I’ve actually tried to find any evidence that he expressed even rhetorical support for Hamas or any other FTO in any public statement he made. I cannot see a single indication of this. That wouldn’t even be material support and would probably still fall under First Amendment speech, but he didn’t even do anything like that. And he was speaking very frequently given his role.
The most serious allegation that anyone has surfaced is that he might have been standing in the same room as some Maoist posters, or the existence of some social media posts that some other person made and that it doesn’t even seem he was even aware of. In fact his many recorded statements are extremely measured and reasonable and absolutely would fall under the First Amendment.
This episode is very revealing of a deeply hierarchical and authoritarian undercurrent in society. I find it mystifying that many people whose public-facing identity had been based around disinterested defense of political speech and civil rights very recently are not just OK with this, but even defending and deriving a sense of schadenfreude from it. It’s clear that for many liberalism is merely employed as a tool to achieve other unspoken political objectives, rather than an ideology whose principles extend universally as claimed.
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Material support for a designated terrorist organization is illegal under U.S. law. So if Mahmoud Khalil is found to actually have supported Hamas,...