Ari Weitzman (2:54)

Pretty good, pretty Good. Enjoying our new turn to spring weather. How about you?

Isaac Saul (2:59)

Yeah, I mean, maybe this will be my grievance later. I've not gotten a chance to experience the spring weather yet. I'm just like, I feel like I can't. It's hard to find five minutes to get outside with a child involved. I'm still working on that. I'm trying to take him on walks and stuff. But then he seems sleepy and you see a nap approaching and you're like, oh, yes, a nap. Two hours of freedom. Let me put this baby down to sleep. So. But I will say it has been warm and nice and pleasant here in Philadelphia the last few days, which I'm very pumped about and looking forward to taking advantage of this weekend. Not warm and sunny in our country right now. I'd say the clouds may be. Thank you. The clouds may be coalescing above our heads a bit. There's a ton of news to talk about. We're recording this Thursday afternoon. We have a looming government shutdown which I really want to discuss, particularly the arguments for and against Democrats maybe holding the line here a little bit. Before we do, though, I want to talk about, I think maybe the big story of the week, which is the arrest of Mahlud Khalil, a student at Columbia University, who I guess was a grad student, a graduated grad student, I believe, who is in custody as we record this, with apparently limited access to legal counsel, according to his lawyer and family, and a future that's kind of uncertain. And I've been writing a lot about this issue in Tangle. We did a whole piece on it. And I also wrote a bit about it on Twitter and have responded to lots of reader emails and people's feedback about it that came to my personal inbox. It's a really, I don't want to say divisive. There's something here on this topic in particular that I think is just creating a lot of really important, sharp sort of electric dialogue because I think it forces a lot of people to reconcile with the repercussions of pluralism and a pluralistic society in our country and some of the values that we hold dear but may maybe don't want to sometimes when it's hard. And I'd like to talk about it. So I'm actually going to do something a little different to just sort of set the table. I'm going to have John share with our audience a two minute clip of former Senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio responding to a reader question, or excuse me, I'm so used to saying reader question, responding to a reporter's question about Khalil and his arrest and the potential implications for free speech. And I want to share this with this framing. I think this is maybe the best articulation of the argument, counter to my own, that I've heard. So I want to talk a little bit about it. I think Rubio makes the strongest case that I've heard for why Khalil should be deported, basically. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about why I think he's wrong. And I want to hear your perspective a little bit. So I'm going to have John just play the clip to start. President Trump appealed to a lot of Americans during his campaign on free speech arguments and not suppressing speech, especially from the government. But your revocation of the green card, to many is seen as one of the most anti speech actions a secretary can take with his powers.

John (6:47)

How do you respond when you enter the. This is an important point and I'm glad you asked this question. When you come to the United States as a visitor, which is what a visa is, which is how this individual entered this country as on a visitor's visa, okay, you are here as a visitor. We can deny you that visa. We can deny you that if you tell us when you apply. Hi, I'm trying to get into the United States on a student visa. I am a big supporter of Hamas, a murderous, barbaric group that kidnaps children, that rapes teenage girls, that takes hostages, that allows them to die in captivity, that returns more bodies than live hostages. If you tell us that you are in favor of a group like this, and if you tell us when you apply for your visa, and by the way, I intend to come to your country as a student and rile up all kinds of anti Jewish, student, anti Semitic activities, I intend to shut down your universities. If you told us all these things when you applied for a visa, we would deny your visa. I hope we would. If you actually end up doing that once you're in this country on such a visa, we will revoke it. And if you end up having a green card, not citizenship, but a green card as a result of that visa while you're here and those activities, we're going to kick you out. It's as simple as that. This is not about free speech. This is about people that don't have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card, by the way. So when you apply for a student visa or any visa to enter the United States, we have a right to deny you for virtually any reason. But I think being a supporter of Hamas and coming into our universities and turning them upside down and being complicit in what are clearly crimes of vandalization, complicit in shutting down learning institutions. There are kids at these schools that can't go to class. You pay all this money to these high priced schools that are supposed to be of great esteem and you can't even go to class. You're afraid to go to class because these lunatics are running around with covers on their face screaming terrifying things. If you told us that's what you intended to do when you came to America, we would have never let you in. And if you do it once you get in, we're going to revoke it and kick you out.

Isaac Saul (8:42)

Okay, cool. Actually, maybe. Ari, I'd be curious. I'd like to hear your kind of first impressions upon listening to that for the first time.

Ari Weitzman (8:50)

A couple things. So first there's the free speech argument, and then there's the argument about supporting terrorism, and then there's the argument about rights of green card holders. I'm going to get to that last. So first, I think when it comes to the free speech rights during the protests of last spring especially, I think a lot of people were saying things that were somewhat radical, if not very radical, but also not entirely uncommon to hear a lot of undergrads in communism theory classes espousing and thinking I'm on the right side of history here by fighting against imperialism, whoever it is that's fighting against imperialism, I'm going to join them in that fight. And then sort of twisting themselves into pretzels, trying to say why Hamas was the right person or the right protagonist to be leading the banner in that fight. I think it sounds really, really bad, and it probably sounds worse than it is because it's true that a lot of people on campuses were saying we have to tear down Western civilization and we have to dismantle imperialism by the means that have been producing it, which is the United States government. That often is like blusterous talk that essentially means like, the government has been bad, USA has been bad, and we need to do something to fix it. I think I see that as differently. I read those comments differently than I think they sound in plain text to a lot of people divorced from like the young, edgy, anti establishment crowd. So I understand that they sound bad. I kind of read them a little bit differently. But I think that there's an argument for saying, like, if you don't have the rights of the First Amendment to protect you as a non citizen, then we can interpret these a little bit more dangerously in terms of supporting terrorism. I think Hamas is a terrorist organization. I'm not going out on a huge limb when I say that. But I think when it comes to supporting a terrorist organization, demonstrating and saying things isn't the same as actually materially supporting them. This is a conversation that we've seen entangled on elsewhere. And I think that's important important to keep in mind and to Rubio's last argument about the rights of a green card holder or a visa holder and that the United States can reject visa applicants if they feel that that person is going to be fomenting disruption on campuses. That's true when it comes to revoking rights that have been granted. This is where I'm a little less prepared to talk about it. I'm not certain what rights get conferred to somebody after they've been granted a green card as a permanent resident, but I think and this is where I'd want to maybe have more of a discussion, I think that those rights are going to be very similar to what you get under the Constitution as a citizen. At the very least, I would say that I think that that is the way that we should be trying to interpret it, that if somebody lives here, if they're resident here, they're getting their degree here, they have a wife who's a citizen here, they're having a child here, wife's eight months pregnant, we should be interpreting their speech similarly as somebody who is a US Citizen. And again, I'm not sure if that's the constitutionally correct thing, but my read is that if a person is saying things that I don't like, then that is I'm not going to respond to that with lawsuits and threatening legislation to prevent them from saying it. That's the thing that I've thought when the ADL was professing it for hate speech against Jews, the thing that I felt anytime there's been hate speech laws from the left or right, and I think it's a consistent principle here, but I will concede that I think the point about green card holders and the rights of green card holders is something that I haven't grappled with yet, and I'm not sure about how to how to respond to that.

Isaac Saul (13:19)

We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

Ari Weitzman (13:26)

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Isaac Saul (14:01)

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Isaac Saul (14:27)

Yeah, so I think Rubia is doing a little bit of a bait and switch here, which is basically that he's framing Khalil. He, he's framing the issue in a way that gives him, I think, strong ground to stand on, which is somebody's applying to get a visitor's visa or student visa, and you go look at their social media or you interview them for the visa, and they're espousing views like, you know, I want all of Western civilization to burn, or I support Hamas, you know, and the October 7th uprising or whatever it is. And then you're put in this position where you're able to say, okay, we have this person applying in a pool of a million other people. Do we want to accept, give him a slot for somebody else? And I think that's reasonable. It's just not applicable to what happened here. Like, this is somebody who has been here. He's a Columbia student graduate, he's, you know, married to a US Citizen, he's a green card holder, his wife's pregnant. Shouldn't matter. But maybe for sympathy points, matters, maybe it doesn't matter legally, but for sympathy points means he's about to have an American citizen for a child, and he's a legal, permanent US Resident, so he should be afforded the same rights that the rest of us are afforded. I don't, I really don't know how you could argue otherwise or why you would argue otherwise. The sort of legal precedent, the law that kind of gives him, I guess, the ground to stand on is basically that a Secretary of state in this case, Marco Rubio, can personally declare any non citizen deportable by, like, asserting that their presence in the US Would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences. In other words, you don't have to prove that he broke the law. You can just say that he has potentially adverse foreign policy consequences. I think that argument is a stretch in Khalil's case. I don't think he is damaging U.S. foreign policy. I don't think he's a national security threat. That seems like a little bit of a. An insane standard to try and prove in this case. And even if that is what Rubio is arguing, which he isn't really making that argument, he's just saying we can pick and choose who comes into the country, which I agree is obviously true. But this guy is in the country, married to an American citizen with legal permanent resident status. So he's here. You're. You're just kind of conflating, I think, the sort of admission process with what happens once we've made the decision someone like this is a part of our society. And it's tough because I think a lot of his views. I mean, I don't. To be frank, I don't actually know his views that intimately on a personal level. Most of the damning things that have been said about him are based on his affiliation with this student group that's just posted genuinely horrific stuff on Instagram and Twitter where they're, you know, calling to burn all of Western civilization to the ground. They are endorsing the Molotov cocktailing of police vehicles, you know, calling the Al AQSA flood of October 7th like a historic, beautiful day. But these are social media posts not authored by the person in question from a group that he affiliates with that I think are more than anything representative of this, like, you know, Palestinian liberation movement, and don't necessarily espouse some sort of unequivocal support or material support for a terrorist organization. I'm not saying that the line there is bold and bright red and easy to see, but in the case that it isn't, I think it's pretty clear to me we should lean on the side of speech and freedom of speech and allowing someone like this to be able to be an abhorrent person if he is. I would add, on a personal note, when I have seen clips of Khalil speaking in public or his writing or his interviews, he strikes me as radical on the pro Palestine side, but not in a violent, dangerous way. I mean, he speaks quite elegantly about the way the Jewish cause and the Palestinian cause are connected and how he advocates for a sort of single state made up of this multi ethnic population of Arabs and Jews and Israelis and Palestinians. And, you know, he's not saying the stuff that Hamas is saying, basically. So I'm just while taking Rubio's point, you know, that we should get to pick and choose the people that come into the country, which I 100% agree with, I also think when somebody is here as a legal permanent resident, married to an American citizen, with an American citizen child on the way, they should be afforded some kind of due process and also be given leeway to have views that we hate publicly and hold them dearly. That's the country that we've chosen. And it's scary to me that we're going in the opposite direction.

Ari Weitzman (20:15)

And I think that they are. I think that as much as I don't have legal clarification to offer about how much the constitutional rights afforded to residents on green card status can be overridden by the Secretary of State's concerns about national security, I think they still have to prove it. And to your point, the proof that's been offered for Khalil is very sparse to justify deportation. And we don't have even a crime that he's been accused of to judge. We just have statements. And when that's all we have, the thing that we have to talk about is free speech protections. And when we say, yeah, but this speech is anti American and it's going to hurt the state, this is, I don't know, maybe this is a tinder box and we don't want to open this, but that sounds very Russian to me. Sounds very Russian State.

Isaac Saul (21:17)

We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

Tony (21:23)

G'day, America. It's Tony and Ryan from the Tony and Ryan Podcast from Down Under.

Ryan (21:28)

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Tony (21:33)

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Ari Weitzman (22:05)

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Isaac Saul (22:08)

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Isaac Saul (22:37)

Well, it's, it's funny you say that, actually, because I thought I follow this, this immigration lawyer on Twitter who is, he's a senior fellow at a major immigration organization and he's not particularly left or right. He actually strikes me as like a pretty centrist guy. And he's been hammering this idea on Twitter. He's been saying, look, this, you know, this is the law that the Secretary of State is invoking. And it is, as I just read it out on the podcast, and he said, to be clear, this is exactly what the law says. I'm directly citing it. It's a Cold War era law which was originally intended to target accused communists. And he makes the point that the free speech problems associated with it are significant. And actually, there's quite a bit of debate in immigration law that it's unconstitutional. And there's a potential outcome here where this goes to court and Khalil challenges it. And the authority that Rubio invoked to do this actually ends up being ruled unconstitutional. But basically the next steps now are that Rubio, he's invoked this obscure law that nobody really uses, which, by the way, another just data point. I mean, we talked about this in the podcast from earlier this week and the newsletter. Ilya Shapiro, who I really respect and admire, sort of twisted himself into knots because he hates these like, quote, unquote, Hamas supporting college students so much that he tried to make the argument in his newsletter and I think in Reason magazine maybe that this was, you know, a basic application of immigration law. Nothing about this is basic. This is like an obscure law that's never used that the Secretary of State's invoking here. But Khalil doesn't lose his status immediately, so the government has to put him through a formal removal hearing. If they follow the law in immigration court, which is what's going to happen now. And when they get to immigration court, he's going to be able to challenge the basis of the removal. And if that fails, he'll be able to apply for some other kind of a relief, like he could apply for asylum, because until he gets any removal order that's final, he's still a lawful permanent resident. So it's pretty interesting. The other thing this lawyer said was that if the immigration judge orders him removed and then denies the asylum or alternate relief, Khalil can appeal that decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals. And if he loses there, he can appeal to a federal circuit court and then even to the Supreme Court. So, I mean, I would love, like, a First Amendment challenge to the law under which the government is seeking to deport him. That can't happen now. It'd be years before it happens. And hopefully Khalil fights it, because I think this is an insane law that the Secretary of State can just deport somebody for speech. But this could be the beginning of a really big, interesting story that goes on for many years, I guess, is my point.

Ari Weitzman (25:39)

Yeah, I think that's true. I do wonder what a hypothetical Khalil vs Rubio Supreme Court case would look like and where the cleavages would be with our justices who to this point have tended to really err towards constitutional literalism and First Amendment protection. So that's an interesting thing to keep track of. I wonder if you'll allow me a short pivot here.

Isaac Saul (26:08)

Sure.

Ari Weitzman (26:09)

I have a. I have a question for you. I want to see if you can. How many states can you name where you know both senators and a representative of theirs in Congress, other than the one where you live?

Isaac Saul (26:23)

How many states can I name where I know both senators and a representative of Congress?

Ari Weitzman (26:30)

Yeah.

Isaac Saul (26:32)

Oh, God. I mean, I hope most of them, I would say north of half, I think, but I don't know that for sure. It's not an easy game. I'm trying to think off the top of my head.

Ari Weitzman (26:42)

Maybe not a question for you, but a question to the audience of people who are thinking. Because I'm going to give you a state here that I think wouldn't come straight to mind as a state that is a heavy hitter politically or in terms of its population, but actually is being. Its representatives are very newsworthy and have been. So here are the names. Representative Thomas Massie, Senator Mitch McConnell, Senator Rand Paul. All are cantankerous Kentuckians making winnings right now.

Isaac Saul (27:13)

And Andy Beshear, that would have been one that I could have gotten, uh. Yeah. Making waves. And also, I mean, Representative, I think, of a sort of politically eclectic state. I mean, Bashir, you know, in retrospect, man, he maybe could have been the 2024 savior for Democrats. That was just overlooked immediately. Not even as a vp. I mean, as the actual person who ran the. The Kentucky vibes maybe would have been disarming for some people stuck on the fence between Democrats and Republicans. It's going to be an interesting state in the years ahead, too, because Mitch McConnell's done. Rand Paul is gonna get, you know, married, we assume. Yeah. Maybe he sort of just came out and did this whole big I've finally become a Trump supporter, I'm all in on him. And then immediately became the lone Republican who's saying he's going to block this CR or, you know, stand up to him in some kind of actual principled way. But the open Senate seat that McConnell's leaving is going to be really interesting because, you know, McConnell obviously has been a thorn in Trump's side for some time, despite handing him the Supreme Court on a silver platter. And I'm very curious what the people of Kentucky do these Democratic electing Kentuckians do about their open Senate seat in a couple years. Interestingly, I'll add too Will K. Back and I Tango Editor we got to spend some time in Kentucky last year. I gave a speech at a college down there, did a talk, and it was fascinating. I stayed in the home of. Well, no, sorry, I stayed in a hotel, but I spent some time in the home, had a couple of dinners and meals with a woman who's actually a professor, who's actually writing a really interesting book about the Constitution and sort of the way that we elect presidents. And she had run for Office in pictures Kentucky.

H (29:37)

Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer of YouTube and podcast content and co host of the Daily Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this preview of our Sunday podcast with Ari and Isaac. We are now offering this podcast exclusively to our Premium Podcast members along with our ad, free daily podcast, Friday editions, in depth interviews, upcoming new podcast series, bonus content, and much more. If you want to receive all that and give your support to help grow Tangle Media, Please go to readtangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, a podcast membership, or a discounted bundle membership, which gets you both access to the premium newsletter and the Premium podcast. If it's not the right time for you to sign up, please don't worry. Our ad supported Daily Podcast isn't going anywhere, but if it is in your ability to support by signing up for a membership, we would greatly appreciate it and we're really excited to share all of our Premium offerings with you. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Mull signing off. Have a great day. Y'all.

Ari Weitzman (30:41)

Take care.

Isaac Saul (30:42)

Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our Managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak Bailey Saul and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our social Media Manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75 and if you're looking for more from Tangle, Please go to readtangle.com and check out our website.

John (31:15)

Foreign.

Tony (31:27)

From the Tony and Ryan Podcast from Down Under.

Ryan (31:29)

This episode is sponsored by Boost Mobile, the newest 5G network in the country.

Tony (31:34)

These guys are no longer the prepaid wireless company you might remember. They've invested billions into building their own 5G towers across America, transforming the carrier into America's fourth major network alongside the other big dogs.

Ryan (31:48)

Yep, they're challenging the competitors by working harder and smarter, like this amazing new network they've literally built. They have blazing fast 5G and plans for all the latest devices. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store or find them online@boostmobile.com if you wear glasses.

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Isaac Saul (32:36)

Is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.