The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is one of those events that can divide a room, or an X space, just by being referenced. The facts are deceptively simple. A Palestinian student at an Ivy League University on a foreign visa who organized protests at which some participants disseminated “Death to America” pamphlets, intimidated fellow students, and illegally occupied a university building is threatened with deportation by a duly-elected president wielding the constitutional power of the executive branch. The executive has called him a threat to national security, apparently (so far) based on his speech.

The legal questions in the case are thorny; Supreme Court rulings have gone different directions on the issue. The political questions are ugly, and shot through with self-interest; federal judges, liberal non-profits, the Democratic Party, and even neoconservatives are using Khalil’s arrest as a weapon against Donald Trump.

But all of this does little to alter the actual political or social significance of what’s occurring. Indeed, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and a host of associated actions by the federal government have very little to do with any of the questions above. Instead, they represent the silencing of one point of view about foreign policy in favor of another—and in ways that will likely redound on Americans now and in the future.….

But the involvement of interest groups in pushing foreign plays is not the most troubling part of this political silencing. The most troubling part is that, in the bigger picture, the pendulum in Washington DC and its environs will always swing toward intervention, particularly in the Middle East, because that’s where the money is. In the context of an establishment teed toward these involvements, having voices from institutions with a lock on high-level knowledge production like Columbia making another case is doubly important. The current actions at and surrounding the Columbia crackdown, by contrast, weaponize Columbia and other academic institutions to speak with one voice rather than hashing out an issue of public policy. This hashing out, in the end, is what truly supports the aim of America First: a sovereign country where citizens, not institutions, determine our collective future.