Good morning,
On Saturday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, the lead negotiator for students during the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the university’s campus last year. President Trump praised the arrest Monday and said Khalil is the “first arrest of many to come” among those “who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” He is accused of harassing Jewish-American students on campus and distributing pro-Hamas propaganda.
The arrest is a direct consequence of President Trump’s January 29 Executive Order combatting antisemitism on university and college campuses. Khalil, who has described himself as a Palestinian refugee born in Syria and is a legal resident of the U.S., is serving as a Rorschach test for American lawmakers and the national media on the Trump administration’s willingness to combat antisemitism and impose order on elite American campuses.
Hannah E. Meyers, MI’s director of policing and public safety, writes in City Journal that Khalil’s detention is not only justified, it is a necessary signal that anonymous violence is unacceptable.
And adjunct fellow Tal Fortang warns in City Journal that “civil terrorism is a dangerous manifestation of a simmering battle for the West.” Masked criminals who subject law-abiding Americans to harassment and an unending flow of physical and economic danger are trying to destroy America and the West, not save it.
At the Manhattan Institute, our scholars have long sounded the alarm on the rise of antisemitism on campuses across the country and the network of progressive and anti-American organizations sowing civil disorder. This newsletter highlights some of our recent work on the issue, especially Hannah E. Meyers, Ilya Shapiro, and Tim Rosenberger’s model legislation to ban masking for the sake of intimidation.
In other news, senior fellow Roland Fryer writes in the Wall Street Journal that MEI—“merit, excellence, and intelligence”—is the latest hiring trend among American corporations, sidelining DEI. Thank goodness for that. But, in UnHerd, Paulson policy analyst Neetu Arnold warns opponents of DEI that, as they roll back racialist programs, they must remember that there is a difference between regulating conduct and regulating speech, with the latter protected by the First Amendment.
This week we launched a video series to promote the work of MI scholars in a new and sharable format. The first installment features Leor Sapir, director of MI’s Gender Identity Initiative, who reveals how interventions like mastectomies and gender transition surgery on minors are based on ideology—not science.
Finally, MI scholars published two new research papers this week. Senior fellow Eric Kober evaluates the mass of contradictions that make up the Midtown South Mixed-Use Plan recently proposed by the NYC Department of City Planning. He also offers recommendations for improvement. And MI’s director of Cities, John Ketcham, co-authored a report with Jack Santucci proposing a new set of electoral reforms for big cities. They explain how party-list proportional representation, which is neither inherently conservative nor inherently liberal, could end the era of one-party domination and open up space for local coalitions to focus on issues that do not track with national politics.
Continue reading for all these insights and more.
Kelsey Bloom
Editorial Director
