As we witnessed in stark relief last Tuesday evening inside the Capitol, many Democrats are struggling to adjust to their post-election reality. They are adrift, laboring to calibrate how to combat and oppose President Donald Trump, frequently descending into rancorous infighting. After the Joint Session Address debacle, more 'progressive' leftists fumed that the party didn't push back against Trump hard enough, while slightly less extreme elements felt embarrassed by their colleagues' counterproductive histrionics. "Everyone is mad at everyone," one Democratic source told Axios, neatly summarizing the party's disarray. Trump is making hugely economically and politically risky policy choices, and if those decisions go south, Democrats' messy drama and radicalism may not matter in the midterm elections. But if the country generally likes what they see from the new administration and Congressional Republicans over the next year-plus, the opposition's weirdness and derangement could prove costly. Again. Lefty commentator Van Jones is...concerned. Watch the first 50 seconds or so of this clip:
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"Look, man, we're screwed. We don't know what to do. This is a nightmare...the Democratic Party is going through a massive set of internal crises...They've got trapped two ways: One, defending a broken status quo that nobody likes...and then offending most people in the country. Calling everybody sexists and racist and transphobic and every other name. And then saying, 'please follow us.' That's not a good strategy, folks!"
He's right. But many of his fellow partisans don't want to hear it. As I noted, if the current status quo becomes deeply unpopular, Democrats stand to benefit by default. But if that picture is marginal, or even somewhat popular, their lunacy could continue to be a self-destructive problem. The latest example is the Democratic Party rushing to the defense of anti-Semitic Hamas supporter, a Syrian national, who was detained by ICE for deportation. I've made my position quite clear on this broader issue. Guests in our country who break our laws, especially in the course of harassing Jews and explicitly or effectively siding with a US-designated terrorist group, should be given a one-way ticket out of here. This accountability is long overdue, given the shameful lack of action and attention from the Biden administration, as well as the cowardice and complicity of many local leaders and university administrators. Yank visas from pro-terrorism lawbreakers. It's not complicated.
What is complicated is detaining and targeting for deportation a green card holder, who has more legal rights than a student visa holder, even before convicting (or, to my knowledge, even charging) him of a crime. That's a legal thicket with a potential sequencing problem. The situation is already tangled in legal challenges, and could remain that way for some time. Some legal experts think pulling this pro-Hamas agitator's green card is legally permissible. It does seem like he's very vulnerable. Others disagree. A judge has already put a freeze on the whole thing, pending litigation. This was not the case to start with, in my view, especially since the reporting suggests that the feds didn't realize he was a legal permanent resident until after they'd scooped him up. The threshold for booting mere student visa holders is much lower. They should have begun there, even if it took a little more time to get the details right (I also think they should have cast a wider net and hit several of them at the same time, to avoid a single person become an individual cause celebre).
The detained man's fellow Hamas enthusiasts have declared him "abducted," which is absurd. He's been arrested by the sovereign government of the country in which he's currently living. An abduction is what their idols in Hamas did to the hundreds of civilians they hadn't yet murdered on October 7, 2023. Those were innocent victims of terrorists, many of whom were subsequently killed, increasing the death toll connected to the 10/7 butchery. Posters lamenting the abduction of those innocents, and demanding their release, were ripped down by these sorts of horrible people. Whatever one thinks about the legal questions around deporting this particular man, he is a terrorism supporter, propagandist and thug. The mob he's led has engaged in explicit support of a US-designated terrorist organization, as well as hostile takeovers of university buildings. Given that he's now a former student, they could at least charge him with trespassing, since he was part of the additional mob actions and 'occupations' in recent days. He hates the Jewish state and Western civilization.
Turning him into some sort of icon or hero is what his twisted comrades might be expected to do, but Senate Democrats doing so is really quite a choice. Notice the original tweet, and the extra context from John Hasson:
Meanwhile, the only times this account has mentioned Laken Riley’s name was to oppose the Laken Riley Act https://t.co/2vOMVV6fg6
— John Hasson (@SonofHas) March 10, 2025
"The Senate Judiciary Democrats have posted more times to free Syrian National Mahmoud Khalil than they have to release the American hostages being held by Hamas," another observer notes. The Laken Riley Act, which passed and is now law, requires DHS officials to detain illegal immigrants who commit crimes in certain categories. The official account of the Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats produced content against detaining criminal illegal immigrants, and also published this 'Free Mahmoud' post. The Democratic Party writ large -- with Hamas-sympathetic 'Squad members leading the way -- is rushing to his defense. Raising questions regarding the legal complexities around this particular detention is one thing. Joining a movement painting him as a folk hero is another. Some hero:
Khalil's group states it is "fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization"...It asks for help from violent extremists abroad to help them fight the U.S.:"we seek...instructions from militants in the Global South." The post's slides exalt a violent Islamist uprising in Bangladesh, so his group is obviously not referring to non-violence...Khalil's group says "the only way to respond to state repression" is to storm prisons & release prisoners and burn down prisons, government offices and state vehicles (like police cars). It describes itself as part of an insurgency in the U.S. "until the empire crumbles" and must learn from violent extremists...Khalil's group refers to itself as "the militants of Hind's Hall" and says it is inspired by Hamas, PFLP, etc.It pledges to "continue our fight for Palestine from within the belly of the beast" (America).
Republicans have their own problems, and if Trump's tariffs and trade wars raise prices and end poorly, there may be nothing Democrats could say or do to fail to capitalize. But from their embarrassing performance at Trump's speech last week, to some of the insanity cited above, to taking the 20 percent position on several high-profile 80/20 issues (like protecting women's sports) the Democratic Party remains, well, crazy. And a party that constantly screams 'crazy' to normie voters is often, to borrow a term, screwed.
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