On March 20 of this year, Maria Kovalchuk, a twenty-year old Ukrainian model, influencer, OnlyFans content creator, and antiwar activist was found lying on the side of a road in Dubai, the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, after going missing from a party there ten days before. Her arms and legs were broken, and so was her spine. She was taken to a local hospital, where she remains in critical condition. According to her mother, “'She has no documents, no phone, nothing. She has undergone three operations. And she cannot speak.'” This snippet could be a brutal, singular anecdote—of a...

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....

In a recent report for the Libertarian Institute, I traced connections between the American and Saudi players rebuilding Gaza into a surveillance city-state—and building Saudi surveillance cities whose offshoots are finding their ways to America. Digging deeper into these links shows an even more troubling picture with sharper implications for American policy and even, disturbingly, some Americans’ daily lives. The connections begin with China’s infiltration of Saudi Arabia, but they don’t end there. They move across the Atlantic to America at the hands of Saudi-connected politicians backed...

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...