Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest and detention in a Louisiana ICE facility is a harbinger for a new authoritarian era of the United States. Khalil’s arrest, the capitulation of Columbia University against dissent and protest by its own students and the Trump administration’s threat of stripping the university of $400 million in grants if it does not meet its requests is just one place where the tentacles of fascism tighten their grip.
Katherine Franke, a former law school professor at Columbia, is on the front lines of this assault. Her support for student protests and her condemnation of the university for not addressing the harassment of pro-Palestinian students has earned what she called, “a termination dressed up in more palatable terms.”
Franke joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to address the Constitutional crisis that faces the US, how it has manifested itself on university campuses and what are the next steps in challenging it.
“They’re using immigration laws now to come after protesters or people who are voicing views that are critical of the Trump administration who are not US citizens. They’ll come next for us, the US citizens, with the criminal law,” Franke warns.
As for universities and Columbia specifically, Franke points to the shift in institutional integrity within schools. Hedge fund managers, venture capitalists and corporate lawyers now run these institutions and their goals aren’t to maintain the principles of education and democracy, but rather the financial bottom line.
Franke says Columbia “is humiliating itself in this process of negotiation with a bully that will not end because it’s that repeated proof of ‘I have all the power and you have none.’ That is what governance looks like at this point. There’s no principle at stake here. It’s about an abusive exercise of power accompanied by humiliation.”
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
The United States is facing a Constitutional crisis, one that if it is not resolved, will cement into place an authoritarian state. The Trump administration has unilaterally revoked birthright citizenship, frozen federal spending, signed executive orders to dismantle over a dozen federal agencies, including shutting down and laying off the staff of the United States Agency for International Development and taking steps to do the same to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is in the process of abolishing others, including the Department of Education, has fired or placed on leave thousands of government employees subject to civil service protections and detained and threatened to deport people, including legal residents, based on their political views.
Donald Trump’s administration is faithfully following the autocrat’s playbook. Vladimir Putin took a year to take over Russian media and four years to dismantle Russia’s electoral system and judiciary. Poland’s autocracy consolidated power even faster. In less than a year it destroyed its constitutional democracy. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who came to power in 2014, has jailed or purged journalists, academics and politicians who criticize his autocracy and turned the judicial system into an adjunct of his ruling Hindu nationalist party. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has jailed critics and decimated the country’s once vibrant press. He has seized control of Turkey’s major institutions, including its universities, to consolidate his dictatorship. Trump is following in these footsteps.
The concerted attacks on colleges and universities — Donald Trump’s administration has warned some 60 colleges that they could lose federal money if they fail to make campuses safe for Jewish students and is already pulling $400 million from Columbia University — has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism. Antisemitism is a smoke screen, a cover for a much broader and more insidious agenda. The goal, which includes plans to terminate all programs of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), is to turn the educational system, as in Russia, Poland, India and Turkey, from kindergarten to graduate school, into an indoctrination machine.
Those who decry this assault, along with the ongoing genocide in Gaza, are being purged, including Professor Katherine Franke, who lost her position at Columbia University’s law school after 25 years for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire in the Israeli military assault in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized. The goal is to criminalize all dissent, to shut down any opposition to our fast emerging autocratic state. Joining me to discuss our constitutional crisis is Professor Katherine Franke.
Tell us what a constitutional crisis is and lay out its hallmarks, what you’re seeing that allow us to use this term.
Katherine Franke
Well, one of the basic features of our democracy is that we have a divided government. We have divided power between the judiciary, the executive, and the Congress, the elected bodies. And what we’re seeing in this moment is Congress is not standing up and exercising its authority as the primary lawmaker within a constitutional democracy. The executive is expanding into the space vacated by the Congress and ignoring the rulings of the courts, of the judiciary. One of the first cases that you study in law school is Marbury versus Madison. And in that case, the Supreme Court held that the courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, have the last word on what the Constitution means and how it applies. And what this administration is doing is saying, no, we are the law. We are the only law. And we will not be checked by the courts when we do things that are clearly, in many cases, unconstitutional.
So power is consolidating in one branch of government, where another branch, the elected branch, has ceded its power, seemingly voluntarily, while the judiciary remains, I think, pushing back. And we’ll see how that unfolds in terms of how courts go about enforcing their orders when the administration acts unconstitutionally.
Chris Hedges
If the Trump administration defies the judiciary or judicial rulings as they did when they deported the Venezuelans to El Salvador and the Justice Department refuses to enforce the rulings of the courts, then what mechanism is there to hold the Trump administration accountable?
Katherine Franke
Right, what mechanism is there? Ordinarily, it’s the US government, the Department of Justice, that is enforcing the law, that stands behind the law. And they might have a recalcitrant private party that they’re enforcing the law against, who then the court can find in contempt for their failure to abide by validly issued judicial decisions. And then it’s back to the executive branch, to the Department of Justice, US Marshals, to enforce judicial decisions either through civil contempt, which is usually fines, or criminal contempt, where people can be arrested and thrown in prison for failure to follow the rulings of courts.
But what do we do in a moment like today where it is actually the government that is in contempt? They can’t enforce those orders against themselves. They won’t enforce those orders against themselves. And the Supreme Court does not have its own army or police. So we’re left in an unusual, very unique situation where the very body that’s charged with enforcing judicial decisions and upholding the power of divided government is itself the one that is acting unconstitutionally and illegally.
Chris Hedges
And you’ve seen, not just since the beginning of the Trump administration, but even during the whole judicial troubles that Trump had, this penchant on the part of Trump to attack judges. In fact, he’s called for the impeachment of the judge who ordered the plane that was carrying the some 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador to turn around, and which, of course, was refused. Talk a little bit about that open hostility. It’s not just that the system has been essentially captured by Trump loyalists, but there’s a real aggressiveness towards the judiciary itself.
Katherine Franke
Well, there’s a disdain that Department of Justice lawyers are showing for the judiciary in court. They don’t show up when there’s a hearing before the judge. The judge issues a decision or an order, and they don’t abide by it. And so there’s resistance we’re seeing in court by the very people who should be the exemplars of what it is to follow the law. And then there is extrajudicial, really violence, that the same actors, or at least behind the scenes, the same actors are undertaking by threatening federal judges.
Judge Jesse Furman, who’s down in southern Manhattan here, who has the case of Mahmoud Khalil, has received death threats at home, as has his wife, who used to be my colleague just down the hall here at Columbia Law School. So judges are under an enormous amount of pressure of having their authority checked in court with their robes on and having their lives threatened at home when they’re on their own time.
Chris Hedges
I want to talk about the case of Mahmoud Khalil and we’re going to play that little clip that his wife made during his arrest. It’s quite chilling. It looks like something out of, you know, Stalinist Russia, frankly. So let’s watch this clip.
Talk about the importance of the Khalil case. I mean, I see it as, I’m sure you do too, extremely ominous.
Katherine Franke
It’s ominous and for all of us. You know, they’re using immigration laws now to come after protesters or people who are voicing views that are critical of the Trump administration who are not US citizens. They’ll come next for us, the US citizens, with the criminal law. So, you know, just watch this. It will roll out in a very similar way for others of us who are not vulnerable to immigration enforcement, but that’s what the criminal law will be used for.
Mahmoud Khalil I have known for over a year. I’ve worked with him here at Columbia. He was basically chosen by the Columbia administration to be the mediator between the student protesters who had an encampment here on our campus and the administration itself and then later with the police. And Mahmoud had a cool head. He was reasonable. Both sides or all sides respected him. He was chosen for a reason to play that role. And Columbia trusted him.
They relied on him to communicate back and forth with those protesters. And at some point he emails me and he says, I’ve been served with disciplinary charges. And I said, what for? And he said, for Instagram posts that I did not make and an account I have no control over. So I was his advisor in this disciplinary process and we presented all this information that, you know, whatever you might think about what those posts were, which is a separate issue, he had nothing to do with it, and they would not dismiss the cases. They would not dismiss the case, even though it was quite clear that he had nothing to do with the issue that he was charged with.
And in effect, what Columbia did is put a target on his back, because it fed this machine that we have these people here as students at Columbia who are biased in certain ways and are saying outrageous stuff when the university knows it’s not true.
So I hold certainly the federal government responsible here for not following the law properly in his detention and abduction. But I hold Columbia responsible as well. They have created this environment through these unreasonable and false charges and won’t dismiss them when they know that they’re false.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about Columbia. So even before the encampment was set up in the quad, Columbia banned Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. You saw an assault or an attack, a rhetorical assault on colleges as being breeding grounds for Hamas or Hamas ideology. This was all before the protests began. Columbia probably reacted with more ferocity than probably any other university in the country.
Over 100 students were arrested. The president, who was of course grilled by [Congresswoman Elise] Stefanik down, and she and the other presidents didn’t grovel enough. She was pushed out along with the president of the University of Pennsylvania. They called the police onto the campus three times. Students were injured. The incident that you spoke out about, these were I believe former IDF soldiers who attacked students because there’s a relationship with Tel Aviv University in Columbia.
So these were people who had served in the military, very likely in Gaza in that operation. They attacked students, some of them were hospitalized. Columbia bent over backwards in essence to cater to its critics and then it lost $400 million in grants anyway. I want to talk about Columbia’s response to outside pressure and what’s happening because this is clearly more than, I don’t think it has anything to do with antisemitism. It’s really an attempt to destroy one of the pillars of an open society, which are universities.
Katherine Franke
Well, that’s all true, and I would say that it’s not just attacks from outside. These attacks were inside as well. Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target, and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities, is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education, committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise, see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy.
Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers, and in our case, arms manufacturers as well. And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia, which is the largest residential landlord in New York City, as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status.
And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance. Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission. When I was sitting in my living room watching President Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee that you referenced, Chris.
I mean, I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that President Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all.
Chris Hedges
Is it a failure to read intent? I mean, I’m not sure these people want to be appeased or can be appeased.
Katherine Franke
No, that’s not the project is to appease. This is the playbook is to, whether it’s with tariffs in Mexico or Canada or Europe or pulling our federal grants, that’s not the end of the game, is pulling the money. The end of the game is then having a new negotiation with those who’ve just lost those funds or those trading relationships so that you’re in a weaker bargaining position and are forced to agree to things that violate your fundamental values.
And that’s where Columbia is right now, is humiliating itself in this process of negotiation with a bully that will not end because it’s that repeated proof of “I have all the power and you have none.” That is what governance looks like at this point. There’s no principle at stake here. It’s about an abusive exercise of power accompanied by humiliation.
Chris Hedges
And they’ve called for receivership of the Middle Eastern Studies Department, South Asian Studies Department, is that correct?
Katherine Franke
Well, I’m calling it a ransom note. Three federal agencies sent out a letter last week to Columbia saying, we will begin, we’ll entertain negotiating with you to get your $400 million back or do not take any more of it if you do a bunch of things, including putting a department into receivership. The Middle East Studies Department has had nothing to do with the protests here. It’s an academic department, but it happens to have the words “middle” and “east” in its title. So they’ve targeted that.
They want us to turn our campus public safety officers into police with the power to arrest our students. They want us to change our admissions policies for undergraduate and graduate students. Essentially, the federal government is taking over the running of a private university according to terms that the federal government is setting. And there are more conditions in this letter that we got last week, which I continue to insist is a kind of ransom note.
Chris Hedges
And what’s the goal? What do you think their goal is?
Katherine Franke
Well, they will get Columbia to agree to a bunch of these things. And to be honest, many of the provisions in that letter are things that the most ardent supporters of Israel within the campus—faculty and staff and members of the Board of Trustees—have been pushing for. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a hand in writing that letter.
So Columbia will agree to a number of those things. Maybe we’ll get some money back or they’ll at least say we won’t take any more. And then the negotiations will continue where eventually Columbia will see to all of these demands. And basically hollow out the university as a project of a political partisan enterprise, either the state of Israel or Zionism itself, in the name of protecting our Jewish students. But there won’t be any students left.
So I don’t see where the end game is that’s good for Columbia with the course that they’ve been following.
Chris Hedges
I want to talk about the head of SIPA, the School of International Public Affairs, Keren Yarhi-Milo, and it was [where] Mahmoud Khalil actually got his degree. She was a former Israeli intelligence officer. Just talk about her role, because we’ve seen the role of people who come out of the Israeli military on other campuses. For instance, Dr. Rupa Marya has been a victim of this in the medical school in San Francisco. Talk about their role and talk about her role at Columbia.
Katherine Franke
Well, we have a lot of veterans on our campus. We do a lot of work with people coming out of military service in countries from around the world, not just from Israel. And we welcome veterans. I’ve had many veterans in my classes. They’re older, more experienced, in many ways more sophisticated about many things. So I don’t want to lend the impression that we’re anti-veteran here at all. But in this particular moment where we have a special relationship, a joint degree program with Tel Aviv University, and they have, to some degree, mandatory military service in Israel. Not everyone serves. Of course, Palestinians do not. And some people who are religious do not. But many, many men and women do serve in the military before they come here to be part of our academic community.
For them to be coming out of the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, onto our campus where these issues are being discussed so enthusiastically, let’s say, is a difficult, very difficult transition for some of the Israeli students that we have. Not all, I’ve had many, many graduate students who also served in the IDF who were absolutely wonderful and made that transition just fine. But the mental state that one has to have, the mindset to be a soldier, following authority, not questioning authority, seeing the other as the enemy, a mortal enemy, and then coming here and being told let’s question authority, ask the hard questions, challenge your professors, be willing to be in debate with students who hold different views than you do, for not all of them that is a transition that they accomplished very successfully.
And it’s not just, again, not just the Israeli veterans, I think that’s true for some others as well. And for that reason, we have an office that helps manage the integration of vets into the university. And they have not managed it very well in many circumstances. And so for, I would say, 15 years, I have had students meeting in this office. I’m in my office at the law school right now coming to me and saying, we are either Palestinian ourselves or supporters of Palestinian freedom and sovereignty. And we’ve been attacked by other students who have just come out of their military service in Israel, physically, verbally, otherwise attacked. How do we let the university know about this to protect us? And so when the spraying event happened last year, I thought, oh, this is a pattern I’ve seen. And these are facts, not just opinions of mine.
And this is something the university has to take more seriously. If they’re concerned about the safety of our students, it has to be for all our students, not just some. And they have ignored the safety concerns of a number of our students who are pro-Palestinian and overcompensated, I believe, in protecting other students, not all Jewish students, because there many Jewish students who are also on the front lines of the pro-Palestinian protests. But some members of the Jewish community here who say they don’t feel safe, and we should take that seriously, but not exclusively.
Chris Hedges
By shutting down free speech, which is essentially what has happened at Columbia and at almost every university across the country, what has that done to the universities, but what has it also done to our civil society?
Katherine Franke
We get 18-year-olds who come here who often they’re encountering ideas that are uncomfortable to them or just new ideas for the first time in their classrooms and what they read. I was an undergraduate at Barnard in the late 70s and early 80s. And I learned as much outside the buildings in the sort of activism that was going on on campus then as I did inside the buildings. And I have to say at 18, I was like, I don’t know what I think about this. I migrated all over the place in how I thought about some of the difficult issues of that day.
That’s part of what we do, if not a core part of what we do in a university is both teach them about things that they actually haven’t been exposed to, but also challenge ideas that they bring with them from high school or from their families or their communities. And what we’re now being told is not to teach anything that makes people uncomfortable. If we’re not making our students uncomfortable, then we’re not doing our jobs.
Now that doesn’t mean it has to cross over into hate speech, of course not. But we need to challenge them and if they’re gonna stick with the view that they have, that’s great. But they need to be able to defend it with facts, real history, and an argument, not just hold it as an ideology. That’s what we teach here, is the difference between having an opinion and being able to back up that opinion with an argument.
Chris Hedges
Can you talk a little bit about the role of Keren Yarhi-Milo at SIPA?
Katherine Franke
Well, I don’t want to single out a particular dean. She is the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. She’s Israeli. But I’m not sure that the fact of her being Israeli is an indictment at all. We have a number of people here who are Israeli. But she has, in the last year or more, would say, taken positions that I thought were un-deanly. For instance, she invited Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister of Israel who has said horrible things about killing Arabs and not regretting it. I’ve killed many of them, he said. She invited him two weeks ago to come to speak at SIPA in an invitation-only small group. That is just such a provocative thing to do right now.
My feeling is if you’re a dean, you ought to be curating engagements on our campus where we actually can hear each other and learn something rather than provoking the other side with your power. Because she knows these people, she can invite them. And that event just struck me as a completely unprofessional thing to do. And of course it baited the students into protesting. That absolutely made sense and then those students were charged with disciplinary violations, etc.
And it’s this loop of the university at every moment where there’s a—and this has been true since October 8th, right after the horrible attacks in Israel—whenever there was a juncture where the university could de-escalate and bring us together or escalate, they always escalated. Calling the cops, having these kinds of people invited, shutting down campus discussion of all sorts of things, locking the campus down. It feels like a checkpoint. I have to go through two checkpoints to come to my office here. And I think the dean at the School of International and Public Affairs has contributed, not uniquely, but certainly has been part of what has been a posture of escalating rather than educating on our campus.
Chris Hedges
You mentioned earlier that what happened or what is happening to Mahmoud Khalil and we should also mention the reason that the New York judge has received death threats is he’s trying to bring him back from Louisiana. He was sent to Louisiana. Most people posit it’s because it has one of the nation’s most conservative appeals court and will probably play a game with the Trump administration.
But he was held ostensibly under the McCarran-Walter Threat Act of 1952. This is the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals, although of course he has a green card, he’s a legal resident. It was used to go after all sorts of figures, the playwright Arthur Miller, [Chilean poet] Pablo Neruda, [Colombian writer] Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It said that’s what led both Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois to have their passports, U.S. passports revoked. Talk about that act, how it’s been used, and what it means.
Katherine Franke
Well, there is a tragic and well-known history of these kinds of immigration laws being used against Jewish activists in this country.
Chris Hedges
Well, I just want to interrupt. The guy who formulated McCarran was a rabid antisemite and passed that law to keep out Jews.
Katherine Franke
Exactly. Exactly. So the irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel. And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be.
Even the laws that intern Japanese people during World War II. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point. So that history is not something that speaks to them. But the issue with Mahmoud is he hadn’t done anything illegal. He hadn’t been charged with anything illegal. He was actually an extremely peaceful and important player in holding our campus together, you know, it’s a tough job, but he was playing a very central role in that.
And to have them say that it’s in our national interest foreign policy or otherwise security interest to remove him without any due process. The one question is, is there any substance to the claim that he poses a threat? Secondly, who gets to decide whether he does? Is it just the unilateral authority of the Trump administration and ICE or Homeland Security? Or should there be a judicial proceeding?
Come forward with your evidence that there is some threat to national security with Mahmoud remaining in New York City. And so it’s that double layer of authoritarian power in this case of using a law inappropriately and not being willing to actually come forward and go through the judicial process and give him due process that is so offensive about this case. But just like with Columbia, the point is to send a message.
We can do this to you, whether it’s destroy Columbia University or destroy this man’s life and his wife and his soon to be family. And you better stay in line or else we’re going to do it to you. And universities around the country are cowering because they’re watching what’s happening right here on our campus. And I know I’ve spoken to many other students here at Columbia who are on green cards or visas who are not, they’re under house arrest. They will not leave their apartments because there are unmarked vehicles lurking around out on the sidewalk. And the students are terrified. That’s the whole point of it.
Chris Hedges
Well, it’s paralysis through fear. That’s the totalitarian game book. This could go really bad really soon. Unchecked where are we headed? You know, what kind of a world is being created for us?
Katherine Franke
Well, we have lessons. You mentioned them at the top of the segment. We certainly have very salient lessons and examples historically, whether it’s in India under the Modi government or in Turkey or Hungary or the Soviet Union or Russia. There are plenty of examples of how this playbook works out. And typically, what slows it down or stops it is institutional actors putting their foot down, not capitulating and negotiating, but saying no more.
We will not collaborate in this. And there becomes a point where, for instance, a university is no longer just negotiating a difficult situation, managing a difficult situation. They actually have agreed to become part of the apparatus or the technology of authoritarianism. And I think Columbia, if it hasn’t crossed that line, it’s very close by what it has agreed to do. So institutional actors like Columbia have to stand up and say, absolutely not. This violates not only our academic values, but values about democracy.
I don’t have much hope that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are going to save the day. But Congress should stand up. Republicans should stand up, but certainly the minority party should exercise some power. Republicans were very good at wielding minority power, and the Democrats are showing that they’re miserable at it. Well, they should stand up and say, we’re not going to agree to these joint resolutions or reconciliation on the budget. There’s too much at stake here.
And then I think we need to have people out in the street. And that’s starting. It’s starting to happen now that there are faces associated with the harms and the injuries of this exercise of unchecked power. And I feel horrible for Mahmoud Khalil. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man. But he has motivated an awful lot of people to take this seriously. And who knows what he knows in detention in Louisiana about what’s going on, but he’s become a real symbol for the movement for sure.
Chris Hedges
What happens if we fail? What kind of a state will be created? It just seems to be moving at such a lightning pace. You can almost not keep up with it. It’s a daily occurrence. This agency seized, shut down, Voice of America. I’m no fan particularly of Voice of America, although that’s how I listened to Václav Havel when I was in Eastern Europe.
The problem is that so often in totalitarian systems, by the time people recognize what’s happened around them, it’s too late. So just paint the end goal, if we fail, what it’s going to look like. And then I just want to close by the kind of actions that we have to take, some of which you just mentioned.
Katherine Franke
Yeah. You know, what does it look like when we fail? I think we can look out the window at other countries where this kind of strategy has succeeded. You know, M. Gessen writing in the New York Times and elsewhere has talked about Putin’s exercise of power and authoritarian governance, and that it was much slower than what we’re seeing here. And I think…
Chris Hedges
Which was also true for both under the Soviet Union and the Nazis. It took the Nazis five years from 1933 to 1938 to consolidate power and they had two main centers of opposition. They’d already shut down the Communist Party and the trade unions, but they had the press, which was hostile, and they had the courts.
And they lost battles in the courts, but it ended up being a kind of rearguard action before they did, they took, captured the judiciary and the police under [Hermann] Göring. But the same was also true, [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn writes about it. It wasn’t overnight.
Katherine Franke
No, it wasn’t. And I’m glad you mentioned the press because when you had said earlier, what should we do? The press needs to get a backbone as well and not normalize what is happening. And just see it as today’s unfortunate events. But to actually put this in perspective in ways that I think could be enormously, both costly to members of the press, also impactful.
Part of the problem is that so much of our media is now owned by the same kind of people that are on the board of trustees of Columbia University. So they’re not deeply committed to the enterprise, the role of journalism and the press in a democracy. So that’s a challenge. But those other, if you will, authoritarian coups took place before the internet for the most part and as we all know technology speeds everything up, the technology we live with now.
I don’t think that’s the only reason why things are moving as quickly as they are but it certainly facilitates it in a way that is a kind of wind at the back, if you will, of Trump and his team. They also just assembled an amazing group of people who were ready to go, whether it’s Project 2025 or other things they didn’t publish. They hit the ground running, they were well organized, they had learned a lot during the first administration, and they took out all of the speed bumps and impediments immediately, in this case.
And so I think it’s also the fact that it’s a second term that has made them much more efficient and effective in what they’re doing because they understand government better. But where do we go? I mean, Chris, I’ll ask you the same question. It’s pretty grim. And I daily ask my friends and colleagues, how bad does it have to get before you’re willing to take some risks?
My friends are worried about me speaking out. My mother is worried about me speaking out. I feel like I don’t have an alternative. And your reporting has been so powerful, but I’m sure you get the kind of death threats I do. And you have to decide, can you look yourself in the mirror and let this happen? Or resist it in whatever the ways are that you can.
So we will each do something different with the power, the privilege that we have, but we all have to do something.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, and time is running out. I think that’s what I fear. I think that most people will realize what has been visited upon us, but by then the interlocking mechanisms of control may be so draconian that essentially, as is true in Russia, as in true in Hungary, Turkey, Modi’s India, you can’t, you’re essentially trapped, you can’t move.
Katherine Franke
I think that’s absolutely right. And then there was a willingness early on to allow the demonization of particular populations. In India, it was Muslims or Pakistanis. Here, it’s trans people, people of color more generally, people who do gender ideology. My whole bookshelf here is gender ideology. That’s what I do.
And on one level, it’s important that we understand that this is just the beginning wedge of them coming for all of us. But as Gessen wrote the other day, even if they weren’t, we need to stand up for those communities that are being used as tools for this larger authoritarian project, because we’re all people. We all have a shared humanity.
And we can’t just see their rights, protecting them as instrumental to protecting everyone’s rights. Their rights are as important as anyone else’s in the US.
Chris Hedges
Well, but they’re also trying to create a new paradigm by erasing DEI initiatives. It’s about white male patriarchy reestablishing the myth of the white male, the innocence and myth of the founding of American society. Because as in all totalitarian societies, when you create that national narrative, which is a lie. It is used to essentially sanctify power.
I mean, you’re right about all of these vulnerable groups and we have to stand up for them not only because it’s wrong, they’re the first, we’re next, but also because it’s about distorting our society, the story of our society in such a way as to solidify their power, which is, and patriarchy is, hypermasculinity and patriarchy are key elements of fascism. I’ve gone after the Christian right and called them fascists. I’m a Divinity School graduate. I don’t use the word lightly, but I look at them as heretics. I think they are heretics. But, you know, there’s also this insidious ideological formation.
Katherine Franke
Absolutely true, and it’s a resource that can be tapped into at many, many points in history is this notion of the fragility of white masculinity, really. That it is somehow under siege, it is delicate, it has been horribly undermined and threatened by the fact that we might have a Black Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Black leadership in the military or in universities or in other institutional settings. And it takes so little to manipulate and deploy this idea of white fragility that then justifies erasing decades of work that we have done, not to advance people, obviously, who are not qualified for jobs, but just to make our workplaces and schools and everything more diverse.
So I think focusing on white fragility and white male fragility, which of course is a myth, but easily deployed and it’s very much what they’re trading with in order to justify the perpetuation of what has been structural, historical, not just disadvantage, but discrimination, blatant discrimination in this country.
Chris Hedges
Great, thank you Katherine. And I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges], Sofia [Menemenlis] and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
