In the detention of Mahmoud Khalil and the ensuing crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism by Donald Trump’s administration, a recognizable model for governance is emerging. The model is from 2002. During that year, as American citizens were distracted by the aftermath of a recession and energized from a terrorist attack, the Geoge W. Bush administration and its allies took actions to mute opposition to its Global War on Terror. These moves provoked charges from a vocal minority of Americans that the administration was acting in an unconstitutional, even a fascistic, way; and that U.S. citizens would be next to be detained or even disappeared.
What happened instead was a subtler and more insidious silencing of speech. This silencing would have been familiar to the Founders, who limited America’s government in order to encourage speech, since they knew that the mere awareness of menacing state power might be enough to forestall citizens’ willingness to speak openly in dissent. In 2002, America’s research universities and establishment media proved the Founders right. They noticed the Bush administration’s hard line and self-policed. Their silence smoothed the way for the invasion of Iraq, warrantless wiretapping, and much else we still live with today.
The 2002 plays occurred mostly behind the scenes. But they have been extensively documented by journalists sorting through their detritus.
Between September 2001 and August 2002, the Justice Department detained 762 aliens, some of them based on “minor immigration offenses,” often without proof of any actual ties to terrorism, and held them in indefinite detention rather than deporting them. To try these detainees, it set up special military courts that legal thinkers from different political persuasions, including Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia, believed usurped congressional power and the writ of habeas corpus. The administration created an Information Awareness Office in the Pentagon focused on “story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance” and “biologically inspired algorithms for agent control”: e.g. on the surveillance of American citizens for spreading government narratives. The Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans began releasing narratives through more traditional channels, including leaking to The New York Times about purported links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
The players pushing these policies and narratives were deeply linked to Israel and Saudi Arabia, which had interests in American involvement in the Middle East as a bulwark against Iraq and Iran. Powerful supporters in the media echoed them.
The Weekly Standard vociferously attacked those urging a cautious response after 9/11, including by offering “Susan Sontag awards.” These amounted to a regular bludgeoning of America’s foremost leftwing intellectual, after she argued in a 450 word article in The New Yorker that “a few shreds of historical awareness” might help prevent future 9/11s. The New Republic, whose literary editor publicly dropped his friendship with Sontag, began publishing an “Idiot Watch” about opponents of the rumored invasion of Iraq. Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe, who had just represented Al Gore in his losing litigation before the Supreme Court over the 2000 election, argued in The New Republic in favor of detaining prisoners via military tribunals, the position later argued against by Justice Scalia. New Republic contributor and Harvard president Larry Summers argued that petitions for American divestment in Israeli settlements, arguably a key driver of Islamic anger at America, could be “anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.”
In the face of the push, knowledge producing institutions cooperated. The New York Times, dependent on White House sources, reduced a series of reports that cast doubt on the connection between Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to one back page story. (The story’s author, James Risen, said later that “It’s like any corporate culture, where you know what management wants, and no one has to tell you.”) The Washington Post, similarly dependent on White House sources, backed the invasion of Iraq. University presidents and many eminent professors held a generally skeptical view as to the Iraq War’s plausible success—but they kept their dissent private.
Together, these operators created a bipartisan intelligentsia invested in or at least acceding to the Bush Administration’s “democracy agenda” in the Middle East, the “hope and change” agenda of its day.
The people resisting these moves were undone by either their even-handedness or their attention-seeking. The late Ronald Dworkin, one of America’s most eminent legal minds, wrote lucid critiques of these policies that were nonetheless unlikely to bring people to the barricades. The filmmaker Michael Moore aimed his hit documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, as its title suggests, to cash in on provocation at the expense of crossover appeal. Instead of making a difference in the debate, Moore made money as a cult hero, which he poured into progressive identity politicking. Meantime, the majority of the country supported the invasion of Iraq.
Within three years of the invasion—even before the loss of $3 trillion dollars, 7,000 Americans, and at least 80,000 Middle Eastern civilians—almost all of the liberal centrists who had backed it had bailed out, sort of. They expressed their “regret—but no shame” as well as their “pain” at their “mistake”: a mistake that was nonetheless “impossible” for them “to denounce,” since they had made the mistake for good reasons. They also expressed their disappointment with the Bush administration—and were duly featured in the pages of The New Republic, Slate, and The New Yorker. They turned their support to the Democratic Party and Barack Obama’s hope and change agenda. Obama’s Democrats, afraid of being called soft on terror, continued most of Bush’s policies, most of which continue to this day.
Since the beginning of March 2025, we appear to be in a 2002 repeat.
The Trump Administration has revoked the visas of 300 visa holders, among them college students and medical students who have expressed their opposition to American policy in the Middle East. It has equipped the State Department with artifical intelligence (AI) tools that scan the social-media posts of foreign students for posts that equate, in the administration’s view, support for Hamas. It has cancelled the appointment of a prominent anti-interventionist to the Department of Homeland Security and stalled the appointment of another to the Department of Defense. It has deepened ties with Saudi Arabia, and has likely committed to the project of razing, relocating, and rebuilding Gaza. It has started bombing the Saudis’ and Israelis’ enemies in Yemen—even though the trade benefits from this bombing mostly accrue, as Vice President J.D. Vance said, to Europe. The president has also taken a hard line on Iran, threatening bombings.
Powerful media players, like in 2002, have lent their support to these moves. The prime driver is The Atlantic, which has succeeded The New Republic as establishment Washington’s go-to magazine—and the promoter of many new bad ideas from psychological racism to restorative justice. Not only does the magazine’s majority investor have ties to Saudi Arabia but its editor is a former Israeli Defense Forces guard who, as a journalist in the 2000s, reinforced the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq War. Recently it’s become clear that The Atlantic has a line to National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, the Trump Administration’s resident interventionist. Echoing The Atlantic’s line are its contributors: many former government operators who teach at international schools of prestigious American research universities and appear at the Aspen Institute.
Universities are taking the hint. Columbia University set up an Office of Institutional Equity which has investigated students under a troublingly sweeping definition of anti-semitism. Columbia also “placed the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department and the Center for Palestine Studies under review.” And it fired its interim president, Katrina Armstrong, for failing to propitiate the Trump administration. Meantime, reportedly under similar pressure, the two leaders of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies left their positions. New York University canceled a speech by a medic from Doctors Without Borders about Gaza which included images of injured children because these “slides about Gaza could be perceived as anti-Semitic.”
Unlike in 2002, there is broad resistance to these moves on the left and on the right. But the resisters are making many different arguments which entail complex questions; about the rights of citizens versus non-citizens; about the use of judicial review. The real issue remains what it was in 2002: the shutting down of debate inside knowledge-producing institutions with major influence over information flows. Democracy, as Susan Sontag said in 2001, promotes “candor” and “disagreement.” At least it should.
Like then, today’s shutting down is not widespread enough to provoke widespread resistance. But it’s enough to create a chill. That chill can persuade a third year college student, after a call home to worried parents, not to write an op-ed about campus speech for a school paper. It can persuade a Middle Eastern studies professor, mindful of Washington’s new interest in her classroom, to water down her lesson plan. It can persuade a second-year columnist at The Washington Post, now owned by recent Trump accomodator Jeff Bezos, not to touch the Yemen issue in her column that week or month or year. It can lead an influencer on Instagram, owned by other recent Trump accomodator Mark Zuckerberg, not to talk about Saudi human rights abuses. Anti-intervention protests will likely get smaller; the space for doubt in establishment newspapers will likely shrink. All of this amounts to the insidious silencing the Founders imagined. It probably already is.
Trump’s genuinely populist supporters support this crackdown on the same logic as they support other Trump policies: Trump is silencing voices who aren’t citizens, who don’t seem to like America, and who are extracting resources—in this case education—from Americans. But this operation is not like the others. It affects American citizens by casting a chill on speech; and its function is to shut down opposition to an American involvement abroad.
What’s more, the people backing this play are no friends to America First. They are liberal and neoconservative centrists who, when the administration runs into difficulty, will repeat their play from the early 2000s. They will use the failure to usher into power a set of Democratic politicians who are already moving to the political center. Larry Summers is already making the play clear. Even as he applauds Harvard for changing its approach to the Middle East in response to Trump, he accuses Trump of being “dictatorial” towards universities and predicts “catastrophic” economic results from Trump’s presidency.
These centrists are dedicated above all to the maintenance of institutional power. Their rising influence in a presidency that was a referendum for popular constitutional government is cause for alarm, and for public pushback, and for debate—all of the things the institutions are trying to deny.
