Recently, in the deportation proceeding against Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, the government was directed to present its evidence to the Court. "[T]he government cited several articles..., including from the New York Post, The Times of India, and the Washington Free Beacon, mentioning Khalil’s involvement with the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)".
All are lying, inflammatory tabloids chock full of disinformation; the Post, Rupert Murdoch's creature, being the most "mainstream". The Post calls me every time I file a law suit for a pro-Palestinian student or professor, but I never answer, because I have seen their egregious lies, exaggerations and attack rhetoric. The Post glories in saving the world from previously unknown 22-year old hijabi women students,. who are besieged with death and rape threats and hate speech immediately after the article appears. The Free Beacon is simply an attack rag, a doxing site. I had never heard of The Times of India, until it published a forged memo from DHS a few months ago, but everyone from India knows it is a tabloid.
The invocation of tabloid coverage in a letter from the Secretary of State to an immigration judge is today normal, but still extraordinary. I apparently take far more trouble checking facts for the tiny, obscure Ethical Spectacle than Marco Rubio does for official pronouncements. The government, which has the FBI and the DHS investigative branch at its disposal, could presumably have mined their files for some more serious-sounding information; or a junior attorney or intern could have done what I do: tried to proceed by amassing statements Khalil actually made directly to media or on video, and to interpret those. If they didn't find anything to spin, they could have fallen back to the "we just don't like him" approach, which Rubio had used in his prior correspondence to the court. Citing the Free Beacon in particular in a legal filing is a historic low, an act of inanity by government, consistent with Donald Trump's own methodology, of just saying shit. The existential threat is not so much that Rubio cited the Beacon, but that the judge accepted the filing as evidence, ruling against Khalil. Things fall apart when judges take tabloid "evidence" seriously, when blatantly hateful hearsay and lies are a basis for judicial action.
Donald Trump is an inane authoritarian, and the people he has picked this time around are either all in or compliant. The X accounts of Congressional committees and government agencies are replete with savage attacks on individuals, universities and groups, and also constant crude declarations of victory. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce (the wannabe HUAC) posted BREAKING —> @columbia FOLDS. Leo Terrell, the former Fox News contributor, now a senior DOJ attorney in charge of Trump's antisemitism project, reposts hateful, false material from doxing sites, including the target's name, photograph and employer, to his two million followers on his private social media account, with his own comment "Let's make the hater famous!" I could give hundreds more examples, from Trump himself, Kristi Noem at DHS, and government agencies at every level. The government itself is now a doxing site.
My purpose today is not to highlight the malice, the damage to government itself, to the private individuals targeted, to the freedom of speech, but how silly and inept this all is. Through-out American history, you can find instances of governments saying shit, dicking around, treated by historians as a sort of glitch, Andrew Jackson or Andrew Johnson in a particularly bad moment, where elsewhere the business of government grinds on. But Elon Musk's DOGE project, and the firing or demotion of all competent people in agencies like CIA, FBI, NSC, NOAA, EPA, and the beat goes on, shouts out that there is absolutely no concept of the business of government being anything else than inane crowing.
Full disclosure, this strangely, perhaps counter-intuitively, makes me a little bit optimistic, that a government based solely around insults and boasting, cannot "long endure".