In February Vice President JD Vance ruffled feathers with his speech at the Munich Security Conference. He said a lot of sensible things about free speech, though for a while it wasn’t clear why he was saying them.
He talked of a canceled Romanian election, of Internet censorship, of the punishment of both prayer and blasphemy, of the need to remind ourselves that the Cold War was won by the pro-freedom side.
But eventually it became clear he was protesting the treatment of the AfD, Alternative for Germany, a right-wing populist party that had been banned from the conference but was surging in German election polls. “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls”—the word “firewalls” a direct reference to the German political establishment’s attempts to keep the AfD out of power.
Vance’s decision to use his speech to defend AfD’s political rights was hugely symbolic. Also relevant was the fact that two months earlier, Trump whisperer and owner of X, Elon Musk, posted “Only the AfD can save Germany.”
Vance and Musk were doing something increasingly common in American politics on both sides of the aisle: making heroes and martyrs out of flawed, sometimes disreputable political actors ostensibly because they are poster children of an underlying sacred principle.
The AfD has had endured genuine controversies over the budding extremism not only within its ranks and its youth participants but its leaders. Vance seemed most concerned with the idea that protesting against “mass migration”—a particular hobbyhorse of the AfD—would be banished from polite conversation. The AfD has also seen its party figures dismiss the importance of the Holocaust, summon Nazi-era far-right rhetoric, and rather openly embrace Vladimir Putin, among other warning signs.
On Friday, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency labeled AfD “extremist” and therefore subject to monitoring and surveillance and opening a possible pathway to a full ban. Republicans in America renewed their outrage, raising again the question of how to advocate for someone’s rights without beatifying them, especially when they are so undeserving of sainthood.
The moves Germany has taken against a popular political party strike many on the right as heavyhanded and others as counter-productive, giving anti-establishment credentials to populists who recently won nearly a quarter of Germany’s parliament.
The day before that designation, the New York Post revealed that Mohsen Mahdawi, the pro-Hamas protest leader who Democrats have made their latest hero after he was detained by ICE, is even less deserving of worship than he already was.
The 34-year-old Columbia University activist was arrested in mid-April during the Trump administration’s crackdown on noncitizens playing prominent roles in the spread of anti-Semitic harassment in support of Hamas’s bloody invasion of Israel.
In 2015, Mahdawi visited a Vermont gun store and his interaction with the owner convinced the owner to alert the police. According to the filing: “The gun shop owner told Windsor, Vermont, police officers that Mr. Mahdawi had visited his store twice, expressing an interest in learning more about firearms and buying a sniper rifle and an automatic weapon and that he ‘had considerable firearm experience and used to build modified 9mm submachine guns to kill Jews while he was in Palestine’.”
A volunteer at a nearby firearms museum, according to the filing, said he’d had a similar conversation with Mahdawi, who apparently had a bit of a reputation as someone who bragged about shooting Jews.
It’s not as though Mahdawi had appeared to be a peacenik before that filing. Video appears to show him blaring a bullhorn in the face of Jewish students who were chanting for the release of hostages. The Columbia protest movement was among the more violent and openly anti-Semitic in the country, chiefly responsible for a campus anti-Israel culture that deployed swastikas with abandon and attacked and harassed non-Jewish building employees as “Jew-lovers.”
Do Mahdawi’s alleged threats and overall high-profile role in a racist student movement make revoking his residency the right response? That’s the question playing out in the courts at the moment.
But Democrats have gone much further than advocating for due process in immigration enforcement. Democratic Sen. Peter Welch made a pilgrimage to Mahdawi while he was in custody, pitching him as a model of upstanding values: “He talked about his activism, which included working with Jewish Americans who shared his goal for peace, and he is at peace even though his life has been upended since he was detained last Friday.”
It was reminiscent of the Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats who turned another campus anti-Zionist activist into the subject of an online worship campaign when he, too, was detained. And not too dissimilar to the series of pilgrimages Democrats made to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongfully deported to an El Salvador prison and inappropriately treated by the Trump administration, but whose initial portrait as an innocent family man went bust: His wife filed a protective order alleging a horrifying pattern of physical and mental abuse.
After Mahdawi left custody defiant, one progressive wrote in New York magazine, “I’ll admit, watching the video, my heart leaped.”
Can America’s two mainstream political movements advocate for due process without celebrating ostentatiously rancid ideas or lionizing people who are themselves a threat to the rights of others? It would give our political discourse a needed dose of sanity.
