stand up for Gaza’s children.

But when a children’s entertainer shows more moral clarity than university presidents, we are deep in the collapse of institutional conscience.

We are all dehumanized by this.

Not just by the bombs and the blockade. But by the silence. By the normalization of cruelty. By the ease with which a genocide is framed as redevelopment. By the way children’s deaths become statistics, and justice becomes a public relations problem.

We are all diminished by it.

Because what is happening in Gaza is not only a crime against Palestinians. It is a test of who we are. Of whether we will allow empire, spectacle, and fear to dictate our moral compass. Of whether we will abandon truth in the name of balance, or justice in the name of power.

And so we must not be silent.
Not now.

Not in the face of manufactured famine.
Not in the face of state-sponsored erasure.

In the face of our president’s Plan for Gaza,
we must have a plan of our own.

A plan rooted in moral clarity.
In collective memory.
In love fierce enough to name genocide,
and brave enough to oppose it—
openly, relentlessly, together.

Because silence is not safety.
And complicity is not neutrality.

Because Palestine is not a slogan.
It is a people.
A history.
A future.

And because every empire depends on silence to do its work.

Let us refuse it.

The most recent speech in the collection is from May 13, 1995, just four months before he died. Several others, from the early 1970s, were uncovered by my sister Emily and me after we filed a Freedom of Information Act request for our father’s FBI file. That’s how we learned that in 1970 and 1971, the Bureau had dispatched agents to every speech he gave, and that each one had been recorded and transcribed.

At the time, the FBI was trying to build a case against him for crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot, a federal crime codified in 18 U.S.C. § 2101, and passed as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

My dad was never prosecuted under the Act.
But the speeches are a gift.

In them, he warned that “the law can be a tyrant,” and called for “resistance to illegitimate and immoral, indecent and unjust authority.” I’ve returned to those words often, but never more urgently than now, as the current administration constructs an unprecedented, authoritarian law enforcement infrastructure under the guise of public safety.

My father was a lawyer.
He wasn’t just committed to the rule of law—he loved it.
He believed that law could be a tool for good.
That out there, somewhere, was a hidden path to justice,
and that law could help us find it.

At the same time, he knew that law was often a tool of oppression, and that throughout history, tyrants have used legal structures to undermine law while preserving its appearance.

Justice and tyranny: one, the elusive promise of a system of laws; the other, the logical consequence of its inevitable betrayal.

Why did he return to this subject, again and again?

Reading through my father’s speeches today, I look for clues.

How much of what is happening right now was already happening?
How much of the future could he see?
Did he know how unsettlingly ordinary it would be,
the assault on democracy we are currently living through?
If he were alive today, what would he be doing?

And what would he tell me to do?

I was eighteen when he died, so this last question is a familiar one.
It lives, in one form or another,
in every moment of every day of my life without him.

I know what my mother is telling me to do.

Last week, it was to write about Executive Order 14288, which I begrudgingly did.

My mom’s support for the things I do is not a given. It’s not that she disapproves of my choices. But if she isn’t impressed, she doesn’t pretend to be.

When Emily and I made our first short documentary, and brought her to our first-ever screening in a theater, I turned to her and asked: What did you think?

I don’t recall her exact words, but I remember she said something about how the low quality of the filmmaking would make the project accessible to audiences because people who don’t make movies would look at it and say to themselves, I could have made that.

I love my mother.

But with her, praise, even for her children, has never been automatic.
She has high standards for herself, and for others.
She doesn’t suffer fools.

So when she asked me to write about EO 14288, I did.
I cut and pasted the entirety of the order into my last post and tried to make sense of it, section by section.

It was not a fun exercise.

EO 14288, titled Strengthening and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement To Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens, reads like a dystopian manifesto—less executive order than declaration of war. It militarizes local police, grants them impunity, guts constitutional protections, and casts any local official who resists as a traitor to the nation.

We have already seen its threats begin to play out:

• A Wisconsin judge was indicted for helping an undocumented man elude immigration officers waiting outside of her courtroom.

• A Representative of Congress was charged with assaulting ICE agents outside an immigration detention facility in New Jersey after exercising her legal oversight duties to conduct an unannounced oversight visit.

• The Justice Department announced that it is dropping consent decrees in Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis, Minnesota, reached after the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd to help reform local law enforcement in those cities, and closing civil rights investigations in many more.

These are not isolated incidents.
They are signals.

My parents were a great match.

My father was a dreamer.

Even though he knew that law could be twisted in the service of power, he never let go of his faith in the potential of justice, his love of a country that he believed could be made to live up to the promise of equal justice under law.

My mother is a revolutionary.

She believes that real justice will never come from within the system—
that it will require hard-fought, radical, structural change.

These are my parents.

I will spend my life trying to find myself in them.

In their fights over politics,

In their fights over directions,

In the deep love they shared,

In their hopes for my sister and me.

Everything I write is a part of a process of untangling that legacy.

Everything I write is also for my own children.

The section of EO 14288 I can’t stop thinking about is Section 6.

Compared to other sections, it is relatively short. It commands the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to

utilize the Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs) formed in accordance with Executive Order 14159…to coordinate and advance the objectives of this order.

So in order to understand this section of EO 14288 you need to read EO 14159.

EO 14159, titled Protecting the American People Against Invasion, frames migration not as a humanitarian reality or a legal process, but as an act of war. It tells us that the purpose of the HSTFs is to:

end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States, dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks, end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children, and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States.

This language conflates immigration with organized crime, a “scourge” that must be met with “all available law enforcement tools”. Elsewhere in the order, undocumented people are described as inherently criminal and subversive. They have “abused” American “generosity,” committed “vile and heinous acts”.

But this isn't just about immigration anymore.

This link between EO 14159 and EO 14288 tells us that these task forces, originally justified as part of a xenophobic campaign against migrants, are now being embedded across state and local policing structures.

Joint federal-state task forces are not new.
But this feels like something else.

Federal power is being fused with local law enforcement, creating a national security state that treats resistance as insubordination and dissent as criminality.

One order speaks of “unleashing” law enforcement; the other, of “protecting” the nation from an “invasion.” Taken together, it’s clear that these HSTFs are more than policy tools.

They are instruments of consolidation.

What nags at me is the purpose behind it all.

The pace at which this administration has dismantled our systems is breathtaking.

Once it had amassed all of the power—what will it do with it?

I stay up late, sifting through congressional testimonies and department memos like a conspiracy theorist.

I find Operation Take Back America, a chilling new initiative quietly announced in a March 6 DOJ memo by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—the president’s former defense attorney. It outlines a plan to turn federal law enforcement into a political enforcement arm in support of mass deportation.

Local papers are also beginning to report on leaked documents from Project 2025, including a proposed “Commander of Domestic Security Operations” who would oversee both military and law enforcement, as illustrated in the internal organizational chart first shared by The Phoenix News Times and reprinted below.

According to the outlet, the goal is to restructure domestic law enforcement under presidential control, giving the president the power to target immigrants and suppress opposition.

In another universe, this would be shocking.

In this one, it’s already happening.

Order by order, memo by memo, we are watching it take shape.

When my younger sister and I were children, there was a small plaster replica of Michelangelo’s statue of David in our dad’s office.

He liked to say it was the only artistic representation of the young shepherd in the instant before he decides to stand up to the giant, Goliath.

That moment mattered deeply to my father.
The moment just before David decides what kind of person he is going to be.

In the early 1990s, this image of David became a centerpiece of the speeches my father gave.

During his final public address in May of 1995, my father stood in front of graduates from the School of Architecture and Planning at SUNY Buffalo and spoke about the uncertainty that Michelangelo’s statue captures:

Michelangelo is saying, across these four centuries, that every person’s life has a moment when you are thinking of doing something that will jeopardize yourself. And if you don’t do it, no one will be the wiser that you even thought of it. So, it’s easy to get out of it. And that’s what David is doing right there. He’s got the rock in the right hand, the sling over the left shoulder, and he’s saying like Prufrock, “Do I dare, do I dare?” I hope many of you, or at least a significant few, will dare when the time comes, if it hasn’t come already.

This is what he was thinking about at the end of his life.

He knew that law could be used for good.

He knew that it could be twisted.
That it would be twisted.

He knew that we couldn’t stop that from happening.
That part was beyond our control.

But what we could control was the type of people that we chose to be.

That afternoon in Buffalo, my father closed his remarks with a poem, Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth by Arthur Hugh Clough. It’s is an affirmation of perseverance, a call not to give in to despair, even when the battle for justice, truth, or progress seems fruitless. The world is in darkness, but Clough urges us to persist. It ends:

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.

I realize now what my father would be doing if he were here.

And I know what he would tell me to do.

Like hostages in a bank robbery.

I met a friend for a drink last week, and we came up with this analogy as our collective answer to the question, “How are you doing?”

Our hands zip-tied behind our backs,
our noses pressed to dirty, nondescript carpet.
We hear shouting.
Chaos.
Once-sturdy things crash down around us.

It’s easy to give in.

To lie here and let our eyesight blur,
staring deeply into the densely fibered short-pile nylon.

To surrender everything.

This is how I’m feeling when my mom starts texting me about Executive Order 14288.

You have to write about this.

I don’t respond.

She texts me again:
This is very scary and requires a response.

I have 132 subscribers on Substack. What I write — about anything — doesn’t travel very far.

But this is my mother.

So here I am.
Struggling to refocus my eyes.
To ignore the shouting.
And to look at what she wants me to see:
Executive Order 14288.

Released on April 28, 2025, this order is titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.” The name alone reads like a press release from a dystopian universe, where language is stripped of nuance, fear is the frame, and any attempt to question power is met with force. Strengthen. Unleash. Pursue. Protect.

EO 14288 is not simply a directive to support law enforcement. It is a blueprint for repression, cloaked in patriotic platitudes. It seeks to criminalize dissent, destroy oversight, militarize civilian life, and punish those who dare to pursue equity.

It is a lie that equity has prevented law enforcement from doing its job.
It is a lie that shielding police from accountability makes us safe.
It is a lie that bigger, more militarized police forces make us safe.
It is a lie that consolidating law enforcement power makes us safe.
And it is a lie that we must choose between safety and civil rights.

But EO 14288 is built on these lies. It uses them to justify the erosion of democratic norms in the name of protecting “innocent citizens,” a phrase that, like much of this order, does more to divide than to describe. On one side are the people who get to count as innocent. And on the other is whomever this administration decides belongs there.

This is not about crime. It is about control.

I don’t want to look at this.
I don’t want to read it.
I want to pretend it doesn’t exist.
I want to wait for it to be over.
I want to go back to staring at the carpet.

This administration has left me traumatized.

But this is my mother.
So I have gone through it, section by section, line by line.

Because my mother is right.
We need to understand this administration’s priorities, and how it is framing them. We need to untangle the rhetoric and call this assault on democracy what it is.

It is the only chance we’ve got.

Section 1 – The War on Equity

Section 1. Purpose and Policy. Safe communities rely on the backbone and heroism of a tough and well-equipped police force. My Administration is steadfastly committed to empowering State and local law enforcement to firmly police dangerous criminal behavior and protect innocent citizens.

When local leaders demonize law enforcement and impose legal and political handcuffs that make aggressively enforcing the law impossible, crime thrives and innocent citizens and small business owners suffer. My Administration will therefore: establish best practices at the State and local level for cities to unleash high-impact local police forces; protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by State or local officials; and surge resources to officers in need. My Administration will work to ensure that law enforcement officers across America focus on ending crime, not pursuing harmful, illegal race- and sex-based “equity” policies.

The result will be a law-abiding society in which tenacious law enforcement officers protect the innocent, violations of law are not tolerated, and American communities are safely enjoyed by all their citizens again.

Section 1 lays out EO 14288’s central lie: that communities can either have safety or equity, but not both.

Race and sex are mentioned, but the EO doesn't invoke these terms to acknowledge systemic discrimination or to affirm equal protection. Instead, it weaponizes them to define equity itself as dangerous. It is a reassertion of a vision of law, safety, and power, one in which “heroism” is synonymous with force, where protection is performed through domination, and where strength is narrowly defined in terms of violence and control.

The order’s language is saturated with hyper-masculine ideals: “tough,” “firmly police,” “aggressively enforcing the law,” “unleash high-impact forces.” These are not merely descriptive choices. They are ideological ones. They reject the idea that public safety might be rooted in care, prevention, accountability, or repair. They cast compassion, community oversight, and anti-discrimination policies as weak, harmful, even criminal.

When the order promises to “end harmful equity policies,” it is not responding to some neutral crisis. It is punishing decades of grassroots organizing—much of it led by women of color—challenging the disproportionate harm inflicted on Black and Brown communities by the criminal legal system. These movements have demanded transparency, restraint, and justice. This order responds by labeling them a threat.

And it doesn’t stop there.

The stated purpose of the order is to unfetter law enforcement so that it can “pursue criminals and protect innocent citizens.” But in a country where Black and Latinx people are disproportionately targeted by police, and where Black people are nearly three times more likely than white people to be killed by law enforcement, the repetition of the word “innocent” is deeply racialized.

And so is “criminal.”

As the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation has warned:

This order will increase the over-policing of Black communities….The order’s insistence that law enforcement officials aggressively police all crimes will increase Black Americans’ interactions with law enforcement officials and raise the likelihood of police violence.

And then there is the word “citizen.” That word draws a line, not just between legal categories, but between those deemed worthy of protection and everyone else. It doesn’t just divide us by race or gender; it divides us by status. It tells us who counts as American, who is presumed to belong, who is viewed as deserving of safety—and whose punishment, surveillance, and exclusion that safety requires.

EO 14288 doesn’t just rewrite the rules. It reasserts a brutal moral order where whiteness, maleness, and citizenship confer not just privilege, but invulnerability. Where law is synonymous with force. Where dissent is criminalized. Where equity is equated with threat.

By drawing these lines, by promising legal protection for police, dismantling oversight, and criminalizing equity, the order sends a chilling message: some lives are not only more protected—they are the only ones worth protecting. Everyone else can be policed, prosecuted, deported, or punished without restraint.

This is a declaration of war on the very idea of equal protection, guaranteed to all people in the United States since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the span of a single paragraph, the administration defines equity itself as criminal.

This is the architecture of impunity.

Section 2 – Immunity by Executive Order

Section 2. Legal Defense of Law Enforcement Officers. The Attorney General shall take all appropriate action to create a mechanism to provide legal resources and indemnification to law enforcement officers who unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law. This mechanism shall include the use of private-sector pro bono assistance for such law enforcement officers.

Section 2 is about shielding law enforcement from the consequences of their actions—no matter what those actions are.

It doesn’t define what “unjustly” means. It doesn’t set any standard for review. It simply instructs the Attorney General to step in whenever an officer faces consequences the executive branch deems unfair. Not a court. Not a civilian review board. Not a jury of peers. Just them.

This is not law enforcement. It’s law without accountability. Power without restraint.

The promise of legal protection for those accused of misconduct sends a dangerous message: that there is no longer a meaningful difference between enforcing the law and breaking it. That if you wear the right badge, the law is on your side—even when you violate it.

And it invites violence.
Because when there are no consequences, there are no limits.

At a time when communities across the country are demanding real accountability for police misconduct and overreach, this administration is doing the opposite. It is offering legal sanctuary to those accused of abuse and betrayal. And it is privatizing their defense, outsourcing it to firms including Paul, Weiss; Milbank; Skadden Arps; Willkie Farr; Kirkland & Ellis, who have collectively pledged nearly a billion dollars in pro bono services aligned with administration priorities. A legal safety net for the state’s enforcers.

This is not about justice. It is about power. It is about sending a message that certain actors are untouchable.

Section 3 – Investing in Aggression

Section 3. Empowering State and Local Law Enforcement. (a) The Attorney General and other appropriate heads of executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall take all appropriate action to maximize the use of Federal resources to:

(i) provide new best practices to State and local law enforcement to aggressively police communities against all crimes;

(ii) expand access and improve the quality of training available to State and local law enforcement;

(iii) increase pay and benefits for law enforcement officers;

(iv) strengthen and expand legal protections for law enforcement officers;

(v) seek enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers;

(vi) promote investment in the security and capacity of prisons; and

(vii) increase the investment in and collection, distribution, and uniformity of crime data across jurisdictions.

(b) Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General shall review all ongoing Federal consent decrees, out-of-court agreements, and post-judgment orders to which a State or local law enforcement agency is a party and modify, rescind, or move to conclude such measures that unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions

Section 3 lays out the infrastructure plan: not for communities, but for control. It is the blueprint for resourcing, protecting, and insulating the institutions of punishment, while dismantling the systems of oversight that limit them.

It begins with a familiar euphemism: “best practices.” But here, “best” is redefined to mean “aggressive.” The directive isn’t to reduce harm or build trust, it’s to “police communities against all crimes,” a phrase so sweeping and undefined it echoes the broken windows policies of the 1990s, which targeted poverty as criminality and gave officers carte blanche to harass, arrest, and detain people for being poor, homeless, addicted, or simply present.

This isn’t safety. It’s saturation policing.

And it is paired with a raft of state incentives: more training, better pay, expanded protections, longer sentences for anyone who dares to challenge police power. The message is clear: loyalty to law enforcement will be rewarded; resistance will be punished.

Then there is subsection (a)(vi), which calls for more investment in the “security and capacity” of prisons, a chilling phrase that signals a return to incarceration as the solution to every social problem. It’s a throwback to the prison boom of the late 20th century, when our state and federal prison population grew from under 200,000 people incarcerated to over 1.6 million, while cutting back on the very services (housing, health care, education, food) that actually prevent crime.

This is how carceral states are built: through funding formulas, discretionary grants, and “capacity investments” that swell correctional budgets and shrink the public sphere.

And then there is subsection (b), which authorizes the Attorney General to dissolve consent decrees “that unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.” The words “unduly impede” are intentionally vague, standardless. They invite the executive to dismantle constitutional guardrails wherever they choose.

Currently, there are consent decrees in place governing police reform in cities across the country, including Louisville, Kentucky; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Baltimore, Maryland; Cleveland, Ohio; Chicago, Illinois; and New Orleans, Louisiana.

The consent decree in Louisville was reached after an investigation into the city’s police department following the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in 2000. As CNN reported:

Among the proposed reforms outlined in the agreement was a requirement that Louisville police officers “use appropriate de-escalation techniques and attempt to resolve incidents without force when possible, and use force in a manner that is reasonable, necessary, and proportional to the threat presented.”

It also mandated the department investigates “allegations of officer misconduct fully, fairly, and efficiently, and holds all officers who commit misconduct accountable through fair and consistent discipline.”

The goals of the agreement reached in Minneapolis, after the murder of George Floyd by police officers, include “preventing excessive force; stopping racially discriminatory policing; improving officers’ interactions with youth” and “protecting the public’s First Amendment rights.”

These aren’t radical demands. They are baseline protections.

So here, in Section 3, we begin to understand what a “law-abiding society” means to this administration: a society where power is obeyed, not questioned.

In the name of “empowering” law enforcement, the administration is ordering the dismantling of the very tools that communities have fought for to hold that power accountable.

This is the central logic of authoritarian governance: expand the power of the state’s enforcers, remove any check on their actions, and cloak the entire process in the language of order, security, and reform.

Interlude, Part One – Fatigue as Strategy

I’ve gone through three sections.
There are four more.
I don’t want to keep reading.
You probably don’t either.

I think back to the bank robbery analogy. And what I know now—what maybe I’ve always known—is that getting me to feel this way is part of the point.

This administration knows how exhausting it is to fight on every front. That it wears us down when new tactics of repression or cruelty are announced every day. That we die a little when we force ourselves to read language this calculated, this cruel, this relentless.

But my mom asked me to do this.
So I’m going to see it through.

Section 4 – The Militarization of Local Law Enforcement

Section 4. Using National Security Assets for Law and Order. (a) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement.

(b) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Attorney General, shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.

Section 4 turns the war on crime into an actual war.

It directs the Attorney General and Secretary of Defense to transfer military and national security resources to local police.

Not just equipment.
Not just training.
Personnel.

This is not the subtle creep of militarization. This is its formalization.

It authorizes the domestic use of “national security assets” without defining what those assets are, without limiting the scope of their deployment, and without acknowledging the dangers of embedding military resources into community life, as when the Ohio National Guard, under state authority, opened fire on antiwar student protesters at Kent State University in 1970, killing four and wounding nine.

This is not about safety. This is about sovereignty—the assertion of federal, militarized authority over civilian life.

And it brings us one step closer to something many of us once believed unthinkable: a fully militarized domestic policing regime, sanctioned by the executive branch, under the banner of crime control.

Interlude, Part Two – More Fatigue

I don’t even know what to say now.
I don’t want to be here.

Writing this is starting to make me think about The Monster at the End of this Book, which, let’s be honest, is a bit of a kids’ introduction to horror literature—but with a cute twist at the end.

Grover is horrified to learn that there is a monster at the end of the book, and works heroically to prevent the book from ending.

He begs and pleads.
He ties pages together.
He nails them down with wooden boards.
He builds a brick wall.

And we, the reader, ignore him.
We turn pages and laugh at the destruction of his efforts.

I’m thinking and writing about Grover because it’s a break from thinking and writing about EO 14288.

And with every section, it just gets so much harder.

I had the stamina to get through three whole sections before my first “Interlude.”
But this last one set my hair on fire.

It’s too much.

At the end of The Monster at the End of this Book,
Grover realizes the monster at the end of the book is him.
And everything is okay.
He’s a bit humiliated, but also relieved.

But that’s not our story.

There is a monster at the end of ours too,
but it isn’t cute and fuzzy and lovable.

It’s armed.
It’s funded.
It’s draped in a flag and backed by law.

And no matter how many pages we try to nail down,
or walls we build to stop it,
it’s still coming.

The difference is,
we don’t get to be just readers.

We’re in the story.

And our monster, like Grover’s, is not an external threat.
It’s our government.

Section 5 – Silencing Our Local Officials

Section 5. Holding State and Local Officials Accountable. The Attorney General shall pursue all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures to enforce the rights of Americans impacted by crime and shall prioritize prosecution of any applicable violations of Federal criminal law with respect to State and local jurisdictions whose officials:

(a) willfully and unlawfully direct the obstruction of criminal law, including by directly and unlawfully prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying out duties necessary for public safety and law enforcement; or

(b) unlawfully engage in discrimination or civil-rights violations under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives that restrict law enforcement activity or endanger citizens.

Section 5 turns the federal government’s sights not just on protestors or the policed, but on local leaders themselves.

Subsection (a) directs the Attorney General to prosecute state and local officials who “obstruct” law enforcement. But “obstruction” here is not defined by law. It’s defined by the administration’s ideology.

And while the section doesn’t name immigration outright, that’s the dog whistle. It’s about threatening mayors, governors, judges, and school administrators who refuse to let federal agents turn their communities into staging grounds for raids, deportations, and militarized crackdowns.

It’s a legal bludgeon aimed at state officials who interfere with federal immigration and policing agendas.

Subsection (b) goes even further. It weaponizes the Civil Rights Act against its original purpose, turning legal tools for justice into instruments of punishment.

It tells our local leaders that if they work to make law enforcement less discriminatory or more accountable, they are breaking federal law.

Interlude, Part Three – Exhaustion

Ok. We really are in the home stretch now.

We may not want to get to the end of this book,
but we can see it.

The last two sections are relatively short.
So short, it’s almost possible to discount them completely.

But that would be incredibly dangerous.

So let’s read on.

The monster is waiting.

Section 6 – A Consolidation of Power

Section 6. Use of Homeland Security Task Forces. The Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall utilize the Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs) formed in accordance with Executive Order 14159 of January 20, 2025 (Protecting the American People Against Invasion) to coordinate and advance the objectives of this order

I read this a few times and still didn’t get it.
Why is this important?
And do I have to read a whole separate executive order in order to understand it?

Unfortunately, the answer is yes.

But the good news is, I did, so you don’t have to.
At least not right at this moment.
You have to, ultimately, because we all have to.
We are fighting monsters, after all.

This section repurposes the Homeland Security Task Forces created under Executive Order 14159, Protecting the American People Against Invasion. The objective of these HSTFs, as set out in EO 14159 is to

end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States, dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks, end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children, and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States,

Now I’m wondering what these HSTFs are really doing, beyond consolidating power.

Because with this new order, their mandate expands.
The border and the interior collapse into one.
“Security” becomes a catch-all.
And every perceived threat—immigrant, protester, reformer, city council member—is treated the same.

With force.
With surveillance.
With impunity.

This is our first look at the face of the monster.

Section 7 – The Fine Print

Section 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

This is the legal fine print.
The part no one reads.
The part that tells you everything.

Subsection (a) tells you not to read anything in EO14288 as a limitation or restriction on the administration’s power. If it seems like the administration is giving itself less authority—it’s not.

Our power is limitless, it says.
Expansive.
Unchecked.
It fills every vacuum.

It is like the Nothing in The NeverEnding Story.

It is a relentless force that wants us to lie cowering on the carpet.

Because, as Jon Miltimore wrote in his excellent 2023 essay on what “the Nothing” means:

{T]here are forces in the world that want people in despair. That want people weak. That want people dependent and hopeless. Because people without hope and dreams are easier to control, and people who are easily controlled pose no threat to those in power.

Subsection (c) is the worst. It says that none of what came before this, none of the sweeping authorizations, none of the expanded powers, none of the threats to dissent or oversight or local control, can be used to hold the government accountable.

It’s a magic trick.
A disappearing act.
A 3,000-word executive order,
and the final clause says: You can’t touch us.

But they’re wrong.

The very fact that they feel the need to tack this on at the end shows their weakness,
and our strength.

I have saved subsection (b) for last. It says that the order “shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.” It almost feels like it got in there by accident.

Why raise the possibility of any limit on the Nothing’s power?

It feels like sabotage.
And it gives me hope.

Even monsters, it turns out, can’t help but show us their weakness.

We’re not just readers anymore.
We’re not hostages staring blurry-eyed at worn carpet.
We’re not afraid to look.

We’ve read every page.
We’ve seen the monster.
And we’re still here.

The end of this book isn’t written yet.
And we get to decide how the story ends.

Thank you, mama.

This means that children are starving to death.
This means that children are starving to death.
This means that we are watching children starve to death.

And for some reason, we cannot figure out how to talk to each other about the fact that children are starving to death—or how to harness our collective empathy in response to it.

Somehow, this has become a zero-sum game:
where showing empathy for Palestinian people living in Gaza and the West Bank is perceived as taking empathy away from Jewish people living in Israel.

And worse: where standing up for the lives of Palestinian people is perceived as antisemitism. And where those who stand up for Palestinian lives are branded as terrorist sympathizers.

But caring about the Palestinian people who live in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel does not mean we don’t also care about their Jewish neighbors.
It does not mean that we support Hamas.
It does not mean that we are antisemitic.
It does not mean that we believe the Jewish people in Israel—or Jewish people anywhere in the world—do not deserve dignity, autonomy, and safety.

It means that we believe the Palestinian people deserve those things too.

But oh, the silence.

The silence.

It’s deafening.

Even my own.

The less we talk about it, the more we normalize not talking about it.
The less we talk about it, the less we know how to talk about it.
The words elude us. They slip from our grasp.
We are afraid of saying the wrong thing.
We are afraid of being misunderstood.
We are afraid of misunderstanding.
We are afraid of the consequences we see others face.

Some of the deaths happen in an instant—
an Israeli airstrike hits a school, an intersection, a restaurant, a refugee camp, a home.
People are there one minute, and gone the next.

Some happen in slow motion.
Trucks filled with supplies burn fuel waiting at Egypt’s border,
while children dig through garbage for food—
until they can’t.

And while we sit here, not talking about it, we are complicit in weaving the silence that blankets us.

I am trying to find the words.
I am trying to find my words.
I am trying not to lose them.

Because no child should be starved to death.
Because no people should be bombed into extinction.
Because none of us is expendable.

And because our silence is not neutral.

It is a day that makes me think of my father, the civil rights lawyer William Kunstler.

My father had a complicated relationship with the law.

At the start of his legal career, he saw law as an instrument of justice. He came to understand just how easily it could be misused.

This is something that the first 100 days of this administration has made painfully clear.

We have seen how executive orders—and the machinery they mobilize: deportation crackdowns, institutional purges, and restrictions on dissent—can be weaponized to normalize authoritarian rule.

And we have seen how administration has purported to justify the detention and deportation of immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act—a centuries-old statute intended for times of war—without any due process.

This strategy is not new.

Throughout history, those in power have used process and procedure as tools of repression, cloaking their actions in the appearance of legitimacy.

My father once called the belief that all things done legally are just “the terrible myth of organized society.”

“And that’s the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that’s done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system. And that a person who goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him and therefore society can turn its conscience off and look to other things and other times. And that’s the terrible thing about these past trials — that they have this aura of legitimacy, an aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their deaths through a legal system than through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich — legal. Sacco and Vanzetti — quite legal. The Haymarket defendants — legal. The hundreds of rape trials throughout the South where Black men were condemned to death — all legal. Jesus — legal. Socrates — legal. And that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places, because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretext.”

He gave that speech in the early 1970s while traveling the country to raise money to appeal the convictions of the Chicago 8—activists charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

My father was one of their lawyers.

The trial lasted several months. Over the course of three days, Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, denied the lawyer of his choice, was bound and gagged in the courtroom by the judge after disrupting the proceedings by insisting on his right to defend himself.

Being a part of a system that permitted this to happen in a court of law nearly broke my father. He felt tainted, complicit, responsible.

At one point, he told the judge:

I just feel utterly ashamed to be an American lawyer at this time.

It was one of many statements that earned him a four-year sentence for criminal contempt, the longest ever given to a U.S. lawyer.1

He was never the same. Reflecting on it years later, he put it plainly:

I gradually came to see that the law in this country—the legal system—is not neutral. That it does not serve all people equally. That it is an instrument of the privileged to maintain their power and their position.

My father never regained his faith in the law.

But he never gave up on people.

He came to understand that justice in courtrooms could only be obtained by the pressure of people in the streets.

He died when I was still a teenager. So I don’t know how he would have felt about me becoming a lawyer. My mentor, Elizabeth Fink, learned a lot from him, so I listened to her closely and watched her carefully. Liz taught me many things; that courtrooms are designed to intimidate us, but that it’s ok to be scared. That we push through our fear so that we can help our clients. That we have to be prepared to change our strategies on a dime (she would say — “all that is solid melts into air”). That our clients, as the people with the most to lose, must be kept fully informed of what is happening and afforded dignity and autonomy in the courtroom.

Most of all, Liz taught me that our job is to stand between our clients and the crushing weight of government power. And yesterday, I saw that same commitment echoed at Foley Square.

I gathered there with lawyers and legal workers at a rally for the rule of law. It was an awkward sight; lawyers aren’t used to raising their fists in the air.

At a speech he gave at San Jose State College on May 26, 1970 , my father shared that he was not always comfortable doing that either:

We’re middle-aged people. This is not a gesture that comes naturally to us. I feel awkward doing it. It’s not my usual type of stance and eight months ago, before Chicago, I never did it. Chicago, in some mysterious fashion, taught me to put that fist in the air and that fist means resistance; it doesn’t mean merely picketing, writing to your congressman or even electoral politics. It means resistance to illegitimate and immoral, indecent and unjust authority.

That is what the lawyers assembled yesterday were doing—no matter how uncomfortable it felt.

Together, we retook the oaths we took when we became lawyers. We promised to “support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York,” and to “faithfully discharge” our duties to the best of our abilities.

We listened to speakers, including lawyers who had resigned from firms that had signed deals to provide pro bono legal work on administration priorities.

We were reminded that pro bono comes from the Latin phrase pro bono publico—”for the public good.” It refers to legal work done without charge or expectation of payment, on behalf of communities and organizations in need. It does not mean allowing ourselves to be used as instruments of the powerful. It means holding the line against them.

We were exhorted to be courageous. To stand up when called.

One speaker told us, “The lawyers must lead,” noting that it was lawyers who drafted the country’s founding documents.

But that is not our job. Lawyers do not lead. They advocate.

Standing there in our suits, holding our pocket Constitutions and recommitting to our oaths, we are part of the system—tools of it. And it is our job to decide how we want to be used.

My father understood that a lawyer’s role is to defend the activists leading movements for change, as well as the most vulnerable members of our republic. This is essential work—especially when our government is demonizing people, telling us they do not deserve the protections of our laws or the rights guaranteed by our Constitution.

It is a commitment to this role that I hope to have inherited from my father. A legacy passing from him to Liz to me.

Yesterday was Law Day. It was also May Day—a day born from the struggle for workers’ rights, immigrant rights, and dignity across borders.

That they fall on the same day feels fitting.

One honors the ideals of law.

The other insists we make those ideals real.

In memory of William Kunstler (1919–1995), who understood that law without justice is tyranny.

There may be no stranger—or more necessary—time to visit. The museum opened in September of 2016, just months before the current president’s first election. And already, it feels as if its time may be coming to an end.

Just weeks ago, on March 27, 2025, the president issued Executive Order 14253: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

EO 14253 warns of a “widespread effort” to rewrite history with “ideology rather than truth”—a “revisionist movement” that it claims undermines America’s “remarkable achievements.” The order asserts that such efforts “deepen societal divides and foster a sense of national shame.” It singles out the Smithsonian for promoting “divisive, race-centered ideology,” and charges the vice president with purging such content from Smithsonian museums, research centers, and even the National Zoo.

The order presents a binary choice: either accept a “patriotic” narrative of American history or succumb to a “revisionist” ideology that portrays the nation as inherently flawed.

James Baldwin refused such false choices. As he wrote in Notes of a Native Son,

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

Baldwin understood what this president does not: that true patriotism demands honesty. That to love a country is not to shield it from critique, but to hold it accountable to its highest ideals.

This is what NMAAHC offers: a space where more than one truth can exist at once. Where we can honor the founding principles of this country while acknowledging the many ways it has failed to live up to them. Where we can mourn, remember, resist, and still find hope.

And it is that hope I carried with me as I walked through the museum with my children.

Visitors are encouraged to start on the museum’s lowest floor, which starts in Africa with the Middle Passage. Here, we passed through exhibits chronicling the capture, forced transportation, and arrival of enslaved Africans in the Americas in the early 1600s, and the centuries of brutality and resistance that followed.

This first level is also currently home to a temporary exhibit titled In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World.

As Clint Smith just wrote for The Atlantic, In Slavery’s Wake “places the experience of slavery, colonialism, and freedom-making across the world in conversation with one another.” The exhibit tells a global story—one that asks how people survive, resist, and imagine new worlds in the aftermath of dehumanization.

Smith visited the museum recently, “hoping to…take stock of what might be lost” following Executive Order 14253. He found other visitors on a similar journey. Elizabeth Hays, a white woman from North Carolina, told Smith that she “was worried that if she waited any longer, she might encounter a sanitized version of the museum, or no museum at all.”

Smith joined a tour of In Slavery’s Wake led by Edward Flanagan, a Black museum docent and former Freedom Rider, who summarized the exhibit’s importance as follows:

“The only way that slavery works is the continued public application of violence and terror.”

Race, he explained, “is a social construct made necessary by unrestrained capitalism, colonialism and the slave trade.” These forces, he said, “are the things that have formed your world.”

And they are. But so, too, are the forces of resistance. Of care. Of community.

A wall in In Slavery’s Wake asks:
“How is freedom made?”

And it answers:
“Step by step, a million times over.”

Below this, the exhibit tells a story not only of survival, but of creation:

In the wake of slavery and colonialism, a strong current of Black resistance and freedom making emerged. On sea and land, through body and spirit, enslaved and colonized people refused dehumanization at every turn.

They defined their world beyond the will of enslavers. Practiced care in the face of harm. Formed community out of strangers. Claimed rights despite subjugation. Made culture across continents. Through these actions, they created new, freer lives for themselves and future generations.

My eleven-year-old daughter and I read these words together. We watched a video installation in which people from around the world were asked what freedom means to them. We were invited to write our own answers and post them on the wall.

We talked about freedom, not as the absence of slavery, but as a practice. A task. Something to be imagined, built, inhabited, and lived.

And in that moment, I began to understand what this president is really afraid of.

It’s not ideology.
It’s not the museum.
It’s not “revisionist” history.

It’s us.

NMAAHC shares uncomfortable truths about our country’s past, this is true. Its exhibits ask us to reckon with the reality that there is a tension, embedded into our country’s founding “between slavery and freedom—who belongs and who is excluded—[that] resonates through [our] nation’s history.”

But the museum also shows us where our power lies.

It is in our shared memory.
Our imagination.
Our solidarity.
Our resistance.
Our hope.

As white people, my children and I bear a responsibility: to confront the legacy of a system that has enslaved and degraded Black people for the benefit of those who look like us. But this history of collective power belongs to us, too.

That’s why these places matter.

Because they remind us not just of what happened, but of what is possible.

And that is precisely what makes them dangerous to those who fear a fully remembered past.

EO 14253 seeks to reduce our federal sites of public memory—like the National Museum of African American History and Culture—to “solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage.”

But this is not a call for accuracy.

It’s an effort to flatten the American story into something obedient and flattering.

Words like “extraordinary heritage” and “uplifting” do ideological work. They signal that history must comfort rather than confront, that memory must serve power rather than challenge it.

EO 14253 isn’t about truth.
It’s about control.

And yet, at least for now, within the museum’s walls, the truth still speaks

Beginning on the museum’s lowest floor and rising several stories upward is a massive gray wall etched with a series of three quotes. An article from Time Magazine published before the museum opened explains that it is known as the “Founding Wall” and that it was “meant to introduce visitors to the major themes that inform the space: freedom, democracy, and America’s uphill journey to ensure both for all of its citizens.”

The first quote contains lines from the Declaration of Independence, including the idea that “all men are created equal,” and ends with the assertion of “the right of the people” to “alter or abolish” any government that becomes destructive of their rights.

In the center is a quote from James Baldwin.

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it…History is present in all that we do.

And at the end is a quote from Ida B. Wells:

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.

Together, they urge us to grapple with the relationship between America’s founding ideals and its historical realities.

As history professor Will Walker wrote after visiting:

I was moved by such an overt and powerful case for the significance of history. More important, these words beautifully encapsulate why this museum matters to all of us.

This administration is afraid we will learn our history.

That we will share it.
That we will discuss it.
That we will let it change us.

The truth is, the National Museum of African American History and Culture is one of the most patriotic institutions in this country.

It tells the story of America not as a fairy tale, but as a promise still being fought for.

It lifts up the stories of enslavement and resistance, not to shame us, but to remind us of what freedom actually costs. Contrary to Executive Order 14253, the museum does not sow division or diminish national pride. Instead, it invites reflection—not as punishment, but as a path toward connection, responsibility, and a fuller vision of what a more perfect union might truly look like.

Even if this administration takes NMAAHC away from us, or sanitizes it beyond recognition, it cannot take away what makes us great.

Or what makes us free.