Politico hones an emerging Democratic narrative that Mahmoud Khalil’s treatment is part of a right-wing ideological campaign to chill free expression.
Politico appears to be operating under the assumption that its readers are either wholly uninformed or shockingly incurious. Whether or not that is an accurate assessment of Politico’s readership, the product yielded by that uncharitable assumption is liable to grate on the rest of us.
The latest example of the outlet’s efforts to guide its readers to a politically preferable conclusion took the form of a piece with the following headline: “Republicans have hated universities for years. Anti-war protests gave them a reason to punish them.” The copy that followed this headline didn’t strive for greater accuracy. “In 2021, JD Vance proclaimed ‘the universities are the enemy.’ This week, the White House declared war against them,” reporter Irie Sentner began. “President Donald Trump and his administration are escalating their attacks on higher education, intensifying a yearslong effort to hobble the campuses they say breed progressive ideology by casting them not as spaces of innovation, but as hotbeds of hate.”
The hopelessly naïve may conclude from the outset of this piece that the universities were just minding their business, dutifully engaged in the yeoman’s work of educating the next generation, when a marauding band of Republicans descended on them for no apparent reason. In their mania, the GOP has set about dismantling harmless diversity initiatives and “academic frameworks like critical race theory.” The “protests that roiled college campuses” after the October 7 massacre serve only as a pretext to “punish higher education.” The piece criticizes the administration’s modest but still debatable efforts to rein in the permissive culture on America’s campuses and pare back the grants that serve only to underwrite anti-American radicalism in academia. However, the potential validity of those critiques is drowned out by the author’s motivated framing of the issue on which he is reporting.
The story Sentner tells begins “months” after the 10/7 attacks when Republicans hauled Ivy League university presidents before Congress to explain the outbreak of violent antisemitism over which they had presided. The fact that two of the three university presidents in attendance “stepped down the following month” attests to the validity of the GOP’s concerns. “But it was Columbia — known colloquially as ‘the activist Ivy’ — that became Republicans’ biggest bogeyman,” Sentner continued.
The author lends credence to the notion that Israeli military actions justified the illegal occupation of school administration buildings by student activists and local riffraff. He elides the routine violence meted out against not just Israel supporters but those who are visibly Jewish and happen to find themselves in range of the demonstrators. And because Republicans are the aggressors in this campaign, he describes the Trump administration’s effort to deport the activist Mahmoud Khalil — whom the reporter describes as the “lead negotiator during the encampment,” as though the anti-Israel bivouacs that sprout up in support of Hamas’s bloodshed are a legal entity — represents “a staggering intensification of a crackdown on student activism.”
Sentner all but abandoned the only argument Democrats have made on Khalil’s behalf that might hold water: the notion that the 30-year-old student-visa and green-card holder, who is married to a U.S. citizen, is legally ineligible for deportation. The Trump administration may not have had its ducks in a row here, which would be an embarrassment. But that’s not Sentner’s argument. Indeed, he even concedes that Khalil’s group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, did disseminate “pro-Hamas” materials. Rather, Sentner claims that Khalil’s detention, his activities, and the university’s shielding him from the consequences of his actions are all red herrings. “All of the recent moves represent the fulfillment of long-held conservative wishes,” he concluded.
Credulous readers will come away from Sentner’s piece less informed than they were before they read it. If they are even aware of the campaign of intimidation, harassment, physical abuse, and criminal vandalism that has to varying degrees consumed America’s campuses for 18 months, they may conclude that the GOP’s objections to all that are merely pretextual. Politico has made a dutiful contribution to an emerging Democratic narrative in which it is alleged that Khalil’s treatment is part of an ideological campaign designed to chill free expression. But that narrative is sustainable only by deliberately eliding how universities allowed a menacing band of wild-eyed radicals to threaten and intimidate Israel’s supporters.
When seen in that context, the Trump administration’s maneuvers look a lot more like an effort to protect free thought and assembly from the designs of a violent mob. And we can’t have that.